… Nonetheless, we’ve reached a stage in campaign season when Democrats have begun to complain that the polls are biased against them. There’s a long tradition of this sort of “unskewing.” The trailing party will say that its internal polls tell a different story or that its turnout operation will save it. It will critique each poll’s demographic cross-tabs. (Because most polls report breakouts for a dozen or more demographic groups, all with small sample sizes, there’s almost always something to argue about.) The party will point toward previous instances when it outperformed its polls. As a last resort, it’ll claim that this election will be different somehow.
Usually this doesn’t end well for the unskewers. CONT.
Nate Silver, FiveThirtyEight