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I struggle to understand what their motives are here. Are you implying the pollsters are trying to help the democrats based on the theory that people turn out for a winner? I don't know what the basis for that theory is. It seems equally or more likely that over-estimating a candidate's popularity will lull them and their voters into a false sense of security. Based on this theory of polls, it would seem more likely the pollsters over-estimating Harris's polling were trying to favour the republicans.
I don't really see evidence to think either of these is the case though. Maybe they are just incompetent or too afraid of being outliers.
I am implying pollsters vote Democrat and are Democrats by vast margins and are part of the regime media who are Democrats and vote Democrats by vast margins and do things to make it more likely Democrats would win. They're on the same team and part of the same milieu and travel in the same circles. They're not merely biased, they have an agenda and you can see them doing the same bag-o-tricks every election cycle. Under normal circumstances, public opinion just doesn't shift like that (and don't in predictive polls), but miraculously it does to drive the same cycle every single time.
Supporting candidates can mean different things at different times, e.g., cratering Biden's polling post-debate, and not just "overstating Democrat support."
A Harris campaign which is trailing by 7 in PA in late September but is getting +2 from "gold standard pollsters" is not being lulled into a false sense of security, they're being saved by allies in media when a campaign which would otherwise see voters disengage and, most importantly, have a much harder time convincing donors to continue to open their wallets to finance a flailing campaign.
There are situations where it's defensible to argue it's "equal or more likely" overstating support would lull a candidate into a false sense of security, but it's not in any of the scenarios we're talking about and also there are countervailing forces. You may think this is likely to "harm" a campaign, but why wouldn't it be "equal or more likely" it would harm your opponent whose supporters think it's a waste of time to bother when they're going to lose anyway? People like to be a part of the winning team.
For whatever it's worth, zero pollsters I know of think "overstating" support within a pretty large margin harms campaigns.
Well they're definitely terrified of being outliers, there are about a half dozen pollsters who were run out of polite company for correctly polling Trump support in 2016 onwards.
To believe the "they're just bad at their jobs" explanation, you would have to explain how pollsters who have a history of failing to predict horse-races somehow manage to still get lucrative contracts from NYT (Sienna) to Reuters (Ipsos) while the accurate pollsters see themselves blacklisted, especially from lucrative commercial contracts. And also why those pollsters continue to fail and be embarrassed cycle after cycle after cycle.
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Oh come on. Trying to act like the "Kamelanomicon" narrative never happened isn't going to work.
Do you want me to link 50 articles about how recent polling surges show that America has rediscovered its favorite brat VP?
The "I don't get it, what do you even mean" tactic is incredibly obnoxious. It's just a way of insinuating that someone is an incoherent schizo conspiracy theorist without openly breaking the rules. And it doesn't even work to bully people without a supporting crew of redditors jeering and snapping their fingers.
Now you're talking about articles about polling, not polling. That is a different thing and I don't dispute at all that it is seeking to 'shape the conversation'.
I am not trying to insinuate you're a schizo conspiracy theorist (though now I am wondering if your anger is causing you to lump multiple things together as your enemy, when not all of them are the same).
Ironically I am not the same person as Bleep.
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There's a difference between coordinated efforts to selectively highlight polls that are positive for your side and actually manipulating poll results to appear positive for your side. The discussion seems to be about the latter. The former is bad, but the latter is arguably worse.
This, I agree with. As I've written before, I struggle to see why people would believe that polls showing their preferred side winning would improve the odds of their side winning, since I could come up with multiple equally plausible mechanisms by which it could help or hurt. But it seems common knowledge enough that many/most people do believe that this is how it works, and one shouldn't feign ignorance of this very possibly false narrative.
I think the process is "hey, we're going with kamela, give us some polls we can spin." The whole polling and media campaign is coordinated on whatever the new version of JounaList is.
That one woman with the "kamela landslide incoming!" poll right before the election was obviously not organic imo. It's all organized narrative shaping, and the line they were going with was indisputably "Kamela: it's inevitable (or you're weird)"
Saying the polls can't have been manipulated because that might reduce dem turnout is trying to ignore the evidence that all of their strategy was based around demoralizing Republicans.
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