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king_panic | 5 years ago
There is no "generally accepted explanation" for the polling skew, let alone one as obvious as "it's easier to poll highly educated, urban voters than lesser educated rural voter". Believing pollsters are dumb enough to not consider this when conducting polls is lazy thinking.
dragonwriter|5 years ago
Major poll-based forecasts (which not only aggregate polls but incorporate modelling of non-sampling error in polls, which only report sampling error in the margin of error) were not “dead wrong” (naively looking at polls as predictions might be dead wrong, but the fact that polls don't work that way is why poll-based forecasts like 538 exist.) The low end of the 80% confidence interval (the 95% CI is what is usually used to state a “margin of error” when a CI isn't explicitly identified and would be much wider) for the 538 forecast for Biden’s vote share was ~50.9%. His actual vote share at current count is ~50.7%.
Results a hair outside the 80% CI doesn't indicate that a forecast is “dead wrong”.
EDIT: While I think 538 has made some progress in simplifying it's reporting to help deal with this, aside from deliberate misinformation (which is a substantial factor in the “criticism”), I think the main problem remains that people really, really don't grasp uncertainty even when it's shoved in their face, and are prone to criticize something for not being a precise oracle even when it's expected error range is prominently presented.
hn_throwaway_99|5 years ago
But Biden did win an overwhelming popular vote.
king_panic|5 years ago
unknown|5 years ago
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parrellel|5 years ago
scruple|5 years ago