This piece was originally published on November 24, 2015, when Bihar’s exit polls got a Mahagathbandhan landslide spectacularly wrong. Sadly, its relevance has aged better than the polling industry.
“NDA leads with 275,” said the cover of Outlook magazine in April 2004. The National Democratic Alliance, or NDA, lost that election, and the magazine declared in its subsequent issue that it would never use an opinion poll to forecast seats ever again. It has stuck to the decision.
