538: Calm Down About Those Virginia Polls, Folks

[lagomorph777]

9. Thanks for your presumption about what I care about.

Though you happen to be entirely incorrect about that too.

I'd love nothing more than to see polls we can trust. Some pollsters are clearly dishonest (e.g. Rasmussen), some are lazy, but I believe most are genuinely struggling to figure out how to deal with a collapsing political culture, combined with revolutions in technology and lifestyle. Those things add up to extreme difficulty in taking random samples, in getting people to answer honestly when they hold shamefully immoral views, and in getting people to believe poll results that never seem to match election results, nor do they match other poll results.

I'd love to be able to say: "See, the polls were definitive. That election was (or was not, in the most recent case) valid!" I'd love to see some published science on how to make polls better. I have a scientific mind, and scientific method matters a lot to me. Social science is so much squishier than the sciences I normally work with, so it is far more difficult for me to suggest a method.

Describe to me your perfect poll methodology, the one that will make pollsters slap their foreheads and say "Why did't we think of that?"