When the New York Times decides to try and discredit John McIntyre you know the imbeciles there have finally jumped the big shark.

How America’s Accurate Election Polls Were Covered Up

by Matt Taibi

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.”

but here is where we start lining them up for the guillotines,

Six months ago, when former Wikipedia chief Katherine Maher became CEO of NPR, video emerged of her talking about strategies at Wikipedia. She said the company eventually abandoned its “free and open” mantra when she realized “this radical openness… did not end up living into the intentionality of what openness can be.” Free and open “recapitulated” too many of the same “power structures,” resulting in too much emphasis on the “Western canon,” the “written tradition,” and “this white male, Westernized construct around who matters.” 

Oh, but wait, look what happened…

Every major aggregate, that is, but RCP. McIntyre’s site was removed on October 11th, after Wikipedia editors decided it had a “strong Republican bias” that made it “suspect,” even though it didn’t conduct any polls itself, merely listing surveys and averaging them. One editor snootily insisted, “Pollsters should have a pretty spotless reputation. I say leave them out.” After last week’s election, when RCP for the third presidential cycle in a row proved among the most accurate of the averages, Wikipedia quietly restored RCP.

and this one,

Because it appeared on the scene years before Mark Blumenthal’s Pollster.com (2006) and Silver’s original FiveThirtyEight (2008), the Real Clear average has a long tradition of use by reporters; MediaShift in 2008 called RCP the “ultimate political aggregator.” But the Times in 2020 wrote a piece skewering it for a “hard right turn,” saying it “seemed skewed by polls that have been ‘a bit kinder to Trump.’” This year’s Times piece was even more harsh. As evidence that its “incentive is not necessarily to get things right,” as one of the paper’s sources put it, the Times cited RCP’s “No Tossups” map, which “currently shows [Donald] Trump winning every swing state,” as if this were inherently absurd.

“It was put out on Halloween, the week before the election,” McIntyre says. “They said, ‘Yeah, they had this crazy map that shows Trump winning all swing states.”

all the Leftists are tampering to receive the results they want,

Start with a basic fact: major aggregators like 270toWin, Silver Bulletin, 538, and the Cook Political Report, while useful, are not the uncomplicated averages many customers imagine them to be. “A poll average is simple,” says McIntyre. “You add polls up, and you divide by the number.”

But the “reputable” or “nonpartisan” averages are different. “Those are really models, but they don’t call them that,” McIntyre says. “The New York Times had an average and the Washington Post had one, but they’re not really averages. They’re more like, ‘This is where we want to say the race is.’”

Most “averages” or “aggregates” have pages that explain how they weight results, though the exact recipe is usually a mystery. The Times in September explained in a general way how it weights pollsters. To an unspecified degree it favors track records of “unbiased and accurate results” (note the term “accurate” isn’t by itself). It also upgrades for “professionalism,” which to the Times among other things means an average that “contributes microdata” to Cornell’s Roper Center or is a member of the American Association for Public Opinion Research.