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Oddly, over the years, I was called twice for opinion polls but disqualified both times because of my high level of GOP political involvement. The polls are real in the sense that they are based on actual responses from real people. Political parties and candidates who pay for polls often audit and confirm that the calls are being made. The problems that subvert the reliability of polls are the high non-response rate and the inherent weaknesses in the models used to project who will actually vote.

The 2016 election is a good example. Remarkably, Trump stirred longtime marginal voters to turn out and vote for him. This killed polling models that counted on continued low turnout from the demographic of Trump supporters. As the pollsters lament, who could have predicted that?

After the election, some pollsters admitted to seeing signs of the Trump win but discounting because they did not believe that his supporters would turn out. And Trump of course had built his entire campaign on the implausible goal of getting White, blue collar conservatives to turn out and flip a key swath of blue states red. In doing so, Trump upended the long-settled expectations of American politics -- and thereby forced some embarrassed pollsters and political strategists into retirement.