It's the Pollsters, Stupid

It's possible the tied race reflects not the sentiments of the voters, but rather risk-averse decision-making by pollsters
Posted by Corky

or maybe the pollsters are just reporting what they are being told by those they poll?
#3 | Posted by LampLighter

Large numbers of surveys would be expected to show a wider variety of opinion, even in a close election, due to the randomness inherent in polling. The absence of such variation suggests that either pollsters are adjusting "weird" margins of 5% or more, Clinton and Lapinski argued - or the following second possibility, which they deemed more likely.

"Some of the tools pollsters are using in 2024 to address the polling problems of 2020, such as weighting by partisanship, past vote or other factors, may be flattening out the differences and reducing the variation in reported poll results," they write.

Either explanation "raises the possibility that the results of the election could be unexpectedly different than the razor-close narrative the cluster of state polls and the polling averages suggest", they added.

But shouldn't such randomness tend to iron out the differences between the pollsters rather than emphasis those differences?
Isn't that why pollsters use random sampling?
#5 | Posted by LampLighter

That's the desired result, but there would still be deviation, especially given the relatively small sample size for many of these polls.

Nate Silver: Cheating' Pollsters Are Putting ----er on the Scale'
"Oh, every state is just +1, every single state's a tie,' No! You're ---- herding! You're cheating! You're cheating!" said Silver

Silver slammed GOP-leaning polling firms for continually putting Trump at an advantage in many states, accusing them of making a prediction that won't put them "too far on a limb."

He added, "Your numbers aren't all going to come out at exactly 1-point leads when you're sampling 800 people over dozens of surveys. You are lying! You're putting your ---- ----er on the scale!"

According to Silver, "If a pollster never publishes any numbers that surprises you, then it has no value."
www.msn.com

But I'm not going to go around and make up conspiracy theories why I think the polls are so close.
#8 | Posted by LampLighter

Well, I'm not going to argue how statistics work. That's a semester of somewhat advanced math and even then half the class won't get it.

Instead, I'll just copy/paste what Corky copy/pasted from the article in #1 and I copy/pasted in #3: "Large numbers of surveys would be expected to show a wider variety of opinion, even in a close election, due to the randomness inherent in polling. [...] "

@ LampLighter

TonyRoma has posted an article that goes into more detail here:
Silver: Swing State Polls are Only Close Because of Herding
drudge.com

I found helpful the stat that Tony copy/pasted ("Based on a binomial distribution - which assumes that all polls are independent of one another, which theoretically they should be - it's realllllllllllllly unlikely. Specifically, the odds are 1 in 9.5 trillion against at least this many polls showing such a close margin."