It isn’t always the polls getting it wrong. Sometimes it’s the journalists.

Here’s a newsflash: The polls in the election that delivered us Donald Trump weren’t the problem. The journalists and commentators who reported on them — they were the problem.

You won’t hear that from most of the media, of course. In fact, these days we hear journalists saying all the time that the polls got it wrong. Implicit in this claim is a rather pathetic plea: Don’t blame us — blame the pollsters.

If you look at the final polling forecast from Real Clear Politics, it showed Hillary Clinton with a 3.3 percentage point lead in the popular vote over Donald Trump. Guess what? She won the popular vote by almost 3 million votes; that’s just more than 2 per cent.

An error of just over a percentage point is an error, for sure. But it’s a perfectly unsurprising error. No reasonable observer would expect the national polls to be more reliably accurate than they were. In fact, as 538’s resident whiz kid Harry Enten pointed out four days before the election, Trump was “just a normal polling error behind Clinton.”

Sure, there were some forecasters who got it horribly wrong — notoriously Princeton’s Sam Wang, who put Trump’s chances of winning at less than 1 per cent. But that was the problem: These wildly exaggerated interpretations of the polls usually did not account for the high number of undecided voters, often ignored the inherent uncertainty of the polls themselves, and frequently dismissed the vagaries of the Electoral College. All of these reasons for caution were apparent to any skeptical journalist — if she or he wished to see them.

Nate Silver at 538 — who at one point in the campaign had Trump at close to even odds to win the election and ended up giving him just less than a one-in-three chance — was gleefully derided by Democrats and many journalists for his pessimism about Clinton’s prospects. Meanwhile, newspapers were running stories about Clinton picking out her cabinet.

But if there’s one thing we should expect more from journalists than from Princeton professors, it’s skepticism.

If you want a jaw-dropping example of journalistic credulity about polls closer to home, take a look at this week’s story about the Conservative leadership race in the Toronto Star. The story, based on a poll of Canadians by Forum Research, begins by boldly stating its conclusion: “Kevin O’Leary is the far-and-away front-runner for the Conservative leadership as the Opposition party gains slightly on the Liberals in overall voter preference, according to a new poll.”

(The poll) does not remotely sustain the claim in the lede that O’Leary ‘is the far-and-away front-runner for the Conservative leadership’. In fact, that completely unsupported claim probably qualifies as ‘fake news’. (The poll) does not remotely sustain the claim in the lede that O’Leary ‘is the far-and-away front-runner for the Conservative leadership’. In fact, that completely unsupported claim probably qualifies as ‘fake news’.

Let me remind you, this is a poll of Canadians. So, leaving aside the usual issues of uncertainty about polls, you might ask yourself (or the reporter and editors at the Star might have asked themselves): Do all Canadians get to vote?

Well, no — they don’t. Nevertheless (you might say), about a third of the respondents in Forum’s poll were Conservative supporters. So that’s better, right?

Not much, actually. It isn’t Conservative supporters — more than five and a half million of whom voted in the last election — who get to vote in this leadership race. It’s Conservative party members, and there are much fewer of them. When Stephen Harper won the Conservative leadership in 2004, about 90,000 people voted.

Rather improbably, the Forum poll claims to have sampled 111 actual party members (out of a total of just over 1,300 respondents). To get that many was either fabulous good luck or the result of some methodological witchery of which Forum is revealing nothing.

But not even this fully expresses the inadequacy of the Star’s lede sentence. As CTV’s Laura Payton explains in this piece, the Conservative leadership is not decided by a plurality in a one-member, one-vote system. The Conservatives have a kind of electoral college in which each constituency in the country has equal weight, and they employ an alternative ballot so that weaker candidates see their support redistributed among their stronger rivals until someone reaches 50 per cent.

In other words, it’s not enough to get a lot of votes. Candidates need to have them well spread out around the country and they probably need to cultivate support among those for whom they are not the first choice. None of this possibly could have been captured in the Forum poll.

If you’ve stuck with me this long, you might well conclude that the Forum poll meant precisely nothing. That’s not quite true.

It does tell us that in a very crowded race, O’Leary likely has the best name recognition among the general public and Conservative supporters. That may well be an asset as he now tries to persuade people to buy memberships in the party, and persuade those who already have them to vote for him (on the second or third round, if not on the first).

But it does not remotely sustain the claim in the lede that O’Leary “is the far-and-away front-runner for the Conservative leadership”. In fact, that completely unsupported claim probably qualifies as “fake news”.

This kind of reporting is an embarrassment to our profession. We need to apply the same skepticism and critical thinking to our own reporting on polls as we claim to apply to government or corporate documents. It really isn’t that hard — but sometimes it means that our poll stories won’t sound quite so sensational.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by all iPolitics columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of iPolitics.