What it's actually saying is that polling is useful in the aggregate and useless in the individual. One can have a 66% hit rate in the aggregate, well above flipping a coin, and still not be able to predict the future for any individual outcome. Unfortunately, 90% of people are statistically illiterate, so we get takes like "getting a single poll wrong can only be the outcome of a malicious attempt to deceive the public".
Polling aggregators also have a miserable record. You get closer because by aggregating you partly eliminate individual biases, methodological errors, sampling issues, and ulterior motives, but you also have problems with the pool of polls itself and aggregators are ineffective in adjusting for these issues by weighting or eliminating pollsters accordingly.
Another comment even mentioned the notorious Nate Silver (bronze perhaps), the most famous of these types who lost 100k by being completely wrong about Florida by a huge margin. (Did he actually commit and payout? Not sure.)
I was the one who mentioned Nate Silver as well. That case does not undermine his skill. The 538 model's track record over hundreds of thousands of forecasts was, statistically, extremely good.
Holding a forecaster to a standard of "Silver must get 100% of predictions correct or else he's a fucking moron" is, in itself, a sign of low critical thinking skills.
