Edit: had no idea “poll” was such a four letter word, especially when talking about them in the abstract. Anyone want to chime in on the downvotes? Is it just “all polls are bad” or is it Nate Silver? Honestly had no idea talking about poll weighting would be so unpopular.
Since there’s always a lot of interest in the validity of polls, I found this to be interesting. It’s Nate Silver’s explanation of how they do weighting of polls when aggregating based on the pollsters track record. He makes it clear that the bias is often a result of the methodology and not necessarily a “thumb on the scale” and how the pollster executes a poll can introduce bias - and how they account for that.
Many folks have issues with Nate, but he’s at least very transparent in how they account for bias based on previous performance, not just the poll source. So while you may disagree with his decisions, you can at least look at his numbers and know how they got there.
BTW, if you haven’t seen it already, this is Nate’s forecast page with a national aggregate, aggregates for swing states (or what were thought to be potential swing states earlier in the year), and the latest polls that have been brought into the model. https://www.natesilver.net/p/nate-silver-2024-president-election-polls-model
It shouldn’t be so close but I’ll take it