There is a growing argument being made that suddenly all of the polls are probably overestimating Trump voters and that any Trump polling momentum is overstated.
Nate Silver: Last update: 2 p.m., Monday, October 14. Mondays are often slow for polling, with most of the numbers released by Republican-leaning or explicitly GOP-partisan firms. And that was the case today, for instance. Rasmussen Reports has Trump leading by 3 points in Pennsylvania — and from another firm, that would be a strong number for him. But given Rasmussen’s house effect (and indeed explicit coordination with the Trump campaign), it’s in line with other polling showing the Keystone State as a tossup. Still, there’s been a slight upward trajectory for Trump in our forecast over the past week.
So case in point, Nate Silver arguing that a +3 Rasmussen poll (rated # 5 in 538 and # 3 in WaPo 2020 election ratings) needs to be discounted, even as he increases the influence of the NYT/Sienna poll when that pollster ranked # 18 in 2020 and had almost double the error rate as Rasmussen. There is literally no objective reason to believe the accuracy of a pollster is changed because there are some rumors of coordination with a campaign. But that was part of the on-the-fly model changes that Silver made to make the Harris changes seem better.
Meanwhile I spend some time over my vacation visiting the Goddard PoliticalWire.com site and found story after story about polling bias, and comment after comment from readers who believe that Nate Silver and Harry Enten are now right-wing hacks who are apparently in the pocket of Donald Trump and the MAGA movement. How else to explain how suddenly they are providing less than positive news.
The co-main-event storyline is that the recent change in polling is because right-wing pollsters are flooding the zone, especially where the Nazis over at RCP are keeping track of little more than those right-wing pollsters. When I provided the RCP link to their averages and asked people to point out which polls were right-wing polls and which were not, I was basically called a troll and several people "blocked" me.
Of course, these people are clueless. Sabato is quite capable of finding his own polls and does not "lean heavily" on anyone else's polling average, no more than any aggregate polling forecaster relies on other people's polling aggregates. Polls are polls are polls and RCP, 538, Silver, Hill, Cook, Sabato are all using the same polls for the most part. Some use more obscure polling, while others tend to stick with more established polling, but if anyone is cherry picking and trying to push the needle with their forecasts, it would be 538 and Silver, not RCP. But whenever someone is suggesting something that they do not like then they suddenly believe that person has become a hack or is being "fooled" by looking at the wrong pollsters.
At the end of the day, it appears that many pundits are now digging under the surface for various nuggets of good news for Harris. If the top lines are not what they want, then going all the way down to white unmarried women to grab some positive information is where they will go. Silver is now on about day ten of understating how the polls seem to be more favorable to Trump. It is just a few tenths of a percent here and a few tenths of a percent there, nothing to get excited about, and if anyone does get excited about it, then they are overreacting. But of course, those small amounts keep adding up.
Was the “reverend” spamming Goddard?
🤣