Arguably the first time Trump got elected the polls saying he couldn’t win played a large part in that. People felt safe not voting in protest of Hillary because “there’s no way Trump can win anyway.”

I cannot speak for the whole of Lemmy, but anything but exit polls tend to have multiple issues. The way that they’re used in popular media tends to fuel horse race politics.

Here’s the Pew Research Center, likely the largest polling organization in the US outside of the US Census. https://www.pewresearch.org/methods/2023/04/19/how-public-polling-has-changed-in-the-21st-century/

Here’s how they can fuel partisanship when that bias is not taken into account by the media https://phys.org/news/2020-10-political-scientist-negative-partisanship-voters.html

Here’s what I mean when I say horse race politics. https://journalistsresource.org/politics-and-government/horse-race-reporting-election/

Ptsd. We have been burned before.

Polls are bullshit and cause stupid. Also they are getting increasingly biased as time goes on, seriously some still only use land lines.