One thing we've learned from last night is that polls don't matter. Looking through the prior IA polling, it's clear that no one got it right. Really, not even close.

Are polls anything more than simply manufactured fake news items, often paid for by the news media themselves, to build a cheap, easy story out of a race?

If we're interested in keeping out politics meaningful, never mind about the terrible things bloggers say, or how dishonest Bill O'Reilly is, or whether or not partisanship is a problem, or the attack ads that politicians run. These all seem pretty minor, compared with the way opinion polling drives and distorts these races.

Opinion polling has many potential problems, including sampling errors, nonresponse and response biases, and a lack of controls around the wording of questions. No one these, though, are mentioned when journalists cite polls, and the results are therefore taken at face value, instead of with the necessary caveats. Polls are, as we see in Iowa, often wrong, but it doesn't serve the news media to admit the mechanism that drives the campaign narrative is built on a faulty foundation.

It's no mere coincidence that you never see a news story looking back at the veracity of prior polling results.