1. I know this is anathema to you... but did you try clicking on the link I provided about 4 posts ups. Its from your teams nate silver. what I predicted in 2012 as unskewing in front of the election he calls herding.
and then there is this..
2.
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/heres-proof-some-pollsters-are-putting-a-thumb-on-the-scale/
But there are two dead giveaways that herding happened. One is the unusual shape of the curve. Rather than abiding by a linear progression, it suddenly veers toward zero in the final week or so of the campaign.
What happened during this period? It’s when pollsters were releasing their final polls of the campaign — the ones they think posterity will judge them by. These polls were included in the final Real Clear Politics averages and received a heavy weight in the final FiveThirtyEight forecast.
The impolite way to put it is that this was CYA (cover-your-ass) time for pollsters. Some that had produced “outlier” results before suddenly fell in line with the consensus.
The other giveaway is the one we discovered before in Iowa. By the end of the campaign, new polls diverged from the polling averages by less than they plausibly could if they were taking random samples and not tinkering with them.
3. and this...
from the same article...
A few pollsters are
shameless about their herding. One of them is Public Policy Polling (PPP), a polling firm that conducts automated polls for both public consumption and for liberal and Democratic clients.
Take a look at this
exchange, for example, between The New York Times’ Nate Cohn
13 and PPP’s Tom Jensen. Cohn
discovered that in 2012, the racial composition of PPP’s polls was correlated in an unusual way with President Obama’s performance among white voters in their surveys. If Obama was performing especially poorly among whites in one PPP poll, it tended to have a higher share of nonwhite voters, which boosted Obama’s result. And if Obama was doing relatively well among whites, PPP projected less nonwhite turnout, keeping his lead in check. As a result, PPP’s polls tended to show an unusually steady race between Obama and Mitt Romney.
I’m picking on PPP for a reason: They’re the biggest herders in the business. Here’s the chart I showed you before, but with only PPP’s polls highlighted. On average, in states with at least three other recent polls, their polls deviated from the polling average by only 1.6 percentage points. The evidence for herding is extremely clear visually and statistically.
14
4. Then there is everything i have learned in the last 6 years watching this.
The herding happens because the pollsters know what proper templates are.
So after have skewed polls because they are paid to influence things... in the end they shift to the best template they think so that they look good for posterity.
The best templates are the recent election turnout. And to be fair maybe allow a point or 2 leeway in your template for a fudge factor or feel.
5. for instance most of the fudge factors should favor donald trump. he kicked ass in the primaries. he has big turnouts etc. people hate him in the same numbers as hillary. He is leading with independents... etc. People will vote for him in secret but not tell pollsters if they are union people etc.
But, there is an argument that he is being over sampled when polling independents because many republicans are so fed up with Ryan McConnell and team they say they are independents. I am particularly sympathetic to that argument... because I said I was and independent when I was surveyed by gallop 2 weeks ago. and although I am still registered as a republican... I am not one if ryan is leading the party.
But do you have any data at all to back up what you say? I mean data as far as the professional polling outfits in recent years are concerned. Not TV call-in polls, or internet polls, but real polls designed by professional statisticians. Their record of late seems nearly flawless to me.
