Boy, do Zogby and Rasmussen look like they really suck or what? Given the total number of polls they've done (17 and 31 respectively) you'd think this would mitigate their numbers. Mo - Rons.

For a critical evaluation of this pollster scorecard, see this post on pollster.com.

Fine - but if we are going to pretend to do an actual statistical analysis, could we also get some measures of error around the mean?

I suspect it would also be very interesting to see this on a candidate-by-candidate and party-by-party basis.

Average is not a good statistic here, it should be median. The median will reduce the impact of outliers (NH in particular) and provide a better indication of accuracy.

Race and gender affect how people vote, but the voters are either not conscious of it when speaking to pollsters or lying.

Jackson thought he had a good chance of winning in Wisconsin, thus showing he could win a primary in an industrial state with a big slice of white working class voters. Jackson spent much time in the state, particularly on the picket lines outside the American Motors plant, scheduled to shut down. Jackson compared the struggle in Kenosha to the struggle in Selma in the 1960s. In the polling before the Wisconsin primary Jackson had a substantial lead. His hopes were dashed. In the last hours, in the privacy of the voting booth, many of these white working class voters jumped to Dukakis.

Random thoughts:

1) Dilbert's right that SUSA's report card should use medians, not means.

2) I agree that more apples-to-apples comparisons would be good. Pairwise comparisons between pollsters on the states they both surveyed, for instance, would be useful.

3) SUSA's having skipped most of the early primaries may have helped them to some extent, but for many of the Super Tuesday primaries, the polling was all over the map - literally, but more important, figuratively. And when that happened, SUSA was almost always the pollster that nailed it, from Massachusetts to California.

4) Research 2000 was quite good too. But if you were trying to track pollsters' records via RealClearPolitics, which I was, it was impossible to figure that out: RCP would list Research 2000's polls by the name of the sponsoring paper. Only after I saw SUSA's pre-Super Tuesday report card and noticed which states I didn't have a Research 2000 result from, was I able to locate them.

Some other day, when I've got time, I'll see which states both SUSA and R2K surveyed, and see who did better.

5) Zogby and Rasmussen were both doing passably well this year. Until Super Tuesday, that is.

6) ARG sucks. But we already knew that.

7) Mason-Dixon sucks. I started noticing that before Super Tuesday, and that surprised me: I'd thought they'd had a pretty good reputation, and before this year, I'd never had a reason to notice whether they lived up to it. So have they always had a poor rep, or was this just a bad season for them?

Were there just not enough polls from Selzer & Co. to include them? They did great in Iowa and I recall they did well in a couple of other contests where they polled. Definitely one of the better looking outfits to come out of this season, along with Survey USA (which has always, despite the grief people give them about robocalling, been great; I remember how consistently they were nailing things even in 2002 and before) and Research 2000. American Research Group has always been awful, and now they can't even consistently poll their own state.

How come Pew isn't listed? I'll bet they have the best track record...

Using root-mean-square errors (which punishes the large errors more severely, and which is a common measure of measurement error), it looks like Quinnipiac does the best.

How does ARG poll, seriously some of their guesses I could do better on by throwing darts, Zogby was actually right on in a lot of races but he missed Cali and NH by such a large degree that it throws off his results (23 and 15 respectively) SUSA only had one really bad miss (Mizzou by 11).

Variance please? Consistency matters.