I know this point was made repeatedly last night including by me, but after sleeping on it, I wonder if people aren't still underrating the importance of the debate having been Trump's best remaining opportunity to climb back into the race and it seemingly having been squandered. Trump can win. It's mathematically possible that polls could be waayyy off or something could come from totally out of the blue. But there are also a lot of things working against him in the final 11 days. COVID cases are rising. He's way behind in $. And 50m have already voted....I think the takes were right directionally, but this is a weird case where a non-event (the debate probably won't change many minds) is a big deal and maybe people are underestimating it magnitude-wise. On top of that, the WSJ fiasco with the Hunter Biden story was probably the last chance for that story to be taken seriously by the mainstream/non-partisan media, for better or worse. There really is kind of a parallel universe of Trump-friendly polls that are on a completely different planet from the polling consensus. The polling world is not unlike the rest of the media in that regard.

5. Don’t pay much attention to individual polls; wait for polling averages to move.
This is perhaps the single piece of advice we give most often at FiveThirtyEight, but it’s especially important in the final couple weeks of a campaign. After a lull this weekend, there are likely to be a lot of polls the rest of the way out. On any given day, it will be possible to take the two or three best polls for Biden and tell a story of his holding or expanding his lead, or the two or three best polls for Trump and make a claim that the race is tightening.

Resist buying too much into those narratives. Instead, turn to polling averages like FiveThirtyEight’s that are smart at distinguishing (ahem) the signal from the noise. We do program our averages to be more aggressive in the closing days of the campaign — so if there’s a shift in the race, our average should start to detect it within a few days. But while there is such a thing as underreacting to news developments,1 the more common problem in the last days of a campaign is false positives, with partisans and the media trying to hype big swings in the polls when they actually show a fairly steady race.