JOSEPH CAMPBELL: After a misfire in New Jersey, pollster offers a remarkable apology for error.

Two days after the election, Patrick Murray, director of the Monmouth poll, publicly embraced his survey’s error, resorting to none of the grudging defensiveness that’s common when pollsters address their failings. That made Murray’s acknowledgement of responsibility as remarkable as it was candid. “I blew it,” he declared in a commentary posted at NJ.com. “The final Monmouth University Poll margin did not provide an accurate picture of the state of the governor’s race.”

Murray apologized in the next paragraph to the Murphy and Ciattarelli campaigns, noting that “inaccurate public polling can have an impact on fundraising and voter mobilization efforts. But most of all,” he added, “I owe an apology to the voters of New Jersey for information that was at the very least misleading.”

It was a statement of regret of a kind the polling industry seldom sees. In a way, Murray’s comments evoked the admonition of Warren Mitofsky, the innovative director of surveys for CBS News who died in 2006. “There’s a lot of room for humility in polling,” Mitofsky said in 1998, at the 50th anniversary of election polling’s greatest debacle, President Harry Truman’s stunning victory over Republican Thomas E. Dewey.

“Every time you get cocky, you lose,” Mitofsky added.

Don’t get cocky, to coin an Insta-phrase.