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Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop
Most polling seems like an art of speculative content generation, not a science. The measurements they are taking are not falsifiable, so how can it be scientific? If a poll shows x +6% a month before Election Day, and x wins by 2%, how can anyone tell if the poll was right? If the final election results vary from the polls, it's attributed to things like ground games and weather and last-second decisionmaking, and this means that there is really no feedback mechanism to test a poll's accuracy.
There obvious is some use to tracking polls that apply the same methodology over times, in that they show shifts, but that value of those measurements is relative, not absolute.
This seems like something everyone knows on some level, but everyone wants the polls to be something they're not, so we collectively suspend disbelief.
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Agreed. There's a desire to know the future, to plan for it.
I think the right underestimated how much dislike of Biden was due solely to age and apparent infirmity. Once he was replaced with a much younger person,
any younger person, the Democrats were re-invigorated. I think this miscalculation upsets the right, because they realized they fucked up by agreeing to have the Biden debate so early. And they are also wrong about dislike of Biden being based mostly on inflation. Now they have the old man in the race and have to run against their prior argument that Biden was too old. On top of that, with a female candidate, the Democrats are poised to capitalize on a growing battle of genders among the voting public.
Hence, there's a lot of denial on the right at the moment. And it infects the way they spin the polls. "She can't be contender, let alone a favorite to win! How could this happen?" So they call it a "Harris Honeymoon." And who knows? Maybe they're right. But they sound pretty scared right now.
