That doesn't sound like much of an upset. In most of the states where Clinton isn't pounding Sanders into the ground with 60, 70 or 80% of the vote, they're running about equal. Which means Clinton is piling up delegates much faster than Sanders.
So why are they calling it an upset? Because the polls predicted that Clinton would win by 20 points. If Sanders had clobbered Clinton by the same amount that Clinton has clobbered Sanders by in other states, that would be an upset. Here, the polls were simply dead wrong.
By this point it should be obvious that polls don't work anymore, and this has been the case for several years. Karl Rove made an absolute ass of himself when he refused to believe that Obama won, because he trusted his polls more than the election itself.
Mark pointed to an article on fivethirtyeight.com about why the polls are wrong. It was a list of lame excuses from someone who still believes that polls can work. They can't. Polling is completely broken, and probably forever.
Here are the real reasons why polling has lost most of its credibility.
Most reasonable people just don't answer the phone if they don't recognize who's calling. They look at the caller ID or let their answering machine pick it up. Why? Every unsolicited phone call you get from an unknown number is
- someone you don't know calling during dinner or your favorite TV show or when you're working, or
- a crook trying to steal your personal information, your credit card, your bank account, or your identity, often posing as Microsoft Windows support, or
- a sales person trying to sell you something shady or something you don't want, or
- a crook from a phony charitable organization selling you some bogus sob story to steal your money, or
- a paid telephone solicitor from a reputable charitable organization that is growing ever more desperate for donations because the disreputable scum bags are stealing all their donors.
Pollsters used to only call landlines, which was beginning to significantly skew poll results. They have since changed that, and now call mobile numbers as well. Since mobile minutes cost real money, only really schmoey shmoes will waste their minutes talking to a pollster.
People who willingly pick up unsolicited calls frequently do so in order to mess with the caller, tying them up and wasting their time. Some think that lying to pollsters helps tweak the lamestream media, which faithfully and breathlessly report the latest poll numbers, which are increasingly wrong.
A lot of reasonable people who do pick up don't think it's anyone's business who they're going to vote for. They'll a) politely decline, b) just hang up, or c) lie to the pollster. Why? Because they have no way of knowing how that information will be used against them in the future. And it often will be used against you -- independent polls are completely free to sell your answers to political campaigns, who will use that information to dun you with more calls begging for money.
Rabid supporters will answer polls in order to "get their vote in" for their favorite candidate. These are generally a tiny and predictable fraction of the population, so they don't really tell you much about how the majority of the population will vote.
Many voters have the attention span of a gnat. They don't know anything about any of the issues. They often don't decide who they're voting for until they get in the voting booth. Polls tell you nothing when the electorate is so undecided, and though they try to control for this, clearly it's not working (this is the one excuse that 538 gave that holds water.)
For example: the most ridiculous thing I've heard voters say this cycle is, "I can't decide between Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump." (Jesse Ventura, among others, has said this.) This is like saying you can't decide between Attila the Hun and Mahatma Gandhi.
Some of these are simply clueless people. Others, like Ventura, are trying to sabotage the American political system. These saboteurs don't are about either candidate's stands on the issues, they just want to blow the system up.
News flash: nominating unelectable or unqualified candidates won't make the government work better. You'd think Ventura would have realized this after spending four years as governor of Minnesota when neither party had his back and the media hounded him for being such a thin-skinned lout.
Finally, there are Internet polls. These are conducted online, and most pollsters regard them as completely worthless because they aren't really random: it's a self-selecting population, and they are easily gamed by campaign organizations, and are also vulnerable to bot nets (like any other Internet scam).
Political campaigns and news organizations will continue to use polls, but their predictive value is nearing zero.
The only polls that really matter are the ones that actually elect candidates.
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