Gallup announced it is discontinuing its daily tracking poll of presidential approval, the latest cutback of the company’s public polling.

The poll will now be done weekly.

Nate Cohn: “The Alabama special election is forcing pollsters to confront just about every major challenge in survey research. There’s more uncertainty than usual about who will turn out to vote, and a candidate whose unpopularity may make his committed voters unwilling to admit their support to a pollster. And looming over it all is a big chunk of voters torn between their party and their misgivings about their party’s nominee. No poll can really predict what they’ll do.”

Politico: “The departures of AP and Fox from the 20-year alliance of news organizations that have commissioned and reported national and state exit polls doesn’t necessarily sound the death knell for exit polling. The four remaining networks in the pool — ABC News, CBS News, CNN and NBC News — are locked into the current exit poll regime through the next presidential election.”

“But they will be facing unprecedented competition — from the AP and Fox News, among others — and the future beyond 2020 remains uncertain.”

Nate Cohn: “A year after polls broadly overestimated Hillary Clinton’s strength in the decisive Rust Belt battleground states, top pollsters and analysts across the survey industry have reached a broad near-consensus on many of the causes of error in the 2016 presidential election. But so far, public pollsters — typically run by news outlets and colleges — have not changed much about their approach. Few if any of the public pollsters that conducted surveys ahead of Tuesday’s elections for governor in Virginia and New Jersey appear to have adopted significant methodological changes intended to better represent the rural, less-educated white voters who pollsters believe were underrepresented in pre-election surveys.”

“On the other hand, private pollsters — typically employed by campaigns and parties — have already begun to make changes. This is especially true among Democrats stunned by Donald Trump’s upset victory, but Republicans are making changes as well. The adjustments are already playing out in Virginia, where pollsters will have one of their first chances to put postelection shifts to the test.”

Nate Silver: “When the conventional wisdom tries to outguess the polls, it almost always guesses in the wrong direction. Many experts expected Le Pen to beat her polls. Currency markets implied that she had a much greater chance — perhaps 20 percent — than you’d reasonably infer from the polls. But it was Macron who considerably outperformed his numbers instead.”

“While this was somewhat amusing — the one time the experts decided to take the nationalist candidate’s chances really seriously was the time she lost by 32 points — it should actually worry you, even if you’re a ‘fan’ of polling and data-driven election forecasting. It’s a sign that the polls may be catering to the conventional wisdom, and becoming worse as a result.”

Nate Silver: “Here’s what we can say for sure: It’s unprecedented for a president to face so much opposition from the electorate so soon. Recent polls show that anywhere between 43 and 56 percent of Americans disapprove of President Trump’s job performance. Even if you take the low end of that range, Trump’s numbers are much worse than any past president a month into his term.”

“But beyond that, there’s a lot of seeming disagreement in the polls about exactly how unpopular Trump is — and even whether his disapproval rating exceeds his approval rating at all.”

“What’s the real story? The differences between the polls aren’t random, or at least they don’t appear to be based on the relatively limited amount of data we have so far. Instead, Trump’s approval ratings are systematically higher in polls of voters — either registered voters or likely voters — than they are in polls of all adults. And they’re systematically higher in polls conducted online or by automated script than they are in polls conducted by live-telephone interviewers.”

“The ‘fundamentals’ models, in fact, have had almost no predictive power at all. Over this 16-year period, there has been no relationship between the vote they forecast for the incumbent candidate and how well he actually did.”

— Nate Silver, writing in FiveThirtyEight on March 26, 2012.

“Reporting largely ignored the importance of economic conditions and other ‘fundamentals’ that implied a potentially close race.”

— Silver, writing in FiveThirtEight on January 23, 2017, criticizing media coverage of the 2016 campaign.