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kleinbl00  ·  2740 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Why those polls that say Clinton’s ahead could be wrong

    And the reason why they're baloney has nothing to do with conspiracy theories, partisan weighting, or even Russian hacking. It's all about common sense.

Don't believe the math because it isn't truthy enough?

The linked article explaining the truthiness is talking exclusively about post-convention bounces, not noise, not reversion to the mean, not all the polls, not all the statistics.

Play me out, keyboard Nate:

    It’s not that the arguments for why the polls could be underrating Trump’s support (e.g. the supposed presence of “shy Trump” voters) are all that strong. There are reasons to think the polls could be underrating Clinton’s support instead of Trump’s, in fact. But polls aren’t always as accurate as they were in the past few presidential elections, and given the large number of undecided voters, they could be off in either direction. A 6- or 7-point polling error is just on the outer fringe of what’s possible based on the historical record in U.S. elections.

    With that said, it’s not the massive polling miss that would concern me if I were Clinton. Instead, I’d worry about what might happen if Trump was on a rising trajectory as Nov. 8 approaches, having cut my lead down to 3 or 4 percentage points, and then there was a more modest polling error on the order of what we saw in advance of Brexit, where the final polls were off by about 4 points. Polling errors of that magnitude are considerably more common than 6- or 7-point errors.