The polling this year is insane. Same state, same time period, wildly different results from poll to poll.
Rasmussen has Romney up 2 in Wisconsin; Marquette has Obama up 8. The Boston Globe (UNH Polling) has Scott Brown up 2; Suffolk has Elizabeth Warren up 7. And so on, and so on.
2012 will be to polling industry credibility what 2008 was to mainstream media credibility.
It’s not an issue of whether a particular poll is credible, but that the industry has lost legitimacy, much as trust in the mainstream media is at an all time low. The Jake Tappers of the world were tainted by the Andrea Mitchells of the world — you will see the same effect on the polling industry.
Or to put it diffently, the public is “averaging” the pollsters just as the pundits are averaging the polls, and on average the credibility of the industry is tanking.
The polling industry — but not necessarily every pollster — may always have been corrupted by partisan messaging. But this is the year in which the public woke up to it.
Here’s today’s case study:
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