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Pollsters normally ask: "Who are you going to vote for?" That might be the wrong question. A few polls do it differently. They ask: "Who do you think will win?" In a recent poll of Georgia, voters preferred Donald Trump over Kamala Harris by 3 points, but predicted by 11 points that Harris would win. Several other polls have had the same result.
One might think: Who cares about what the average voter thinks about who will win? Interestingly enough, there is some academic research on this from 2012. Going back 60 years and using state polling data, the leaders in the polls won the state 69% of the time. In contrast, the candidate the voters predicted would win actually won 81% of the time. In other words, asking people "Who do you think will win your state?" is a better predictor than asking people how they will vote and seeing who got the most votes.
The reason is not clear, but it could be that although a voter wants candidate X to win, he or she hears all the neighbors raving about candidate Y. The question about what the voter wants is just one data point, but the question about who will win the state collects information from many voters. That might actually be a better way to do forecasting.
Not all pollsters ask the "Who do you think will win?" question, but it might be useful if they would start doing so. It might be better than the standard poll. (V)