Patrick Murray, whose final Monmouth poll showed Gov. Phil Murphy (D) with a double-digit lead in his re-election race, writes in the Newark Star Ledger:

“I blew it. The final Monmouth University Poll margin did not provide an accurate picture of the state of the governor’s race. So, if you are a Republican who believes the polls cost Ciattarelli an upset victory or a Democrat who feels we lulled your base into complacency, feel free to vent. I hear you.”

“I owe an apology to Jack Ciattarelli’s campaign — and to Phil Murphy’s campaign for that matter — because inaccurate public polling can have an impact on fundraising and voter mobilization efforts. But most of all I owe an apology to the voters of New Jersey for information that was at the very least misleading.”

Kyle Kondik and J. Miles Coleman: “While it’s hard to know specifically what’s going on — remember, we’re talking about pollsters trying to figure out a group that it appears disproportionately doesn’t respond to polls — it seems likely that, in 2020, there was an underpolled group that tended to vote not just for Trump, but for a straight Republican ticket.”

“Needless to say, this is an important group of voters moving forward, but it may be hard to account for them — both for Republicans dependent on their turnout, and Democrats fearful of it.”

Samuel Goldman: “The diminishing reliability of polls is bad news for campaign journalists and political consultants, but it’s good news for the rest of us.”

“Uncertainty about polls could liberate unconventional candidates to pursue ostensibly unpopular positions and novel strategies. It might also encourage turnout by keeping voters’ hopes for improbable victory alive. Facing the risk of massive error, even candidates who are heavily favored can’t take their core supporters for granted.”

Natalie Jackson: “It is increasingly clear that how a poll contacts people — formerly a key heuristic for assessing poll quality — no longer tells us what it used to about accuracy.”

“The 2020 primary pre-election polling task force report found that whether the survey was online or by telephone had no bearing on accuracy, and the new task force report presentation indicated the same finding. As a result of their own analysis showing the same thing, FiveThirtyEight has retired the landline and cell phone live-caller survey as the ‘gold standard.’”

“The field letting go of its attachment to one source as more accurate than others will allow other methodologies to become more prominent and encourage further experimentation with new methodologies.”

Nate Silver: “The changes we made to our pollster ratings earlier this year — namely, no longer privileging live-caller telephone polls — will have some knock-on effects on our models, since our models use our pollster ratings to determine how much weight to assign to polls from different firms.”

“And as I mentioned, while our models already assume that the errors between different races are correlated, those correlations may be even higher in an era of greater partisanship, so we’ll want to look at that, too.”

FiveThirtyEight’s “deluxe” model fared particularly poorly in toss-up congressional races in 2020, only correctly forecasting 37% of them.

Washington Post: “When GOP pollster Frank Luntz in mid-March assembled a group of Trump voters to find out why they were hesitant to take a coronavirus vaccine, he invited several Republican politicians to join him in the discussion. One was House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy — at the time also Luntz’s guest in Luntz’s 7,000-square-foot penthouse apartment in the Clara Barton building in Penn Quarter.”

“Luntz did not mention during the Zoom call that McCarthy was in a separate room in the same apartment.”

Salon: “On Oct. 15, 2018, HBO aired a VICE News focus group orchestrated by Luntz, which had been filmed three days earlier in Dallas.”

“Participants were chosen by Luntz, who also decided what questions would be asked. But what neither HBO nor VICE News told their audience — possibly because they didn’t know — was that Luntz was being paid by the Cruz campaign.”

Wall Street Journal: “Public opinion surveys ahead of the 2020 presidential election were the most inaccurate in 40 years, according to an expert panel convened by the main trade group for pollsters, which said its work hadn’t yet pointed to a way to correct the error.”

“In the aggregate, the panel said, polls overstated support for Democratic nominee Joe Biden by 3.9 percentage points in the national popular vote in the final two weeks of the campaign.”

“It was the most substantial error in polling since 1980, when surveys found it hard to measure the size of Ronald Reagan’s impending landslide and overstated support for President Jimmy Carter by 6 percentage points.”

New York Times: “Data for Progress researchers have gotten used to being told to take a hike — and worse — by Trump supporters they try to poll, and the report detailed their difficulties in reaching that group. But perhaps most significantly, it also found that they were having trouble reaching a representative sample of Democrats, as well as Republicans — partly because liberals with strong political views were almost too willing to be polled.”

Geoffrey Skelley: “In a February poll taken on behalf of Democracy for All 2021 Action, which backs efforts to admit D.C. as a state, Data for Progress found that 54 percent of likely voters backed statehood while just 35 percent opposed it. However, DFP told respondents that statehood would give congressional voting representation to more than 714,000 Washingtonians, ‘just like Americans in every other state,’ so this question framing likely primed respondents to be more favorable toward statehood.”

“Bottom line: How you ask a poll question matters.”

FiveThirtyEight released their updated pollster ratings, with four groups receiving an A+:

• Selzer & Co.
• ABC News/Washington Post
• Siena/New York Times
• IBD/TIPP

Nate Silver: The death of polling is greatly exaggerated.