IT'S ALWAYS FUN THE WAY OUTLIERS CRUSH THE LABILE:

With so many polls being conducted of the Democratic race nationally, we should see a decent amount of polls that fall outside the margin of error of the average. Monmouth was one of those cases. There should be many more "outliers" to follow.

Moreover, the margin of error for primary polls is going to be wider than you might expect. Because of the expense to poll a subset of the population, most national primary polls are going to have a margin of error of 5 points or greater. A pollster could have something that looks like an outlier that is still within the margin of error.

When a pollster continuously produces results close to the average, it means something funky is going on. It could mean a pollster is not reporting outlier polls or somehow weighting their polls to match the average. That's bad science. Pollsters must and should have faith in their methods, like Monmouth did with this poll, and as other, such as Ann Selzer of Iowa fame, did in the past when releasing outlier results. Selzer did so when she was one of the few pollsters to correctly pick up on Barack Obama's strength ahead of the 2008 Iowa caucuses. She did so again, when she published a national poll showing Obama up double-digits on Republican Mitt Romney in 2012.

If pollsters suppress their surveys, they may actually be missing a real trend. There have been instances in the United States and abroad where pollsters admitted they withheld publishing results because they didn't match the average. Sometimes, those "outlier" polls actually turned out to be accurate, and the average was inaccurate.

So what is the media to do if a pollster puts out a poll that looks very different from the others? It's not to ignore the outlier. Doing that is not much better than pollsters not releasing outliers. In 2016, many outlets ignored supposed outliers showing Trump doing better in key battlegrounds than the average. On the other end, we shouldn't be hyping outliers, either -- like I fear many did with the Monmouth poll.

Rather, folks in the media, including myself, should give context to outlier polls.

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