Originally Posted by Robbie

That's a great question. I don't have any answer to it.

During the campaign I kept seeing all these polls saying Trump was losing in a landslide. And I wondered "how?" when he is drawing huge crowds and seems to be saying the things that working people wanted to hear.

So I looked at a CNN Poll. Clicked on the details of the poll.
Found out that they had only polled 500 people! And the poll was "weighted" by 11 points of Democrat respondents.
So it gave Hillary a 7 point lead in the election.

I posted here on GFY about that, and wondered how on Earth that could be representative of a diverse country of over 320 Million people.

Turns out it isn't at all.

Checked some of the other polls and found the same thing. They all polled 500 to 1,500 people. And they didn't reveal WHERE the people lived.

You know...if you only polled people in California...Trump's "job approval rating" would be negative 10. lol

So I really don't know the answer.
I think polling is probably a lot like using Alexa to figure out traffic of other sites.
It might give you a general idea...but it's not always correct.

On Trump's numbers...my guess is if you polled blue collar workers in the Rust Belt (the states that won him the Presidency) say Pittsburgh, PA. You would see vastly different numbers than you would see in the inner city of Philadelphia, PA

But who knows what predetermined result a pollster is looking for and the geographical areas of the country they choose to get the result they kind of wanted in the first place.

My guess is that Trump's own pollsters could get results showing him at 100% if they wanted to.
And a polling company that has people in it that oppose Republicans could get results showing him doing poorly.

It seems like everything is politicized. Probably always has been. But now with the internet, we the people are seeing it for ourselves instead of having things filtered to us from the news media.