Got my copy yesterday. It's pretty interesting how much this book trashes public polling showing Biden winning by "huge margins" and their insistence that private internal polling on both sides were very accurate in predicting a close race hinged on just a couple of states.
I wonder if this is mostly hindsight bias or reflective of an actual chasm between what's publicly available versus what the campaigns see
It's tough to say. I think it's both, but there were leaks here and there that hinted at a closer Biden win than the likes of Rachel Bitecofer were leading the public to believe. I remember a somewhat internal but still publicly available presentation from the Biden campaign where their expectations and average leads in swing states were much lower than expected, and many posters here (probably myself included) assumed that it was because they wanted to lower expectations and get more donations. The Florida Democrats, awful as they are, were sounding the alarm bells for months about the growing crisis in the state. There were whisperings in the lead-up to the election (and confirmed in write-ups afterward) that Democrats expected Gideon to lose, and this was not even hinted at in most publicly available polling. The Selzer poll is the only credible poll I can think of that spelled out the state of the race in the midwest.
In short, I tend to believe them when they say that true private polling, as in the ones we never get to see, painted a much more accurate picture of the race than the ones we got from PPP and Quinnipiac.
