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Read up on how political polling works. It’s very hard to get a representative sample or even to know what a representative sample looks like.

You're saying that, because a failure mode is taught in school, it must be a solved problem in the real world?

Yes, I suspect most pollsters are Democrats, and are not aware of how they come across to Republicans.

So they think they have a representative sample, but they really don't.

It can be explained simply by pollsters mainly living in large cities, and not really understanding rural Americans.

Why did this just start happening relatively recently?

Because polling response rates fell off a cliff over the past decade or two, leaving a sample population much different than was historically available. (https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2012/05/15/assessing-th...)

Is that because of cell phones or some other reason?