A little late to the party?

Trump says what I have believed for years...  

Second, I agree with the president that pollsters deliberately reported bad results for most of this campaign cycle. Because of everything that has come to light in the last four years, I am much more cynical now than I was in 2016. Then, I assumed bad polling represented innocent errors. Now, I think that most pollsters, especially those associated with liberal media organizations like ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal and so on, deliberately reported absurd results in order to encourage Democratic Party fundraising, depress Republican fundraising, and demoralize Republican voters. Then in the last days before the election, when their goals had been more or less achieved, they released more realistic polls (albeit still wrong in most cases) and said Trump is catching up! I think the whole thing is deliberately engineered BS, and I am glad to hear Trump say it.

I have actually made this argument time and time again. Early polling is simply a tool to create a narrative, rather than report a narrative. Pollster figure if they get the last one fairly close, that they can claim to have caught some sort of last minute surge (Comey announcement or some nonsense) and look smart. After the fact, only the last polls for each pollster really count anyways. 

The difference between most every other election and this year was that many of the pollsters never came back with a "final" poll that was more realistic. While you had several polls still showing Clinton with double digit leads in mid to late October, they all sort of fell into place in that 3-5 point range (which when averaged with those that were more favorable to Trump) created an average not too far off the final result. This time you had multiple pollsters that had final polls with ridiculous double digit leads, and most of the other media polls were close to that double digit range.

It was as if they were "all in" on the narrative that this was going to be a blue wave of epic proportions. It was even difficult for me to manage to scrape together a realistic spreadsheet with some of the nonsense that the pollster were handing out. Biden leading by 30 points with Independents? Biden picking up 15% of Republican voters? 

Who was accurate? IBD/TIPP has gotten it pretty close (50.2-46.2) and probably pretty close with the demographic breakdown as well.  Rasmussen was the only one who would have come in with better numbers for Trump than the final results, but will still end up closer to the final mark than 90% of the other pollsters. The Hill also had it at 4 points, so along with TIPP they seem accurate? Emerson was not too far off at 5 points.

The big losers? CNN had Biden at 12 points, Quinnipiac  (didn't you used to be legitimate) came in with Biden at +11. CNBC, NBC/WSJ, Reuters, and the Economist all had double digit leads. NYT/Sienna had it at 9%. Fox, USA Today, and SUSA had it at 8 points. 

All that being said, look for Nate Silver to continue to mark the NYT, CNN, and Quinnipiac as A+ pollsters and provide their results with more weight.... that is, if anyone is still listening to Nate Silver come 2022.