It's, of course, very possible that "this time it's different" as they say every time. He is certainly an unconventional candidate. However, I'll throw my lot in every time with the MANY polls who are trying to account for this, and the MANY poll aggregators who are trying to make sense out of this madness.
I think 538 was actually quite reliable during the primary season. Pretty much bang on, in fact.
Everything they said anti-trump was basically opinion and they have been roundly chastised (as deserved) for treating punditry as fact.
The reasoning is that pollsters have herd behaviours - they believe publishing an outlier they will lose them credibility so they suppress inconvenient results and will rework methodologies and weightings to avoid it. For many, election polling is a loss leader - its publicity to get their name out there for commercial services. The credibility of the outlier is increased because it has escaped the herd pressure despite the incentives.
To extract information we need to carefully revise methodology behind outlier predictions, and such an activity is a complex task for skilled data analyst.
This feels a lot like the atmosphere over here (in Britain) just before the Brexit vote.
Many people thought it was a guaranteed Remain vote, and woke up to a terrible fright on that Friday morning.
If you look at states that are contested, things look bad for Trump, even in the ones where demographics favor him he is not getting polling results that point to a win (an example would be Pennsylvania).
Where they eliminated that one 19 year old, and saw very little effect on the poll.
How is that a compelling answer?
It's like if a news investigation found that a company had poor quality control and features a photo of a defective product in their writeup and the company's response was "we issued a refund for the product the news team purchased."
All I can say is that you sound an awful lot like the 2012 talking heads who were convinced Romney would win despite all the polling pointing to the contrary. For the record, Nate Silver's biggest mistake in the primaries was not listening to the polls enough. For him (and every other data-driven forecaster) to be getting the general wrong they'd have to be making the exact opposite mistake as before.
I'd be happy to give you 10:1 odds on Trump losing. And I'm biased here: a few months ago, I was convinced Trump would win.
1 responder should not move a 2500 person poll by 1%
That seems highly disingenuous a response.
I say so because of its polling methodology, which is unique.
If you're a politics/polling nerd, this poll is interesting. If you're not, then yes, you are probably better off either just reading 538, or looking at the RCP polling average.
https://news.usc.edu/109339/why-the-usc-dornsifel-a-times-pr...
But this poll performed well in 2012[1] with the same methodology. As a polling nerd, wouldn't you be interested in why it is producing unusual results this year and what implications that might have for polling in general?
[1] http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-poll-faq-20161006-...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/13/upshot/how-one-19-year-old...
There are plenty of aggregation sites which are far better at smoothing out any issues:
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/upshot/presidential-...
They all show Trump losing in a landslide with Clinton getting around 330 EC votes.
We don't know who is right/wrong until after the election so it is better to assume that a range of different polls taken at different times with different methodologies is likely to be more accurate.
Now I can't sleep...
1. They're the best data we have
2. We have no reason to believe they're incorrect
3. There is REALLY no reason to believe they're dishonest
Is 100% intellectually dishonest.
This is exactly what happened 4 years ago, and apparently some people have not learned from their tremendous mistake.
If you want to know why "turnout at a campaign event" is a crappier metric than "real actual scientific data", I don't know how else to help, other than to point to other instances in which it has failed:
"Mitt drawing larger crowds" http://www.politico.com/story/2012/10/mitt-drawing-larger-cr...
"Donald Trump continues to draw YUGE crowds. That matters less than he thinks." https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/28/do...
"Trump brags about crowd size but will it turn into votes?" http://bigstory.ap.org/article/d74fbd472f7a420a90737e55cfb20...
I do not know or care who you support in the Presidential election. However, I suggest you get realistic about your metrics, as you're way off in fantasyland at the moment, as far as I can tell.
If you turn out to be incorrect, I hope you learn from this experience. I know I will, if the data turns out to be wrong.
When the polls show him to be ahead, it's evidence that the voters love him. When he's behind, it's evidence that the polling is rigged.
Campaigns also conduct their own internal polling which may or may not have biases, but they're not released; they're used for the campaign. So it only benefits them to know what's actually going on. Trump's is one of the few campaigns that seems only interested in good news, and in not learning from what their internal polling tells them.
That said, of course all campaigns will selectively brag about the polls that make them look good, and quietly ignore those that don't.
Again, the polls are extremely reliable in this country. If you can't see that, you're unlikely to be swayed by yet another data point when this election is complete.
You can find signs that people in the establishment personally favored the establishment candidate – the least surprising revelation in political history – but there's no evidence that lead to any concrete action. That's why the only claims of rigging have been intentional misrepresentation based on the knowledge that some people like you would repeat those claims without checking the sources.
Hint: it's the same reason why the alleged victim is going around telling his supporters to vote for Hillary. If you trusted his judgement enough to think he should be president, why not trust his analysis now?
And that reason is elementary game theory. The only people with incentives to claim that the Democratic primaries were rigged are those who will be left with no political influence if the Democrats fare poorly.
When the Republicans do well, it's because they value party unity over literally everything else. One of HRC's strengths is that she brings the same thinking to the Democrats. For anyone within the party, working against her carries no conceivable upside. And as we've seen in DWS's case, working for HRC means you'll be well taken care of, no matter what.
Basically, if Sanders or anyone else on the left has beef with the DNC, they will be much better off if they wait to bring it up until after the election. And maybe not even then.
Is it not (in absence of any evidence) equally plausible that the type of voter that will vote for Trump is more predisposed to attend a campaign event than other voters?
Yes, this poll is an outlier because their methodology is very different than most other polls.
Yes, Nate Silver has a very different outlook on the election, but Nate Silver was also not very reliable during the primary season (although that is, by his admission, because primaries don't have very good polling).
If I had to make a[n extremely uneducated guess], it's because most polling is done over the phone, and I don't think "people who answer their phone when they don't recognize the number" is a very good random sampling of voters in the US.
I don't think this race is nearly as over as most people seem to believe, which is why, if you want to beat Trump, it is REALLY IMPORTANT (all caps!) that you get out and vote!