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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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