The "how did the polls do this year?" is a reliable staple of political journalism, but few polling analysts enjoy quite so much authority as Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight blog, now a regular fixture at the New York Times web site.
Silver, you might recall, is the uncannily perceptive "spreadsheet psychic" who began his career analyzing baseball statistics for sports fanatics and then turned his attention to political polls in the 2008 presidential election year. His models--based on crunching and merging all of the polls about a particular race--have stunned the experts with their accuracy.
So, natch, Connecticut's own Quinnipiac University Poll was quick to churn out jubilant a press release Friday after Silver, in a post on the Times website Thursday night, said that Q.U.'s polls were the most consistently accurate of the polls in the critical three weeks before the Tuesday election.