Mmm...crow

Ed Kilgore suggests that in light of the rather stark disparities between different polls, someone is going to turn out to be wrong, and "there's gonna be a whole lotta crow on the menu of some pollsters" after the election. I doubt it. Virtually no pollsters called the 2000 election correctly and many called it very wrongly. Gallup was furthest off the mark among major groups and that had, as far as I can tell, no impact whatsoever on either their 2004 methodology or their standing as the leading name in American polling. The trouble is that, for media polls, like Gallup, NYT/CBS, ABC/WaPo, etc., the incentives are all wrong. The polls are conducted in order to sell newspapers or attract viewers to television programs. As a result methods, like the Gallup LV model, that seem to exaggerate the effect of opinion swings, are actually preferable to accurate methods since they build the drama. In general, no one has any real incentive to get things right and everyone does have various incentives polling in other directions (if nothing else, there's always incentive to minimize costs). Hence, in the abstract one can and should characterize the market in media polling as badly out-of-whack. The historical evidence, moreover, reflects quite poorly on pollsters. Just about everyone correctly predicted that Bill Clinton would win in 1996, but pretty heavily overestimated his margin of victory. In 2000 almost all polls called the popular vote for Bush.