He's not an idiot. He is funded by Thiel. He has been politically captured by authoritarian capitalism, so I'd be wary of any models he produced that aren't independently audited for bias.
I think polls are useful, and the monte carlo simulation approach for turning them into a electorial vote probability is good, but there "too much" magic sauce left over for me to trust the outputs from Silver or 538.
I do or at least I have in the past. If the caller will answer my Google call screening, I'll answer or call back.
There's always been a issue of sample not matching population, and a variety of methods to correct for that. But, I will admit there is some limitations to that, and I don't quite understand where the limitations are. (I love math, but I failed statistics once, and barely passed the second time. I prefer symbols and proofs and closed forms...)