It promises to be a campaign the likes of which we haven't seen for about two years

[Labster]

SV and SB are such liberal hug boxes that if I even admit to being a conservative, i would spend months getting hate replies

Have you seen this happen, or are you basing this on behavior that's happened to you elsewhere?  I'm legitimately curious, because I think that this is the worst part of liberalism.  I reject all philosophies that try to create an out group.

During the 2016 campaign most if not all polls showed Hillary beating Trump hands down.

Actually, this is false.  The majority of polls didn't ask the question of whether Hillary or The Donald would win the election, they asked which candidate would get a majority vote on election day.  Some polls asked which candidate would win a particular state.  Only one or two pollsters did a 50 state poll, which could be used to predict who would win the election via the Electoral College -- and most of this was online, lower-quality data.

The distinction is important.  I read Nate Silver a lot, so let's link to the election night forecast for 2016 on FiveThirtyEight.  It showed that Trump had a 28% chance of winning on election night.  Like, that looks like a runaway, but it's not.  It means that if you took two coin flips and they both came up tails, that would be worse odds than what Trump got.  Trump got 46.1% to Hillary's 48.2% -- the equivalent in the 538 meta-analysis is 48.5% to 44.9%.  So, they were off by 2% -- which is the historical average -- it just mattered a lot in this election.  I remember him complaining about how little polling had been done in Wisconsin, which was a large source of uncertainty at election time.

538 also relies on their Pollster Ratings project, which analyses polls for house effects and accuracy, based on their past performance.  Note that house biases can influence the result in the opposite direction you might expect; there are liberal pollsters that consistently put out polls that overstate the Republican's chances.

Like, simple observance of polls isn't enough.  It's a science.  Or a math, at least.  Believing a single poll is folly, but believing a group from different sources is smart.  Polls are misused selectively by all sides to show support for an issue, but this is almost always cherry-picking.  It's like a lot of political speech -- not a lie, but representing the truth either.