… [Gallup’s Frank] Newport warned in a post-election commentary that because of the popularity of aggregators like [Nate] Silver, “We could see significantly fewer polls conducted in the 2016 election—at the state and national level—than in this election.” …
Instead of being frightened by Newport’s nightmare vision of a 2016 presidential campaign with reliable public polling cut back to 1970s levels, it seemed at first blush to be rather beguiling. … I will confess a nostalgic bias against the bloodless 21st century traditions of inaccessible candidates, spin-cycle campaign aides and statistical analysis trumping on-the-ground reporting.
Yet the more that I thought about it, the less that I wanted to go back to an era when the release of a Field Poll in California or a Columbus Dispatch Poll in Ohio was the major political event of the week. [cont.]
Walter Shapiro, Columbia Journalism Review