In Iowa, a victory for new advances in polling

Polls conducted online, and even by text, performed even better than traditional phone polling

The fiasco in Iowa continues. It is now over 24 hours after the start of the caucuses and we have yet to receive a final count of the results. No word yet from the Iowa Democratic Party about when we will get the remaining 38% of precinct-level results (you can look at the 62% we do have online at the Washington Post).

But the results shouldn’t change that much between now and the final count, so I want to take some time to assess the accuracy of the polls released in the run-up to Iowa. The results are pretty revealing about both the current state and future of political polling.

To measure accuracy of each firm, I matched the current returns — Sanders 25%; Buttigieg 21%; Warren 19%; Biden 15%; Klobuchar 13% — with the last month of polls aggregated by FiveThirtyEight and compared each of the top 5 candidates’ projected vote shares in the polls versus their actual vote shares. I then took an average of those errors for each pollster. (In data analysis we call this the “mean average er…