It's almost like people are treating polls like SPAM calls, and just tell them anything to keep them on the line as long as possible intentionally giving bogus answers.
Yes and no. Polls shouldn't be treated as gospel truth, but they shouldn't override our intuitions either. If there's a discrepancy, it means you have to dig deeper find the truth.
That's putting undue weight on quantified data, and letting it shut down attempts to actually find the truth. Polls can be biased or badly designed, metrics can be gamed or not actually measure what they claim to, or the poll could be founded some flawed assumptions. If you assume your intuition is wrong when you see a "strong" poll result, you'll never discover errors of the kind I just enumerated.
Your comment reminds me of this anecdote:
> "What I've noticed from users is that a windows user will blame the computer every time even if it is their own mistake, and an apple user will blame themselves every time even if the hardware failed.
> "Apple users know they have the Fancy Name Brand that Cool People(TM) use, so they have multiple levels of psychological aversion to blaming it for anything. They would be less cool by extension. And the brand image doesn't place any value on being capable of using "regular" technology, so they take no hit to their hipster image by blaming themselves.
> "It is really the same as any other name brand item. If a person buys name brand jeans and they tear, they're going to blame themselves for not taking better care of something expensive. Another person who buys a different brand gets mad that it didn't last longer because they only tried to use it in the "normal" way. If they blame it for anything, even its own real failings, then they lose the snob value."
The interpretation of said anecdote as it applies to your situation is left as an exercise to the reader.
Edit-it’s always worth considering the error bars on polls. News will gladly say A is preferred to B when their difference is well within error bars.
If I put two blue marbles and one red marble in a bag and ask you to blindly draw one, you probably won't be too shocked if you end up drawing the red one. Yet if it happens in an election everybody starts suddenly claiming all polling and statistics are useless.
The actual analysis of the polls showed Trump was well within striking distance of Hillary. People just didn't want to hear that.
I didn't think I was?