Nate Silver: "**** you, we did a good job"

[Dr. Arch]

To be fair, it's hard to build an accurate model off polling if the polling is inaccurate. Again, Silver had the best model, giving Trump much better odds to perform as well as he did than the Morris' model. On a separate note, it always felt like Morris let his partisanship affect his modeling decisions. He excluded what turned out to be valid pollsters like Trafalgar and Emerson on the grounds of having unreliable data. I feel like this had to do with them giving good results for Trump. This was defensible, but I feel like he would not have excluded junky polls if they were giving good results for Democrats.

Trafalgar wasn't a valid pollster.

People need to stop saying that all the Republican hack pollsters were good just because they were closer to the actual result.

I could make a map where I just give Trump every single state by 5 points, and then point to FL and say "look I had Trump winning FL by 5 and he won it by 3!  I beat all the fake news pollsters!"  or "look I had Trump winning WI by 5, and he only lost it by 1, that's way better than the fake news pollsters who had Biden +9!"

The fact of the matter is that the mainstream pollsters were wrong, but they were mostly wrong directionally.  Trump got way better turnout than expected so you basically shift every poll 4-5 points in Trump's favor and you're close to the real results.  That's why Nate's snake map ended up being just about right, with GA the only outlier.

On the other hand, Trafalgar was just predicting a Trump win in every swing state based on nothing other than quantified "gut instinct" about "shy Trump voters."  So you had totally wrong numbers like Trump +2 in MI, +2 in PA, +1 in NV, +5 in GA, +3 in AZ, and so on.  Those are wrong numbers, and there's not any rhyme or reason to their wrong-ness.  They're just random Trump-friendly numbers that Trafalgar got not through any scientific methodology, but rather by starting with the final result they wanted, doing a poll, and then fabricating priors to massage the results until they got to their desired outcome.

Why does this matter?  Because if all polls were like Trafalgar, polling would be worse than useless.  It means all Trafalgar basically is is one guy's gut instinct translated into numbers.  It's no more useful than an SN2903 map.

Trafalgar does count; they did the best job, as does Rasmussen.  It just bugs people that Robert Cahaly, an eccentric conservative with a bow tie and unflattering mustache and hairstyle, is building a track record of accuracy in Presidential elections. 

As the media was completely in the tank for Biden this year, why should one be surprised to think that the pollsters were complicit as activists posing as observers?

When are you going to stop embarrassing yourself? In what world does this map qualify as "best"?

https://mobile.twitter.com/Politics_Polls/status/1323781792286081026