Retrospective averages are used by guys like Nate to memory hole the fact that all the big name polls had Biden ahead by 10 points.
It is only the big name polls that are quoted by the media during the actual campaign.
Yeah, he won by 5% not 10% points. But if you look at what happened, is that they were pretty accurate about Biden's percent, and underestimated Trump's (e.g. undecideds or shy voters broke for Trump). And again, if your margin of error is 3 points, then a 55-45 could be a 52-48, a 10 pt difference shrinks to a 4 pt difference.
In any case, even if the polls were systematically off, and they may have been, that doesn't justify calling them all propaganda, or bs. It isn't even evidence of it. Because, as it happens, polling people is effing hard.
The fact that ALL the 'major' polls were heavily biased towards Biden, and Clinton before him, is clear evidence of corruption.
They are not all bullshit.
In 2016 the LA Times/usc poll was honest and accurate, so it was shut down for the 2020 election.
No, it is not "clear evidence of corruption". Not even close. It's evidence of being wrong. And no, not all the major polls overly favored Biden. At this point, you're just making crap up.
Look, there clearly are some "bullshit polls", and there are partisan polls paid for by candidates which tend to be favorable to them, and there a good polls with consistent bias, a kind of "house" effect as a consequence of their sampling methodology, etc.
That's why Nate Silver does averages of polls, btw, and weights polls in the average by their accuracy in previous elections.
It wasn't retrospective. It was a prediction, available on the day of the election, and before. Basically, you are talking nonsense, rationalizing your priors.
Oh come on. Silver's polling averages, and his election predictions, were up a year before the election, and are still up for everyone to see. "Retrospective now" doesn't even make sense. Keeping up his model and his averages on the web isn't "memory holing" anything, it's being radically honest. You can still see his 2016 predictions too!
