It seems to me that pretty much every pollster is "terrible" according to this forum.
In reality, YouGov is B-rated pollster with a mean-reverted bias of only D+0.3 over 375 polls analyzed. That is not bad at all.
I could make up numbers close to the polling averages of other firms and be a B-rated pollster.
I think the main reason why YouGov, and a lot of other pollsters are criticized as being "terrible" (
"not the best" would probably be a better and fairer way to put it) is not so much just a matter of pollster rating, but their methodology. YouGov is an online pollster, and despite online polling having been around for several cycles at this point, it remains less proven and less trusted/accurate methodologically than live phone polling. The same can be said for IVR/Robopollsters. Of course, with each passing year, live phone polling becomes a bit more suspect as well as response rates constantly go down, though so far live phone polls' accuracy seem to usually have not been hurt too much by this.
Anyway, these are not good polls for Dems. The only optimistic take for Dems on them is that
maybe they are wrong, and the chances that they are wrong are a bit higher for YouGov than the chances that some other pollster would be wrong.
But hoping that
maybe the polls are wrong is never where you want to be.
The better thing to hope (for Dems) is that maybe when we get out of this damn polling desert, we'll get some polls from other pollsters like CNN and FOX that do live phone polls, and hopefully those will be better.
