[dragonwriter]

> The pollsters take too much credit when they're right and deflect too much blame when they're wrong.

You are confusing pollsters with "forecasters using data from pollsters". These are not the same people.

Many of the forecasters in 2016 were very bad because of naive assumptions about how polls related to election results, particularly many making the assumption that polling errors were independent between states (also, lots did a really poor job of poll aggregation before those naive models.) The reason is Nate Silver and 538 had made a name for themselves in the preceding couple of cycles, and lots of people who didn't understand the process but saw the outcome decided they could do the same thing, because, hey, how hard could it be to compile a bunch of polls and model outcomes based on them?