If these #s are correct, Selzer is going to lose that gold standard title hard. And it's even weirder b/c these are the types of margins they were showing for their other polls before this ridiculous new one.
No, they're not.
Even a hypothetically perfect pollster would have an outlier occasionally. This is inherent in the nature of sampling, and it is inescapable. Some pollsters will hold back their outliers because they don't want to look like they don't know what they're doing. A good pollster will go ahead and release it, because their reputation is strong enough that they don't need to play those games. The Selzer poll and the ABC/WaPo poll with Biden+17 in Wisconsin are both in that situation. Both pollsters are very good, and neither pollster's reputation will (or at least should) suffer if those polls turn out to be the outliers they look like now.
I agree that good pollsters should always release outliers. Having said that, I would be perfectly fine with it losing the gold standard title if they're off because I don't believe in the concept of gold standard polling at all.
"Gold standard" implies accuracy that just isn't really possible in polling by its nature. There's good and bad pollsters (and Selzer having one bad year if they do miss substantially wouldn't make me take away their "good pollster" reputation) , but no real "gold standard".
