No poll watching this year.

Every (primarily presidential) election cycle I used to track the polls that appear on RealClearPolitics to try to extrapolate a realistic result by filtering out polls that are what I would consider statistically unreliable.  Some were too small (high margin of error), some oversampled Democrats (not a truly random sample, therefore biased), some polled adults or registered voters instead of likely voters.  Some may have even defined likely voters oddly.  They needed to be filtered out  in order to get a clearer view of how race really looked.  It worked in 2016, I was seeing a Trump narrow win over Hillary Clinton.  I thought I had to be wrong and it turned out I was; I understated president Trump's electoral performance. 

In 2018 I looked at Senate races and my filtering method still did pretty well.  But in 2020 I did not see a Let's Go Brandon victory. In 2022 I didn't do that well in senate races either. I'm not convinced that my methodology was wrong, but I think the polling has changed in a way that is not clear to me. That could mean I am doing something that is wrong that perhaps used to work, I don't know.  But the point is, as a poll watcher, I do not trust my input data any longer.  

I've enjoyed looking at the What-If scenarios, and I may still do it this year. I like statistics and doing the analysis. But until I can figure out why the polls are different and my previous method of filtering out suspicious results can be fixed, I don't think it's productive to share my results here, at least for this election cycle.

Besides, I don't believe, as Rush Limbaugh used to say, poll watching is the best use of our time. I'll find another way to be productive and useful to the conservative cause. What does it matter if the polls show a close race and it turns out that hundreds of thousands of Let's Go Brandon votes appear at 2 a.m. in Pennsylvania for Let's Go Brandon, with a corresponding (and statically impossible) zero votes for Trump. 

But outrage over suspicious results won't change the results. What will change the result is a rejuvenated RNC that  does it's job properly. Let's hope the RNC's new leadership is up to the task.