People in a non-swing state figure "yolo" and vote for their emotional favorite, because they're dissatisfied with the status quo and have no other way to express it?
Well, it was close enough that it should worry the Dems and put NJ in play for Republics in the near future. NJ has not always voted consistently for democrats.
The question is not why there was a swing, any number of reasons can be attributed ex post facto.
The point is no poll caught any of the swings at all. To win with this margin Trump the polls can hardly be tied and be called accurate.
The result is not a close at all, and it is not about swing states and electoral college swings. Trump is winning the popular vote by a large margin something he has never be able to do so before.
That's easy to explain--cultural and media institutions have disparaged Republican voters for so long that Trump voters inherently distrust pollsters. They might or might not turn out in a given election, but they have nothing to gain by telling anybody.
it doesn't explain why in every single major poll national and swing states that it was a tie.
It is not like no trump supporter participated in the polls and he got 10% in them, they all showed 45-47% of their samples consistently supporting him. Those 45% apparently didn't think they were marginalized by media
enough no to respond and express their support, which is most of them, so I don't see this is the widely held sentiment
What you are basically saying is exact same percentage of people who favor trump over Harris is the same % percentage of people who don't care to respond to polls and cancel each other out, that is extremely unlikely.
Also know that bias modelled in any poll already, not just response rate bias for trump voters ,all kinds of selection biases(likely to respond) for different demographics get factored in typically with past data
