Thread by @bramcohen

And now for the world's dullest hot take on the election. Returns are still very unclear so this is going to be a bit meta (thread)

What we know clearly so far is that the polls severely missed in Florida and even if they didn't seriously miss elsewhere they missed major trends and a few things sort of cancelled out

So why did the polls suck? My guess is changes in technology. Back in the day you could call random phone numbers and get decent response rates across the whole population. Now it's pathetic.

You can thank spammers of the world for that. The majority of the time when the phone rings now it's a malicious actor so people just plain don't answer, and sending people query questions via text might be even worse

The betting markets, for their part, were probably skeptical of the poll data so moved everything closer to 50%. Given what appears to be the number of different polling screwups (it's a bit early to be sure though) that was a reasonable call

Clearly there's room for improvement in the poll aggregators. At one point NYTimes was giving North Carolina 95% to Trump and Fox was giving it 95% to Biden. Which is funny, but obviously someone missed

But I think laughing at this is unfair. Given that the news orgs were giving it in the opposite direction of their partisan lean is a strong sign they're trying hard to be objective, and these sorts of needle predictions are new and difficult

That they're even trying is a huge improvement. When watching returns everybody wants to know how the results so far compare to what was expected and how the results are expected to move based on where the returns so far have come from

In the past news orgs didn't even pay lip service to these things and instead reveled in how they were making the audience lose their lunch with technically correct and all-encompassing but actually extremely misleading reporting of early returns

I expect polls aggregation to continue to get better in the future, and the fraction of journalists understanding this whole 'probability' concept goes from 'a lot of them' to 'most of them'.

But if polling is permanently hobbled due to technological changes that's a huge problem. Garbage in garbage out.

I for one am a bit relieved that there has not so far been major disturbances at polling places or allegations of vote counting impropriety. We'll see how that holds up though.