Flipping Coins in 100,000 Universes Wouldn’t Be as Close as the Polls in Wisconsin

I just read Nate Silver’s blog post, where he writes that pollsters are systematically altering their data to roughly match the average of existing polls. According to Silver, rather than releasing their findings as-is, they’re worried they’ll look uniquely wrong, and so they’re settling for blending in with the crowd. He infers this bias from the numbers that the pollsters themselves report; the…