> the polls showing trump ahead are obviously bogus no. there's a million things. let me tell you the most obvious one: not reaching out to rural voters. rural voters are mostly trump voters, and by nature of their geography, work, lifestyle, mindset about technology, they're some of the least likely people to respond to polls. there is a major underestimation in every cycle because of this. every single election, trump overperforms in rural support because of this. then it goes into state by state polling, where some states have been moving more to the right relative to national polling, others states like nv being hard to poll because it's mostly reno+lv which is a lot of service workers who can't be reached, and then states that suddenly flip like va from red to blue.  what we consistently know is: - polls have a leftward bias - therefore, if a poll shows a republican tied/ahead, this is a *good sign*. i never once saw a poll and said this'll be the final results, only whether or not we were on the right path. this is a science, and takes about 10 classes to understand, and theoretical mathematics plays a big part such as measure theory. then you have each separate pollster having an average error. and the end conclusion is, polling isn't reliable. if it was, campaigns wouldn't have internal polling done. also, polls can easily be manipulated. an independent sampled from ca would likely vote blue, versus and independent sampled from tx would likely vote red. so sampling independents from places you want to produce a result you want and shape the narrative is super easy. but the tldr is - polls aren't accurate. they can tell you "we're on a good path" or "we're on a bad path", and *maybe* an aggregate of polls can get you rather close because of diversified risk being reduced as more data is added, and you approach the true mean of a sampling distribution.
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