John McIntyre couldn’t believe it. The publisher of the Real Clear Polling National Average, America’s first presidential poll aggregator, woke on October 31st to see his product denounced in the New York Times. Launched in 2002 and long a mainstay of campaign writers and news consumers alike, the RCP average, he learned, was part of a “torrent” of partisan rubbish being “weaponized” to “deflate Democrats’ enthusiasm” and “undermine faith in the entire system.” “They actually wrote that our problem was we didn’t weight results,” says an incredulous McIntyre. “That we didn’t put a thumb on the scale.” The Times ended...