But as I said, in less than two weeks, we'll know who's right. Will it be a neutral or Democratic-leaning year, as many on this forum believe, or will it be a Republican-leaning or wave year?
Which will say absolutely nothing about the merits of this individual poll or pollster.
The results in a few weeks will be very revealing. As I said, if pollsters such as this one turn out to be more accurate than the pollsters lauded by many on this forum, people here will continue to act as they did before, and bash the pollsters they don't like. Conversely, if pollsters such as this one are wrong, then they are wrong, and ought to be regarded with the same kind of skepticism as some regard the others.
People on here claim that I am biased and I've become too invested in defending the legitimacy of polls. But they refuse to believe that they themselves are biased, and only trust the pollsters who generate the results which they desire. And they are more likely to express feelings of giddiness or hope if pollsters show a positive result for a Democratic candidate, even if such a result is unlikely or not that plausible.
Even if every Big Data poll released nailed the margins and vote share perfectly, that wouldn't prove that their polling methodology was statistically sound. Bluntly, it is possible to arrive at the "correct result" with absolutely terrible methodology.
Center Street has showed some ridiculous polls with Democrats doing far better than they should. If we learned that their method of "polling" was drawing numbers out of a hat and one of their ridiculous polls nailed the margin, would that justify their methodology as valid?
i'm fully convinced the purpose of "pollsters" like center street is to push up their favored candidates in polling averages. otherwise they'd only have ryan or fetterman up by 2 instead of 102
