The fourth reason to like the election results

The media obsession over polls was exposed as a sideshow. 

In the end, the 2012 race showed that a composite or average of all surveys – rather than pouncing on any one poll – is the only responsible method of reporting on these campaign snapshots.

Certainly, New York Times blogger Nate Silver’s perfect prediction -- getting all 50 states right by using probability and statistics -- should cause all political reporters to reassess their methods.

In addition, partly due to the surprisingly superior ground game of the Obama campaign, the temptation by the press may be to conclude that Democratic pollsters are most accurate.

Fordham University graded all the major polling organizations and found that Public Policy Polling, which had been derided as a shill for the Democratic Party, was the most accurate.

At the same time, the Rasmussen polling firm that right-wing talk-radio listeners love, along with the viewers of Fox News, was an outlier, with Fordham concluding that its unreliability put Rasmussen at 24th on the list of 28 organizations.

Another troubling sign – Gallup poll, generally recognized as the wise old veteran of the polling world, ranked near the bottom. Worse yet, the Associated Press/GfK poll, which is routinely viewed as objective and reliable by the media, particularly by newspapers, ranked dead last at 28^th.

Perhaps the end result of all this will be improved methods of polling – and reporting on those surveys – in 2014 and beyond.