What Pollsters Want You to Know About What Went Wrong

… Public opinion research is a thankless job in the best of times. There are no congratulations for charting the nation’s changing preferences toward a wide range of issues, or for basically predicting the future, as pollsters did, for the most part, prior to the 2018 midterms. But there’s no shortage of scorn if the polls turn out to be less accurate than usual and the media needs a scapegoat for the potential downfall of democracy, as was the case this year. …

Recontextualizing election polling might wind up being more difficult than correcting election polling methodology. The latter can be done scientifically. But the media tempering its reliance on polls and how they’re framed could be a matter of sacrificing both revenue and their own authority to give definition to horse-race elections that are constantly changing and largely mysterious. CONTINUED

Ryan Bort, Rolling Stone

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