At a time of maximum popular mistrust of major political institutions, the polling industry hasn’t been immune from battering. Indeed, now, as ever, we can periodically read angry screeds suggesting we get rid of polling — or at least campaign-specific “horse race” polling — altogether. So with another election in the books (albeit a limited off-year election in which some of the results were in scattered locations with no public polling), it’s worth taking a look at the polls’ relative accuracy.

For purposes of comparisons across elections, I’m going to use the RealClearPolitics polling averages since we have them for every election and they use the simplest methodology (straight, unweighted averages). According to RCP, the averages were pretty far off for the three marquee contests

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