I think there’s a stronger argument that those polls were intended to suppress Trump voters into thinking they were not the majority (when in fact they were).
I think there's also a huge misunderstanding of statistics in the US.
More than one person I've spoken to believed that when sites said things like "Hilary has a 70% chance of winning" that that was the same as getting 70% of the vote, i.e. a landslide.
I've had literal arguments with people who can't/won't understand the difference between an average and a median even when presented with 5th grade level phrasing examples.
That poll was in August of 2016. A lot changed between then and election day. Obviously we can't know if Clinton really would have had a 15 point lead on the day that poll was taken, because no official vote was taken. You may think it's implausible that it could have been true, but you're just some rando on the internet, what do you know? (Same with me!)
> intended to suppress Trump voters into thinking they were not the majority (when in fact they were
Depends on what you mean by "majority". If you're just talking about Wisconsin and that specific poll, sure Trump voters ended up being in the majority, but we can't say with any certainty what that situation was in early August. Polls like that one are the best guesses we have for that particular snapshot in time.
If you're talking about an overall majority of those who ended up being actual voters, then that's also not the case, as Trump did not win a majority of votes; Clinton did. Sadly, though, popular vote majority is not how our presidential election system works.
>I think there’s a stronger argument that those polls were intended to suppress Trump voters into thinking they were not the majority (when in fact they were).
Show your work. What evidence do you have to support that argument?
He won the popular vote in 2016 in States like Wisconsin that for months said he was 10-15% behind in the polls. It’s my interpretation that those polls were wrong but the majority of the media didn’t care. They just wanted to push a narrative that supporting Trump was a fringe minority in those States, rather than the true majority that it was.
This is not an accurate description of the magnitude of polling error in 2016 in WI, which was the state with the most significant polling error that year by a very large margin, see Table 2 "2016 final polling average versus actual results": https://centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/polling-error-in-2...
The final difference from polling in WI was 7%, other states had smaller polling errors. The fact is that 2016 was simply an extremely tight race in many states and difficult to forecast even with completely normal polling error bars.
I think there’s a stronger argument that those polls were intended to suppress Trump voters into thinking they were not the majority (when in fact they were).