I voted for the last one on the assumption that you were talking about polling companies that at least try to be impartial, & certainly not non-profits with an ax to grind.

Polls are people saying they have an opinion or that they are going to do do something.
In the case of 2016, people said they were going to vote a certain way but did they actually go out and do it.. obviously not!

Personally I don’t think polls mean a lot to the individual. I don’t really care how others are voting as it applies to my decision on who to support.

I think polls are used by politicians for both nefarious and honest reasons. They may use them to see where to concentrate their efforts. Where is a lost cause to move on from. What messages and rhetoric resonates with the voters in a particular area.

I do believe they also use them to manipulate voters. Show a candidate way ahead and voters may stay home. Thinking the the person has it in the bag and they don’t need to bother. Or perhaps show yourself polling just behind your opponent and people may be more motivated to turn out. It’s all in the spin. And relies on a truthful and diverse pool.

I’m not sure how they can say the 2016 polls were inaccurate by using some sort of “fancy speechifying” to pretend like we just didn’t know the difference between a pollster and a forecaster. This is a lame attempt to shirk responsibility for getting things so terribly wrong.

If anything 2016 should have taught the Congress critters and candidates on both sides of the aisle that they have grossly misinterpreted the people they are supposed to be respresenting. That the disconnect is so wide people left behind any sort of past practices and reasoning to simply elect someone, anyone who wasn’t the status quo. I was one of those people. I felt like i was basically held hostage by a system that forces me, election after election to vote for the lesser of two bad choices. And now we are reaping the consequences of that. Regardless of the polls.

Most of the major polls were at least close to accurate. People love to talk about others being wrong. That's why some people think they are so smart when they talk about how useless weathermen are.