POTUS/General Election Thread 2020 + Aftermath

[Montmorency]

Polling around the world tends to be more left than the results. UK, USA and Australia all showed stronger shifts to the left in polls vs the actual election results.

Why do you think there is a systematic tendency across elections?

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features...partisan-bias/
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features...te-polls-been/

If you skim through those articles, you will see that in US presidential elections the national polling bias changes every election, often toward alternating parties, and state polls may have their own bias divergent from national polls' bias.

The 2012 Obama-Romney election was the latest episode of significant Republican bias in polling. Usually problems with polls can be explained in methodological terms. For example, in 2016 it was found that a major factor underrepresenting Republican support in polls was nonweighting of education (i.e. non-college voters, especially non-college whites). These and other oversights have been adjusted for this cycle.

Partisan bias in sub-presidential races also constantly fluctuates.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features...ard-democrats/


Another recent non-American case, but where the polls were off:
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features...-were-way-off/

Emmanuel Macron’s 32-percentage-point victory in France’s presidential election runoff may end up being touted as a triumph for French pollsters, who consistently gave him a huge advantage. But it shouldn’t be. The polls leading up to the contest between the centrist Macron and his far-right opponent were the least predictive in French history, underestimating Macron’s support, rather than Marine Le Pen’s, to the surprise of some. ... The average poll conducted in the final two weeks of the campaign gave Macron a far smaller lead (22 percentage points) than he ended up winning by (32 points), for a 10-point miss. In the eight previous presidential election runoffs, dating back to 1969, the average poll missed the margin between the first- and second-place finishers by only 3.9 points.

Sorry, but this just seems like one of those common political myths.