Why the Polls Were So Off

538’s final forecast for the presidential race between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump is officially out, and it’s a real nail-biter. Our model gives Harris a 50 out of 100 chance of winning the majority of Electoral College votes. Our model gives Trump a 49 out of 100 chance. The model shifted toward Harris slightly on Monday, Nov. 4, after high-quality polls released over the weekend showed her tied or ahead in the key northern battlegrounds of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Of course, Harris lost badly, including all three key northern battleground states in which she was supposedly “tied or ahead”. Donald Trump’s electoral college ranked #39 out of the 59 historical US presidential elections; it was not exactly the “real nail-biter” that 538 forecasted. And the Dark Herald knows why:

A while back, Disney subsidiary ESPN bought up Nate Silver’s 538 to help with their forecasting. It was actually a pretty smart idea. Then 538 gets transferred over to ABC News, which takes it away from Jason Pitaro and puts it under the control of… You guessed it! Dana Walden. Nate Silver “resigns” from the company he created and is replaced by G. Elliot Morris a 28-year-old flaming idealogue and journalist. This is when things started to go down hill fast for 538.

Rasmussen Polls were sent a few polite-ish requests for their procedures and some proprietary information. The boss of Rasmussen doesn’t like how this smells and refuses. Sure enough, it was the equivalent of “We are going to write this story about you and feel you should have a chance to tell your side of the story.” It was obviously a trap. Sure enough, Disney’s 538 sends Rasmussen a vicious letter accusing them of every kind of bias in their methodology and informing them they are now being dropped from 538’s aggregation.

538 also injected ABC News’ own polling into their aggregation which immediately biased things to the left. Basically they poll the same people over and over again and they are allegedly influenced by community managers.

That’s right. The Devil Mouse has now graduated from ruining news and entertainment to destroying the purpose of election polls. This is progress?

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