i see we've reached the "could the polls be wrong and the sugar cookies be right" stage of punditry

Especially frustrating that the news side of the Times already published an -- entirely reasonable -- article on the possibility for error in PA polling with an almost identical headline.

I'm linking to that one instead:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/25/us/politics/pennsylvania-polls-biden-trump.html

cookies doughn't vote

The remarkable thing to me is that there are PLENTY of legitimate polling challenges/issues to talk about, and yet the naysayers just happily breeze right past those to be like "shy Trump voters! yard signs! cookies!"

By the same token, it's also perfectly possible to write a scene-setter about the ways partisan divides have visibly manifested in your hometown with trying to claim that it's either statistically representative or an argument against the polling.

All that aside, I have to say I'm also very hung up on the phrase "the polls are, once again, badly discombobulated"

....miscalibrated?

[pollsters, nervously looking for the COMBOBULATE button on their big keyboards]

if you give a pundit a cookie, chances are

he'll ask to write an op-ed about it

Again, this is not me saying "the polls are infallible, there's no chance they're off."

It's saying "this is a fairly useless way of assessing that possibility."

it is, you might say, half baked