LogFAQs > #969311977

Also speaking of losers of the night: Trafalgar, RCP, and to a lesser extent - but still worth calling out - Silver/538.

Most of us here have been shit talking Trafalgar and rightfully so because they openly juice their polls on vibes and give absolutely nonsense results, coasting off their results in 2016 where their arbitrary boosting of Republicans lined up with Trump activating a bunch of nonvoters who the rest of the industry missed (and even then I think if you dig in the weeds it's more complicated when you evaluate Trafalgar's performance) but they and other partisan GOP polls were basically trying to will a narrative into existence with sus polls.

Which brings us to RCP. They've long, long, been operating with a partisan slant towards the GOP but they went super blatant with it this time. They were cherrypicking polls to include in their averages in a manner that was openly partisan. An outfit could release a poll that looked favorable to the GOP and they'd include it but then that same outfit would release a poll the next week showing a better result for the Dems and it mysteriously would not be counted. Bush league shit.

And then 538/Silver. Admittedly, they're not on the same tier as the above two but aside from shit like A-ranked Trafalgar, Silver was being called out by other election data people in the run-up to the election on how he was weighing partisan polls and polls that were uh... not very high quality - we're talking in one case case literally run by two high schoolers - like they were the same as the robust outfits like Marist and NYT/Siena and maintaining that if you just throw them all on the pile it'll work itself out - which tracks with the libertarian mindset of the market giving the best results.

I was watching all this transpire for months obviously, and it came up occasionally in discussions here, but I held back because it felt adjacent to "unskew the polls!" plus I'd been burned by being an optimist in 2016 and 2020 but the whole thing looked extremely sus the whole way down when you basically had two entirely separate realities depicted when you looked at just the established pollsters versus looking at Trafalgar and the GOP-funded polls - and RCP and the media were running with the Trafalgar worldline with glee - take that Politico article where they shit on their own poll that refuted their article premise of "Dems in disarray!!!111!"

sorry had to get all this off my chest