Member-only story
Liberal Pollsters Are Coming for Your Deer Rifle!
Polls are bullshit, right?
Wrong. Some are better than others, and the methods to make them more reliable also make them beaucoups more expensive, so if you don’t have money or a supporter who has money, you make do with what you have. There are some outfits like RealClearPolitics and Pollster and FiveThirtyEight that have had some luck aggregating the polls. The results would seem to indicate that all polls do not have the same weaknesses, and so the weaknesses can work to cancel each other out and yield a more useful number than any individual poll.
You can manipulate sample size and fine-tune the sample with mere money, but there is no accounting for news breaking right in the middle of your time window, so nobody is perfect.
I am a veteran of judge races, which are down ballot, and in which you are lucky to get enough people who have heard of you to generate some rough measure of opinion. Therefore, polling is done by piggy-back on a real poll and your pal who is paying the freight will let you ask one or two questions. Even with these severe limitations, no race of mine ever strayed outside the margin of error.
Neither did most of the polling on Trump-Clinton, contrary to folklore. Polls measure opinions on the popular vote, which Clinton won. Trump did under-poll, though…
