Just a reminder. The polls all had Ronald Reagan losing the election in '80.....
Actually they didn't. Not sure how that storyline got started*, but tracking polls at the time had Reagan winning strongly since around May and he never slipped below that.
I did a bit of digging in archive news articles and found this.
http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/b/brinkley-unfinished.htmlFrom August on, Reagan had anywhere between a 7% and 27% lead in the polls.
What commentators were shocked about were actually two things, first, the low turn out and second, the impact of independent candidate John Anderson had on the race.
However, all the polls referenced here did predict the Reagan landslide. No indication in this article did the polls predict a Carter victory and Reagan flipped that.
*correction, Ann Colter started that one and it was debunked.
http://www.gopbriefingroom.com/index.php?topic=203496.0 She cited a made-up Gallup result.