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takyon [soylentnews.org] writes:

A survey by FiveThirtyEight has found that pollsters believe their public reputations are declining [fivethirtyeight.com]:

No votes have been cast yet in the 2016 election, but there may already be one set of losers in the campaign: pollsters' reputations. And that's according to the pollsters themselves.

We asked people working at some of the nation's most prominent polling outfits whether pollsters' public image has improved or declined since the 2012 election. Of the 21 who answered, none said their public image had improved, and two-thirds said it had declined.

That was one of a few dozen questions we posed to 76 of the most prolific and prominent political pollsters. And we found that the people who are measuring and shaping public perception of the election — as well as Donald Trump's Twitter account [fivethirtyeight.com] — are feeling much more positive about the work they do than they think everyone else does. (You can find the questionnaire in this PDF [wordpress.com], all the responses on GitHub [github.com], and a list of the pollsters who responded in the footnotes.)

Using a classic tactic in politics [reuters.com], many pollsters blamed the media. There were three strands to their criticism. The first is that the media make too much of bad moments for the industry, when its polls miss election results badly. (We've covered those moments in last year's midterms [fivethirtyeight.com], as well as in Israel [fivethirtyeight.com], the U.K. [fivethirtyeight.com], Greece [fivethirtyeight.com] and Kentucky [fivethirtyeight.com].) The second is that media organizations that aggregate polls combine the bad with the good, tarnishing all for the sins of a few. (Four pollsters said aggregators are doing badly or very badly at filtering out polls from bad polling organizations, four said they were doing OK and four said they were doing well.) And the third is that uncritical media reports [cnn.com] of outlandish claims — such as Ben Carson's that Egypt's pyramids were used to store grain — leads many Americans to believe outlandish things, which pollsters are blamed for quantifying [motherjones.com].

"Polls are wrong is a more interesting story than when the polls do well," said Barbara Carvalho of Marist College [marist.edu]. "Lumping all methods together distorts the accuracy of polling."

But several respondents acknowledged that the media wouldn't have a story if pollsters were nailing election results. "Obviously, there were several high-profile calamities in the past three years," said Matthew Towery of Opinion Savvy [opinionsavvy.com]. "The best I can say is this: The field is evolving, and some pollsters are succumbing to natural selection."

Related: Political Polls Become Less Reliable As We Head into 2016 Presidential Election [soylentnews.org]

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