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.

FiveThirtyEight has banned any polls coming from former polling firm executive director Sean McElwee after an investigation brought to light that he’d bet on elections.

Nate Silver: “Let’s get this out of the way up front: There was a wide gap between the perception of how well polls and data-driven forecasts did in 2022 and the reality of how they did … and the reality is that they did pretty well.”

“While some polling firms badly missed the mark, in the aggregate the polls had one of their most accurate cycles in recent history. As a result, FiveThirtyEight’s forecasts had a pretty good year, too. Media proclamations of a ‘red wave’ occurred largely despite polls that showed a close race for the U.S. Senate and a close generic congressional ballot. It was the pundits who made the red wave narrative, not the data.”

Politico has a deep dive into the fallout at progressive pollster Data for Progress after the departure of Sean McElwee amid allegations of misconduct.

The Bulwark: “The nonpartisan polling was actually pretty good in 2022. Most of the phantom Republican strength in pre-election statewide polling was a function of junk firms with poor data quality and low transparency spamming the polling averages with bad polls.”

“In reality, an aggregation of nonpartisan polls predicted the correct winner in every Senate battleground and would have predicted the margin substantially more accurately than the partisan GOP pollsters which flooded the averages in almost every major race.”

Nate Cohn ran an experiment where he paid Wisconsin voters to complete a poll.

“The data is still preliminary, and it will probably take at least six months, if not longer, before we can reach any final conclusions. But there is one immediate difference between the two groups, and that is in the polls’ response rates: Nearly 30 percent of households have responded to the survey so far — a figure dwarfing the 1.6 percent completion rate in the parallel Times/Siena poll.”

“That said, an initial glance at the topline findings may be sobering for anyone who hoped that $25 and higher response rates would break through to reach the coveted ‘hidden’ Trump vote. While there were important differences between the high- and low-incentive surveys — including some that hold promise for improving Times/Siena surveys and others going forward — there was not necessarily obvious evidence of a breakthrough to a vastly different pool of respondents.”