Breaking News: unemployment numbers (pollsters)

FiveThirtyEight, which smugly boasted that it had given Trump a better chance (roughly 30 percent) than most analysts did in 2016, gave him just a 10 percent chance in 2020. The Economist was even more bullish on Biden. Then came the vote. In every swing state but Arizona, Trump outperformed the FiveThirtyEight polling average. This is not to pick on FiveThirtyEight, which went to unusual lengths to ensure that its averages were accurate, but simply to indicate how far off the polls as a whole were.

The coming days and weeks will see careful analysis and less careful recrimination, but no one seems to know yet exactly what went wrong. But the answer almost doesn’t matter, unless you’re a professional pollster, because after two huge presidential flops, pollsters have lost the confidence of the press and public.

Expect two lines of defense. First, many pollsters insist that their polls are snapshots, not predictors (and bridle at people such as Silver, Nate Cohn of the Times, and G. Elliott Morris of The Economist using them to create forecasts). If their snapshots are so far off, though, where were they aiming the lens? Why bother? Second, the analysts will protest that they’re only as good as the polls, but who cares? Whatever the instructions on the bottle, the public uses opinion polls to try to understand what happens. If the polls and their analysts don’t offer the service that customers are seeking, they’re doomed.