… Naturally, we hope the pollster ratings can give you a better basis for understanding the polls as a news consumer. However, discussions about individual polling firms — there are now more than 300 of them in our database — can sometimes miss the point. I’m more interested in the big-picture questions. Are some pollsters consistently better than others, as measured by how accurately they predict election results? In other words, is pollster performance predictable? And if so, are a pollster’s past results the better predictor — or are its methodological standards more telling? CONT.
Nate Silver, FiveThirtyEight