Virginia was +5 Harris rcp averages.

This is outside of the margin of error.

Harris won by around 5 points in NJ, Biden won NJ in 2020 by 16 points. That is a far wider swing than any poll predicted.

People in a non-swing state figure "yolo" and vote for their emotional favorite, because they're dissatisfied with the status quo and have no other way to express it?

Well, it was close enough that it should worry the Dems and put NJ in play for Republics in the near future. NJ has not always voted consistently for democrats.

The question is not why there was a swing, any number of reasons can be attributed ex post facto.

The point is no poll caught any of the swings at all. To win with this margin Trump the polls can hardly be tied and be called accurate.

The result is not a close at all, and it is not about swing states and electoral college swings. Trump is winning the popular vote by a large margin something he has never be able to do so before.

That's easy to explain--cultural and media institutions have disparaged Republican voters for so long that Trump voters inherently distrust pollsters. They might or might not turn out in a given election, but they have nothing to gain by telling anybody.

[delayed]

Iowa was polling at +3 Harris. Trump won it +13. Not even close to margin of error.

That was one poll which was wildly out of line with all other polls.

All of the polls had Trump ahead there. https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-general... (No intended endorsement of 538, they're just a convenient list of polls)

There were a large number of “herded” polls that basically all predicted the exact same results as 2016 and 2020 (Trump +5/+8).

So, not really even within the margin of error. There weren’t any predicting +15.

And the high quality polls that didn’t attempt to synthesize results to match past results were even more wrong.