Unskewed and undistinguished: The 5 most gloriously awful polls of 2012

Michigan, site of one awful stadium rally, and some truly abysmal polling.

As we continue to decompress from what wound up being a highly enjoyable Election Night in America, the balance of 2012 will likely be dedicated to postmortems of a truly interesting electoral cycle.

Down the line, when the official numbers have been tallied from state-to-state, we will look at how the pollsters, as a collective, performed. Indeed, the only criticism I would make of many of the (quite good) polling analyses I have seen post-election is that the data is (even more than 10 days after the fact) incomplete.

For example, if you examined California polling on Election Night, you were looking at a 57-41 race. As of last Thursday evening, it was 59-38, with the very real prospect it will be 60-38 when all is said and done. That's a six-point shift since Nov. 6, which is not insignificant.

So, patience on the "big picture" polling analysis. Those polls (all 2,900 of them, for the two-year cycle) aren't going anywhere.

What we can do, for now, is place a spotlight on the truly craptacular. It took a lot of deliberation, and the honorable mentions list is as long as it is marvelously undistinguished. At last, though, what follows is one man's opinion of the five worst polls conducted in the final hours of the 2012 campaign marathon.

(Continue reading beneath the fold.)