So is there a "blue wave" ??

Well the short answer is "nobody really knows".  Certainly I don't pretend to know, and anyone who pretends to know at this point is basically pretending. The fact is that polling has become more and more unreliable in recent election cycles, and the further away from an election, the more unreliable the polling.

After a very successful run of five election cycles with only three misses, I decided that 2016 was the year I was going to leave the prognostications to others with more courage to be wrong. Wrong was the only thing the prognosticators turned out to be be. That and embarrassed.

In 2016, at ten weeks out, Hillary held a six point RCP average lead. In mid September, she held about a five point lead. By middle of October, she was up by seven. 538, NYT, Sam Wang, and most others had Hillary a massive overwhelming favorite to win. In fact, instead of campaigning, Hillary was said to be picking out her White House curtains.

I have long held a theory that election polling outside of three weeks is more propaganda than polling. Last election cycle, Nate Silver wrote a piece about what a puzzle it seemed to be that all of your disparaging election polling always seemed to come together down the stretch. He offered many possible solution to the puzzle, but never considered that polling prior to the stretch run is not "meant" to be accurate. Did anybody "really" believe the NBC poll showing Hillary up 14 or an AP poll showing Hillary up 13 points? Well apparently Nate Silver did, and appeared confused when those polls wandered their way back to reality.

Of the ten polls taken completely during November, six of them ended up within two points of the final result. Two of them were within three. All of them were within five points. More to the point, if you dig into the polling, the sample make ups were much more similar (and closer to the actual electorate). It's not that the percentages within each demographic changed as much as the weighting of those demographics changed.

Same can be said about the generic ballot. In 2016 the Democrats held a generic ballot lead throughout the election cycle. They topped out between six and seven points about four weeks before the election. This was when everyone was suggesting a big Hillary win, with long coat-tails that would bring her majorities in both chambers of Congress. But by the end of the cycle, the generic polling had bounced it's way back to a meager 0.6% lead for the Democrats, with the final national ballot showing that Republicans had garnered a 1.1% advantage.

In my humble opinion, the large Hillary polling leads and the large Democrat generic polling leads were mirages. Propaganda by people manipulating the numbers ever so slightly to create a narrative that they hoped the nation would follow. But once it became crunch time, these same pollsters knew that accuracy would become the primary goal. That (and not some undiscovered mystery) is why all of these polls converge down to a more accurate result.

This may all sound like a wild "conspiracy theory" and that is exactly what it is. But I have yet to hear a better explanation as to why this same phenomenon seems to take place every election cycle, and why it seems to get worse (rather than better) as time goes on. Certainly pollsters should learn from these mistakes, but that doesn't seem to be the case. They seem to get worse.

The reality is that not that many people "really" change their minds about an election. In fact, I personally know almost nobody who has ever once changed their mind about who they were going to vote for in any big election, much less change them back and forth based on the latest news cycle. Ask yourself how many people you know who simply change their minds about who they want as President or who they want as Senator.  It's inconceivable that large portions of the population simply change their minds in this manner. Moreover, you often see large polling changes when almost "nothing" has even "conceivably" caused it. They just change, and then pundits scratch their heads and try to come up with a reason after the fact. Perhaps the real answer is that there was no reason because the polling shift was some sort of mirage.

So is there a blue wave? Perhaps. But until we see a bunch of polling within a couple of weeks of the election, I am going to remain open minded about any and all possibilities.