“The poll aggregation and evaluation site 538, part of ABC News, dropped the right-wing polling firm Rasmussen Reports from inclusion in its polling averages and forecasts,” the Washington Post reports.

FiveThirtyEight has updated its pollster scorecard.

“The New York Times/Siena College, for example, is the most accurate pollster in America. Due to its accuracy and transparency, it and ABC News/Washington Post are also the only two pollsters with a three-star rating.”

“Every losing campaign complains about the polling. When it’s one poll or one outlet’s series of polls, maybe you can make the case they are garbage. In fact, most public polls are trash. But when every poll shows the same trends, the griping comes across as desperate and pure spin to give their supporters hope not to throw in the towel before voting even starts.” 

— GOP strategist Dave Carney, quoted by the Washington Examiner.

Nathan Gonzales: “Despite seven years of hand-wringing about polling, it was a pretty good night for surveys. The final FiveThirtyEight average before the Iowa caucus had Trump at 52.7 percent followed by former Gov. Nikki Haley (18.7 percent), Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (15.8 percent), and Vivek Ramaswamy (6.4 percent).”

“The final results look like Trump (51 percent), DeSantis (21 percent), Haley (19 percent), and Ramaswamy (8 percent).”

“People seeking perfection from polling will quibble with the DeSantis polling versus his final result, but overall, Iowa should be considered a victory for the polling industry, especially in the context of a low-turnout caucus in extreme weather.”

The Economist: “As America enters a nervous election year, one thing is certain: the opinion polls will be watched closely for clues about the outcome. But how much faith should be placed in them? In the past two presidential cycles they misfired, badly underestimating support for Donald Trump each time. Mr Trump looks likely to be the Republican nominee again. In head-to-head polls he leads Joe Biden by 2.3 points on average. That suggests a toss-up. Polls conducted so far in advance of the election have generally missed by a margin far greater than Mr Trump’s current lead.”

“And Mr Trump’s voters vex pollsters: they appear to be disproportionately less likely to take part in pre-election surveys yet turn out to vote for him. Pollsters have been grappling with ways to reflect this in their numbers, but no one knows how well their adjustments will work. In a close contest, even small errors can prove critical.”

Nate Cohn: “If you do this exercise for previous elections, issue polling failures look more like the norm than the exception. There just aren’t many elections when you can read a pre-election poll story, line it up with the post-election story, and say that the pre-election poll captured the most important dynamics of the election…”

“With such a poor track record, there’s a case that ‘issue’ polling faces a far graver crisis than ‘horse race’ polling. I can imagine many public pollsters recoiling at that assertion, but they can’t prove it wrong, either. The crisis facing issue polling is almost entirely non-falsifiable — just like the issue polling itself. Indeed, the fact that the problems with issue polling are so hard to quantify is probably why problems have been allowed to fester. Most pollsters probably assume they’re good at issue polling; after all, unlike with horse race polls, they’re almost never demonstrably wrong.”

Amy Walter: “When I first started covering politics some 25 years ago, the following data points were considered the gold standard to understanding the trajectory of an election cycle: a president’s job approval rating, the overall mood of the electorate (namely, is the country headed in the right direction or wrong direction) and opinions about the economy. Taken together, they told the story of a president or party in peril, or a president and party that were headed to reelection.”

“Over these past few years, however, these questions have become less determinative.”

Nate Silver, the old head of FiveThirtyEight, is fighting with the new head of the data analytics website, G. Elliot Morris.

Politico: “The polling industry whiffed every year Trump has been on the ballot. In 2016, Trump upset Hillary Clinton to win the presidency. And after spending four years trying to fix what went wrong, the polls were even worse in 2020. Trump ran far more competitively with now-President Joe Biden than the preelection surveys suggested.”

“Pollsters are breathing a sigh of relief after largely nailing last year’s midterm elections. But presidential years have been a different story in the Trump era.”

“And now, with Trump expanding his lead over his GOP primary rivals, pollsters are fretting about a bloc of the electorate that has made his support nearly impossible to measure accurately.”

FiveThirtyEight is out with updated pollster ratings after the 2022 midterms and finds Suffolk University and Siena College/New York Times Upshot were the most accurate pollsters, while several GOP-affiliated firms were the least accurate.