Two years ago, in advance of the 2014 midterms and in conjunction with the release of FiveThirtyEight’s pollster ratings, I wrote an article headlined “Is The Polling Industry In Stasis Or In Crisis?” It pointed out a seeming contradiction: Although there were lots of reasons to be worried about the reliability of polling — in particular, the ever-declining response rates for telephone surveys — there wasn’t much evidence of a crisis in the results pollsters were obtaining. Instead, the 2008, 2010 and 2012 election cycles had all featured fairly accurate polling.
Has the reckoning come for the polls since then? The evidence is somewhat mixed. CONT.
Nate Silver, FiveThirtyEight