The irony is that 538 can only exist because of gut-based journalism. The polls it aggregates aren't cheap to conduct. Newspapers and television commission them so that they can be the first to run a story alerting the public to some shocking new result, even (or especially) if it's an outlier. If the public stops paying attention to traditional horse-race poll journalism, these outlets won't have any motivation to continue polling.
I don't think most people would put polling in the "gut-based journalism" category. When people dismiss horse-race reporting and the "gut" stuff, they're dismissing pundits telling us what they think will happen based nothing on the other pundits they talk to and what the campaigns are telling them.
In a world where people place less importance on what people like Mark Halperin and Dick Morris think, news organizations would still have plenty of reason to conduct polling - that would be a world in which people value data over what "thought leaders" are telling us what they think.
People may value data, but they don't value a datum. Individually, none of the dozen polls that report in every day are newsworthy except insofar as they feed the commentariat's need for something to hang stories on. 538 is newsworthy because his statistics can draw meaningful results from multiple polls. In aggregate, polls are valuable, but without poor journalism their value to each organization funding individual polls is probably less than the cost of conducting them.
