In the before times, polling outfits wanted more than anything to Get It Right. That meant more business down the line from news outlets and candidates who wanted an accurate picture of how the election was progressing.
But now there are so many polling outfits, outfits that come and go in one election cycle, that it's practically impossible for the average voter to evaluate what any poll means. Is it accurate? What's the sample size? Margin of error? Demographic profile? And just by asking these questions, a voter has to be a fairly sophisticated consumer of news. But the polling outfits aren't volunteering a lot of information beyond the bottom-line horse race narrative. Certainly the media outlets are less concerned about a poll's veracity than whether it fits the narrative they're trying to write.
We heard several meta-stories this time around about conservative polling outfits flooding the zone with crap polls designed to discourage Democratic voters. But the direct reporting of those poll results often didn't include an analysis of the methodology used and whether the poll was likely to be accurate.
The crap polling outfits don't care about being wrong, they're not going to be around for the next election anyway. They'll be replaced by new crap polling outfits.
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