It's true that low-quality Republican-aligned pollsters flooded the zone here and in many other competitive races - I personally was conflicted on this because I knew those polls were nonsense yet their topline numbers looked very similar to the numbers we and other Democratic pollsters were pulling out in our own surveys (except in Nevada). Simultaneously, many media and university polls did wind up doing a good job but folks were skeptical with good reason because these were the exact outlets that badly missed in recent years.
Making sense of all of this required everybody - myself included - to make a lot of blanket assumptions which is something that personal preferences and partisan leanings easily cloud decision-making about. Very easy to Monday morning quarterback and the "correct" assumptions always become obvious/clear in hindsight but at the time there were good arguments in a lot of directions - all you have to do is look at many users' old pre-election posts to see them. Arguments about future predictions can still be good and well-reasoned even if they don't wind up being "accurate" per se - and I generally think its tacky to speak down on people for thinking something would happen differently than it did after the fact even though they may have had good reason to beforehand.
If, however, their reasoning was impractical/evidence-free/unserious then they should be mercilessly mocked.
You guys were seeing Oz up in PA towards the end?
I mean I think one of the biggest red flags for many of the low quality pollsters was their samples of minorities and young people. IA for example was finding the GOP getting 25-30% of the black vote, 70% of the Other/Hispanic vote, and GOP sometimes winning 18-29/18-34. Even with sample variation, there's no way that the GOP would be getting anywhere close to those numbers. It was a consistent trend too!
