Fewer Polls Mean We Know Less

Interesting point, that the Internet's assault on newspapers means there are far fewer polls than there used to be, even as recently as 2012, and that means we know less:

If anything’s a little odd right now, it’s simply a question of “where are all the polls?” It’s not your imagination that there are fewer polls this year compared with the 2008 or 2012 cycles … or at least the traditional individual-state polls using call centers. (There certainly has been an increase in online non-probability samples, like the national tracking polls from NBC/Survey Monkey and Ipsos/Reuters.) That’s largely a factor of newspapers, who traditionally have been the funding source for much of the state-level polling, just not having the financial resources to commission as many polls as they used to. And that’s why you’re seeing less of certain once-prolific pollsters like SurveyUSA and Mason-Dixon this year; they don’t do freebie polls to promote their internal polling operations (like PPP) or to promote their university brand (like Quinnipiac), and their clientele is mostly papers and TV stations.