Yes, that’s her public defense. Did she publish the raw data and methodology showing this? Or are these unprovable statements that cover for her reputation?

I mean this defense is effectively saying that polls are actually worthless and should be ignored anyway - that’s what “the best polling methodology we have can sometimes be off by 15 points” would actually mean.

If you really believe “good” pollsters don’t do this, you should question how the Harris campaign’s internal polling outperformed them. How did a political campaign correctly predict with polling all along that she was behind Trump when public polling consistently showed her ahead until tightening immediately before? Public polling, again, is generally more of a tool to shape opinion than it is to reflect reality. Private campaign polling that’s limited to leadership only is much more likely to be accurate since they actually want the truth.

▲ shagie 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Did she publish the raw data and methodology showing this?

Yes.

https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/opinion/columnists/f...

One can debate how the change in political polling has been done over the past decades. Reverse polling (weighting) vs forward polling (weighting).

https://www.pewresearch.org/methods/2026/09/16/weighting-pol...

https://goodauthority.org/news/pollsters-are-weighting-surve...

Seltzer used (and consistently used) forward polling. https://www.npr.org/2024/11/03/nx-s1-5177322/high-profile-io...

    Well, I do it the same way I've been doing it. I've made no change in that, to be clear. And this is going to get a little wonky. What I want to do is to collect data that will reveal to me what the future electorate is going to look like. I call it polling forward. I call people who are weighting their data looking at past elections polling backward.

And there are biases with internal polling. I'm more likely to answer a poll by (A) whom I'm more likely to vote for than by (B) where I may be concerned that they're trying to collect my data for nefarious uses.

If you believe polls are worthless, then don't look at them. However, a lot of the enthusiasm and donations for a political candidate are driven by polling.

	▲	Amezarak an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Yes, I have made a lot of money by not looking at them on prediction markets dating back to the Intrade days.

▲ anonymous908213 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

What it's actually saying is that polling is useful in the aggregate and useless in the individual. One can have a 66% hit rate in the aggregate, well above flipping a coin, and still not be able to predict the future for any individual outcome. Unfortunately, 90% of people are statistically illiterate, so we get takes like "getting a single poll wrong can only be the outcome of a malicious attempt to deceive the public".

▲

Amezarak an hour ago | parent [-]

Polling aggregators also have a miserable record. You get closer because by aggregating you partly eliminate individual biases, methodological errors, sampling issues, and ulterior motives, but you also have problems with the pool of polls itself and aggregators are ineffective in adjusting for these issues by weighting or eliminating pollsters accordingly.

Another comment even mentioned the notorious Nate Silver (bronze perhaps), the most famous of these types who lost 100k by being completely wrong about Florida by a huge margin. (Did he actually commit and payout? Not sure.)

	▲	anonymous908213 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I was the one who mentioned Nate Silver as well. That case does not undermine his skill. The 538 model's track record over hundreds of thousands of forecasts was, statistically, extremely good. https://web.archive.org/web/20250306130304/https://projects.... Holding a forecaster to a standard of "Silver must get 100% of predictions correct or else he's a fucking moron" is, in itself, a sign of low critical thinking skills.