… Polling isn’t built to be an instrument that correctly identifies the winner in a race that comes down to one or two percentage points. It’s meant to roughly evaluate the views of a population with predictable margins of error. Those margins are reduced when polls are averaged, but we tend to expect more from presidential polls than they are built to offer. That’s compounded when considering the gap between measuring voting preferences and the electoral college, the actual system for choosing presidents. …
The questions now are twofold: How anomalous were 2016 and 2020, and to the extent that they weren’t anomalous, how does polling accommodate the reasons for the polling errors? Both of those questions will take time to answer.
But we can reject one answer out of hand. The best answers will come from open discussion and research about what happened, not from giving up on polling or from mixing private, subjective factors into estimated results. CONTINUED
Philip Bump, Washington Post