Polls originally had two practical functions:

1. To let a campaign know what its odds were and what it needed to do

2. To allow news organizations to inform the public of how well a campaign was doing

While the effectiveness of polling was always overrated as part of the progressive obsession with metrics and experts, pollsters generally did their jobs well because their bottom line was connected to the accuracy of what they dispensed to the campaigns and to the media.

That’s all gone by the wayside.

The media has no interest in accurate polls, but in polls that suit its narrative. Campaigns generally want accurate data, but that’s internal data, which only occasionally gets reported on second hand by the media. Polls, like everything else, have been sucked into the narrative black hole in which reality is constructed by the storytellers. Some explictly partisan pollsters have taken to blatant trolling, but for the most part, even the more legitimate ones, dispense to the media what it wants. The actual polls may contain useful information, but the media cherry picks narrative material.

That means, on a practical level, media polls will show Trump losing, but not by so much that there’s no point in donating to Biden.

That’s what the narrative demands. And in politics, narrative has become reality.