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Comment by bo1024 | Hacker News Reader

This is not precise enough and I don't agree.

> when the vast majority of polls in Florida showed Biden in the lead, and then Biden lost there by a few percentage points, that’s a polling error.

The job of the polls is to gather information, not forecast. It sounds like forecasters are setting up to pass blame off onto the polls instead of taking responsibility. And I guess they got away with this in 2016.

The polls asked people questions, the people answered, the polls reported the answers. So one would have to dig a lot deeper into the poll's claims to say they messed up.

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Poll percentages aren’t raw data. Usually there are various weights and balances applied to the counts, and these could give misleading numbers. E.g., polls might think male latinos who finished college might turn up at the polls at a lower proportion than they actually did, which can result in significant shifts.

There’s also the factor of questioning, both how things are worded and the means they use to ask them. Landline polling with 50 questions (yes, some pollers do this and you can see the questions they ask) aren’t likely to reach people with jobs or people who are young, so that results in the few people they do reach giving undue weight to “make up” for the voters they couldn’t poll. Wording of a question can also change how a person reports their result, and there’s always the lizard man constant and people who intentionally screw with pollers, some being easy to detect and discard.

In a way, they do end up as forecasters.

Yes, I agree with all these things. I still think there needs to be a lot more precision and details about what the polls claim to do, to say they screwed up.

Most people have made up their mind ahead of time. An accurate information-gathering poll for an election should usually serve as an accurate forecast for that election.

Turnout is a huge variable.

It's one of the variables you're supposed to be polling for.

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