Adamworks

The conspiracy would be that the media creates rigged polls to favor globalist positions, in hopes that people would think globalism is what everyone else thinks, and then go along with the crowd.

Media companies rarely conduct the polls themselves. They rely on professional pollster to collect and weight the data. Believe it or not Pollster have a ethical standards, "push" polls are unethical to say the least. Financially, election polling is expensive, probably doesn't pay that well, and is not worth the abuse from the public, compared to the work we do with private corporate clients. Many pollsters do it for the publicity, so there is zero value in getting the polls wrong.

It would have to be a some high level conspiracy to coerce an entire professional community (that I am apart of) to get them to fabricate their results. Sure maybe you can turn one pollster, but all of them even the republican pollsters?

I am a survey (sampling) statistician, I think I can offer some insight.

Essentially, there are series of qualitative decisions that need to be made by the methodologists/statisticians before the actual results can be analyzed. There is so much coverage bias (finding the right people), non-response bias (getting the right people to respond), and measurement bias (did they understand and answer the question correctly?), that you can make legitimate decisions on how to correct for it that can swing the results wildly in either direction. You can't simple weight to the Census totals, because not all US adults vote, so you are left to define "likely voters" yourself.

Basically from the discussions I've been apart of, pollsters got the turnout models wrong, they assumed more voters would come out for Clinton, when in reality she under performed in almost every demographic. Also, Undecided Voters split more towards Trump in the end (which calls into question what it means to be an "Undecided"). On top of that State polls tend to be of poorer quality and tend to have more error.

A talk recently attended with both Republican and Democratic pollsters, pointed out they were both shocked by the results. Both lamenting that with a different set of assumptions they would have predicted the election perfectly.

They also mention, no one will hire the pollster that predicts their candidate winning only to have the lose. There is real value in being a trusted advisor (sharing good and bad news).

TL;DR They probably made assumptions and they were wrong.

You have to be more specific on both counts. I am not sure what you are talking about. From the looks of it, the national polls are actually pretty spot on for the popular vote. Also, weird weighting probably has a rational explanation that is described in the methodology section. But I can't really comment without more context.

Both brexit and trump were pro nationalism (and anti globalism). Both were down by like 5 percent in polls the day before the vote, and then won.

The popular vote in the US is actually really close to what was predicted by the polls. Hillary is currently up +1.5 in the official count. State wide polls had a lot of variability but were relatively close within the margin of error. Only a few states turn out to be really wrong. I don't see a trend.

With regards to weighing, this article is the sort of thing I am referring to:

First, let me just say the interpretation of that Wikileaks email cited in that link is completely misguided. The discussion of "oversample" is not to juke the statistics, but it is you get more granular results on key demographics (e.g., "By Markets, Regions, etc."). The more you oversample, the deeper analytics you can do. That is clearly what they are talking about. Any oversampling would be adjusted in the weighting stage to produce representative results.

I don't actually see anything wrong with the methodology. There could be many reason for this. One of the more obvious ones is that Democrats actually have a registration advantage compared to republicans. See: http://www.gallup.com/poll/15370/party-affiliation.aspx

What is your opinion on BMI being used as a population health indicator?