Polls

LA Times/USC poll have Trump up by 7. 

Guess we'll see next week how much Hillary bounced.  Maybe Bill bounced her?  :-)

I totally agree with that this.  I think people tend to be non-confrontational and people-pleasers and will tell the pollsters what they think they want to hear.  This is why I don't put much stock in polls.  It's hard to do a scientific poll without any bias.  How one answers has a lot to do with how the question is posed....and who is asking the question.  If a man asking a woman?  Is a woman asking a woman?  Is a woman asking a man?  If a woman is asking a woman if who she supports a woman might be more inclined to say Hillary.  Likewise, a man asking a man he might be more inclined to say is he voting for the man.

Maybe pollsters take all this into consideration and that is how they derive their margins of error? 

I've often been a sceptic of the polls over the years but again and again they've proved me wrong.  There's a lot of science that goes into it and the big name ones are usually pretty close.  There's always outliers that are pretty obvious with push polls or over sampling with no corrections, but those are the minority.

if you take a step back it makes sense that trump would get a big bump because people don't know a lot about him other than what the media tries to portray.  He did a good job of stating his case at the convention and independents and hesitant republicans likely responded.  

They will all eb and flow over the next few months with wider swings and then smaller swings.  There's also big unknowns that can have big opinion swings such as the stock market crash back in 2008. McCain was consistently ahead of Obama until the market went boom and everybody wanted change.

I remember how shocked many pollsters were in the 2012 election.

Good article on polling for that election.

http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/10/which-polls-fared-best-and-worst-in-the-2012-presidential-race/?_r=0

Pretty significant republican bias that year.

Yet Trump lead the LA Times daily tracking poll in all but one day last month.
Comparatively (in this poll anyways) he got a much larger bump than Hillary.

http://www.latimes.com/politics/

I saw that too and am left scratching my head.  How can two credible polls come up with dramatically different result that are not even within the polls margins of error?!

dp

I like this!  Just bookmarked it.  Lots of good data....some bad data.  :-)  The very top "chance of winning" is meaningless.  The chance of winning is mostly of function of what happens between now and Nov....how many more times Trump steps on his d......how many more Wikileaks emails come out damning Clinton.....how they do in the debates....how well their ground games work....more probably most important, who turns out to vote.

The problem I have with sights like this is I have no idea how they're coming up with their information.  For example they've got Florida solidly in Clinton's camp, but if you look at the RCP polls Trump has been ahead in Florida for a long time.  I think Clinton is in the lead in one of their last 4 polls.  So how in the bleep can they call Florida for Hillary with that data?  I didn't go through all their states, but it's certainly hard to trust them in any way.

You missed the bolded part.  So like I said, we have no idea whatsoever how they're coming up with their data.

Lets look at their statement and compare it to actual polls from RCP in Florida.   There have been 5 polls that RCP recognizes as legit conducted in Florida since 6/27.  in those it was Tie, Trump +3, Clinton +7, Trump +5, Trump +.3.  Now you apply the logic mentioned above and it is obvious they're adjusting "based on other factors" to give Florida to Clinton.  

Another datapoint that's a little interesting is that in poll after poll Trump is crushing Hillary in independents.  Meaning the only reason Hillary is ahead is because of lower support within the Republican party.  That may be true today, but it's a little hard to hang your hat on all the undecided Republicans who don't support Trump now voting for Hillary to give her the win. 
Public Policy Polling (Hillary is up big overall, but Trump leads independents 46%-41%)

All I can say is that polling is really weird this time around.  I genuinely try to stay out of the conspiracy camp of the media and pollsters trying to throw public opinion one way or the other via polls, but it's really hard to.  lol

Wonder how they faired in the Republican primary.  I seem to recall that not a single prediction site had Trump winning that one either.   
It's just polls and they're all over the place so you and I really don't have much to stand on either way.  It's continuing to be an interesting election.
Obama is certainly scared because he's out there bashing on Trump every chance he can.  If Trump was as far behind as everyone believes then Obama would sit back and smile I suspect.  His attacks are quite unprecedented for a sitting President. 

I'll have to read that later, but it does look interesting to me.  Glancing at the headlines it appears they had some challenges with Trump predictions in the primaries, but are open about them and trying to identify why.   I wonder how much of the pre-Trump modeling remains in their current general election system.

This page had a cool graph:

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/upshot/presidential-polls-forecast.html

Yeah yeah I know some of you may not like the NY Times liberal slant.  Don't read it - just scroll to the bottom.  The last graph shows the 10 most competitive states and different ways they can add up electoral votes to win.