> “there is no such data”
You are correct. By such data you mean a ‘representative sample’.
A representative sample in statistics means a subset of the population, a subset that has all the characteristics of the larger population.
To get a representative sample, a sampling plan must be designed and executed.
But sampling plans today are impossible to execute because people either are not home, are not going to pickup the phone, or will hangup; these are the ‘non-respondents’ and they make up about 90% of original sampling plans. Those few that do pickup, the 10% ‘respondents’, are not representative.
It is interesting to see how the primary polls favored Trump pretty much across the board in nearly every state. The polling was indeed invalid because the underlying sampling plans were impossible to execute.
But there was one ‘signal’ that all the pollsters did not account for but which they picked up on, the ‘Elephant In The Room’. That Elephant comprised the nearly 100 million Americans sitting home out of work.
Trump’s leading polls were driven in large part by pissed-off Americans sitting at home or working PT jobs, unsatisfied with the state of the economy and their lives as a result.
Silver didn’t pickup on that signal because likely he was screwing around with his sampling plan trying to reach what he considered as the ‘larger moderate, employed’ population. In other words, he kept working his call list to reach more of what he thought was a real representative sample, and that is where his bias entered. The man is stupid. I imagine he was getting the same results as other polls but his paycheck was conditioned on his coming up with something that was ‘missed’ by others. So his ‘clever crafting’ became ‘salacious stupidity’ at best, but more likely a deceitful sellout at worst. His stupidity stems from the same Beltway well that hypothesizes the media has the power to destroy any candidate of their choosing. He’s stupid because he missed the role of social media and their near absolute hatred and contempt for the national news media.
I know statistics better than most people on the planet. Silver is a lightweight, a PhD reject that got his name in the spotlight with the syndicated news media. His apologizing in this crappola report is an attempt to smooth over his stupidity and get in the good graces of those that feed his belly. He’s on his way out.
What he failed to take into account was Trump being a self financed candidate through the nomination process. This takes away the puppet strings to the elites.
This is what terrifies them, not his positions per se, but his complete autonomy.
Perot was also pulling this off in a different way and they went after his family and he backed off. Trump seems to have either been able to prevent that, or it hasn’t happened...yet.