The article they link to here doesn't shift blame to the pollsters at all. While they note that the polls were wrong, they take full responsibility for their bad predictions:
"It’s our job as forecasters to report predictions with accurate characterizations of uncertainty, and we failed to achieve that in this election. We are not trying to make excuses here; we are trying to understand what went wrong."
It's a little bit annoying seeing some people who are satirizing the media class unapologetically misrepresenting others in the same breath.
> Even when all of Silver’s models for a given race turn up wrong, it never seems to be FiveThirtyEight’s fault.
That is not at all a fair summary of 538's position. They always take responsibility when they come up short.
> When the site badly whiffed on last year’s British election, it was the pollsters who erred. (link to: http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/what-we-got-wrong-in-our-...)
The article they link to here doesn't shift blame to the pollsters at all. While they note that the polls were wrong, they take full responsibility for their bad predictions:
"It’s our job as forecasters to report predictions with accurate characterizations of uncertainty, and we failed to achieve that in this election. We are not trying to make excuses here; we are trying to understand what went wrong."
It's a little bit annoying seeing some people who are satirizing the media class unapologetically misrepresenting others in the same breath.