If there is one good thing to come out of this, it will hopefully be that once and for all FReepers will not spend such enormous amounts of time and energy trying to convince each other that "The polls are wrong!", or, "The polls just CAN'T be right!", or, "They're just trying to suppress the turnout!". We did that in '06 and we got slaughtered. We did it this year and we got slaughtered. We got the turnout. It wasn't suppressed. The problem was, many more of them voted for the 'Rats than we expected. We turned out "our" voters (red districts) and maybe up to a third of them voted for Obomba. Why? They didn't like what they were hearing from us, and/or what they've seen over the past 8 years.
We can't waste time fooling ourselves. We've got to have the common sense to see it like it is and tell it like it is. This is two elections in a row where the voters have blown conservatives/Republicans out of the water. Like it or not, we have to understand that the 'Rats have found a winning message, and people are responding to it. We have to come up with one from our side or we're going to be out of power for another 20-40 years.
We can't waste time fooling ourselves. We've got to have the common sense to see it like it is and tell it like it is.I agree totally. Now, polls can be wrong, but declaring them wrong simply because they contain results we don't like isn't helpful.
I heartily recommend going through the archives at FiveThirtyEight.com. This site was attempting to project the winner based on current polls (i.e. not "if the election were held today" but "when the election is held on Nov. 4th"). Along the way, Nate Silver posted a lot of useful tutorials on how polls work and why they do what they do. The site was pro-Obama, but it gained a great deal of respect because when it came to the numbers, it didn't spin them at all.
I think that if we were better educated about the mechanics of polling, as a group, there would have been a more measured response to them here.