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Elie Mystal:
So... pollsters are basically punk ass people who juke the stats to please their bosses and keep their jobs.
Kewl.
Didn't the polls miss the Dems' power in 2018, 2020, & 2022?
When you add to that the fact that there's an institutional incentive to "get in good" with the winner, and when gaming the result (as stats fans will do) gives them an incentive to avoid annoying the side that's most likely to react explosively, you get a bias toward not publishing results that would annoy that side. In other words: "If I R-tilt the results, and I'm wrong, not much bad happens to me, but if my results favor the Ds and I'm wrong, I could be targeted for death by the Rs."
@Bix
As long as ther's a way for sample counters of any kind to cook the stats, even unconsciously, by imposing their idea of where the central point on the curve *ought* to be and what results should be considered outliers, the results will be influenced by preconceived notions.