What they said was that they could not predict the outcome, and were giving basically 50/50 odds of either candidate winning, which is essentially just another way of saying "I have no idea".
Just because their odds were 50/50 though, does not mean the outcome would be close. The pollsters were all warning that the swing states would likely be strongly correlated, so if a candidate performed strongly in one swing state, they'd probably perform strongly in all of them.
It used to be "Libertarian" which for a subset was "I'm a Republican who likes to smoke weed".
The polls were better but still consistently underestimated Trumps support by a lot. Basically, the weighting they do for the polls now basically just guarantees that they converge on the results of the last election.
Although I don’t actually think it was equally likely like that, we are missing something to make all this analysis actually informative rather than a “all I know is that I don’t know anything”. We had mountains of evidence indicating that it was totally unclear, so frustrating. Perhaps that’s how the probabilities actually were, but somehow guts pointed to Trump much more regardless of personal bias, and in hindsight it feels rather obvious. Confirmation bias I guess, I still want trust all the expert analysis.
Source?