I have had the thought for several years now that other websites should create their own polling averages using whatever rules that they feel make the most accurate averages.
And then we can compare the poll aggregators in the same way we compare the polling firms, by seeing whose averages perform better over time as the most accurate.
I want to see threads that say something like: “In the 2014 election, the XYZ average performed the best, while the RCP and ZYX averages missed the mark.”
Poll averages are useless. They mix good polls, garbage polls and outliers taken with different methodologies at different times and give you an ‘average’. It’s useless, but journalists like it because they are lazy and don’t want to analyse individual polls, so they just talk about the ‘average.