ARG...... no longer argh ?

[Mr. Morden]

ARG was really really really terrible before Super Tuesday.  But then after Super Tuesday, they either magically became decent pollsters, or they just started copying other pollsters' numbers.  Also, ARG has always produced much crazier numbers in polls taken several weeks/months before the election, rather than just before the election, and all of these pollster ratings only assess the final polls from each pollster, rather than the earlier ones.

This is a problem that was pointed out on pollster.com recently.  We would ideally like to be able to accurately track the election, not just produce a good poll the day or two before.  Yet we have no way of testing the accuracy of polls taken weeks in advance of the election, because there's no objective number to compare them against.  A lot of the polls show very divergent results early on, but then converge towards the final numbers on election day.