"The World May Have A Polling Problem," Silver asserted. "In fact, it�s become harder to find an election in which the polls did all that well."... "[T]here are lots of reasons to worry about the state of the polling industry," Silver concluded, citing a range of factors. "There may be more difficult times ahead for the polling industry."Well, that's awfully bland... from Dylan Byers at Politico, who was only processing the raw material Silver gave him. Can I blame Silver? For anything, ever? He cited "a range of factors." Were they too dull and meaningless to be worth more than the repetition of the conclusion that polls just aren't that good?
ADDED: The NYT surveys some analysis of what went wrong with the polls:
�It could be simply that people lied to the pollsters, that they were shy or that they genuinely had a change of heart on polling day,� [said Alberto Nardelli, writing in The Guardian], �Or there could be more complicated underlying challenges within the polling industry, due, for example, to the fact that a diminishing number of people use landlines or that Internet polls are ultimately based on a self-selected sample.�...
�What seems to have gone wrong is that people have said one thing and they did something else in the ballot box,� [said Peter Kellner, the president of YouGov, a leading survey firm]. �We are not as far out as we were in 1992, not that that is a great commendation.�...
Rem Korteweg, a senior research fellow at the Center for European Reform in London, said... �People say who they are voting for with their heart and then vote with their wallets,�...To tweak Korteweg's point: People say what they think will make other people like them, but they do what they think is in their interest. Re-tweak: People do what is in their interest, which is to say what they believe is socially desirable, and that won't square up with what they do when no one's looking. If this is the problem, it's a problem that will get worse as it becomes more widely believed that liberalism makes you look good. Korteweg is contributing to the contagion of this belief by saying that in their hearts people are liberal, nudging us all to say I'm a liberal, so I'll seem to be a person with a heart.
(Detail about that video here.)
