Source: All The Reasons You Doubt Polls: Motivated Reasoning Strikes Again

Sam Wang’s new take on people’s take, courtesy Princeton Election Consortium.

This, this, a thousand million kaskillion times this. If you want the mathy parts, read the article, and look at the calculations. If you don’t, here’s my quick read. Undecided voters break in exactly how you’d expect undecided voters to break: Some go here, some go there. Yeah, there are a lot of them this year, but the only evidence suggests that they won’t break differently from usual. Whenever folk assume differently, the voters do what they always do, and the assumers look like, well, big old assumers.

The justifications for what Wang politely calls “motivated reasoning are the same as always, only with a little 2016 spin to them.

Brexit? Well, rectangle glasses dude called it the wrong way because HE ASSUMED THAT ALL THE UNDECIDEDS WOULD BREAK FOR REMAIN.

Midterms? Well, midterms are midterms, and presidential years are presidential years, and they’re always different.

“We didn’t think Trump would win the primaries either.” Wang’s dig at the glasses. He knew Trump would win the primaries in about March, as did anyone who looked it the numbers without silver-colored glasses. That was the easiest statistical call of them all.

Intangibles. Whateverrrrrrrrrrr. Unskew them polls!

It’s all really stable. And unless something genuinely unexpected happens, it’s gonna stay that way.