The next problem is how you define polling "accuracy."
Is accuracy determined by the ability to predict the results for one election? Or is it determined by how many elections the pollster called correctly over time?
Is it determined by whether the pollster called it right six months before the election? Six weeks? Or six days?
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To answer dobro's query. ("Why do you think there's such a concentration of inaccuracy from the pollsters that are considered to be right-leaning?")
–If we accept dobro's premise that there are left-leaning and right-leaning pollsters, then the question itself points to the answer. If we allow that there can be a pollster who is "right-leaning" or "left-leaning" or this-leaning or that-leaning, it supports my earlier point that voter polls are inherently unscientific and that they are subject not just to the vagaries of voter behavior but to bias on the part of the pollsters themselves, who may phrase polling questions or report the responses according to those biases.
But let me put it plainly . . . the reason right-leaning pollsters were less accurate this time was because they wanted their guy to win, and the numbers they reported reflected that want. But in fact their guy lost, so in retrospect, they look kind of foolish.
You could test my assumptions here (if you had the gumption) by going back and reviewing the pollsters' predictions according to their perceived degree of bias. So then, if what I'm saying is true, the pollsters who are most strongly right-leaning would have been the most wrong in terms of their predicted support for Romney.
But wait! Don't assume that means that the rightmost-leaning pollsters are the only ones who "got it really wrong" because if you also went back and identified the left-leaning pollsters, I suspect you'd that they had also gotten it very wrong in terms of their predicted level of support for Obama. And accordingly, those who were most left-leaning were the ones who got it most wrong.
To test this thesis further, you could go back to the some time before when the Republicans won, where the same pattern should be apparent. Take GW Bush's second win in 2004, for example. I suspicion that if you checked you'd find that, as a whole, the most left-leaning pollsters were the furthest off on that one, because they were the ones who most wanted their guy Kerry to win, in spite of the fact that he didn't.
How's that? Clear as mud?
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