> but you'd think that this would be an obvious one for them to break since it is ostensibly their specialty.

Silver's already touched on this poll and its unusual methodology:

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/election-update-leave-th...

He didn't get scooped; explaining the technical details isn't his ostensible specialty, adjusting for them is.

Good point. Although I think Cohn's speciality is more valuable to me here. I came away from the Silver piece when I first read it with the problem merely being a fixed population of voters; the Cohn piece was much more illuminating since it showed the specifics of how that pre-condition has been affecting all kinds of aggregation methods. So Silver was the early warning, but Cohn had the nitty-gritty.

I'm just used to Silver providing that--they seem spread pretty thin. As you point out, you have to specialize in something, though...

And so what if he were to be scooped? No ones all knowing.

Cohn is the Times's data journalist geek. He's, frankly, just as good at this stuff as Silver is. They seem to like each other, even.

It's a good article. And yeah, 538 got scooped on this one. But it's not because they weren't paying attention, they just had other stories to write.