Mark Blumenthal: “Gary Johnson and the Libertarian Party appeared on state ballots in all but two states in 2012, and Stein and the Green Party appeared on all but 12. They will likely gain access to at least as many state ballots this year, if not more. Without offering supporters of those candidates an explicit option to register their preferences, we have no practical way of tracking their support.”

“Yet if we prompt for third party candidates, many voters who are undecided about Clinton and Trump (or about voting generally) tend to grab for these alternative options as a way of indicating their uncertainty. Whatever the reason, both history and our own data yield evidence that mid-summer polls greatly inflate the true preference for third party candidates.”

Reuters: “Many voters on both sides have been ambivalent in their support for Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and Republican nominee Donald Trump, complicating the task of the pollsters trying to track the race.”

“That sentiment may help explain an apparent skew that recently emerged in the Reuters/Ipsos poll results. Given the choice, a relatively large group of voters opted for “Neither/Other” candidate compared with other major polls, leading to an underreporting of several percentage points for one or other of the two major contenders at times in the race.”

“As a result, Reuters/Ipsos is amending the wording of the choice and eliminating the word ‘Neither,’ bringing the option in line with other polls.”

Norm Ornstein: “In this highly charged election, it’s no surprise that the news media see every poll like an addict sees a new fix. That is especially true of polls that show large and unexpected changes. Those polls get intense coverage and analysis, adding to their presumed validity.”

“The problem is that the polls that make the news are also the ones most likely to be wrong. And to folks like us, who know the polling game and can sort out real trends from normal perturbations, too many of this year’s polls, and their coverage, have been cringeworthy.

Harry Enten: “You’re going to hear a lot about the Electoral College this cycle. At various points, one state or another will be declared pivotal. But stay calm, especially with so long to go until Election Day. It’s too early to take any poll too seriously. We’ll have plenty of time to get into the weeds of different Electoral College scenarios in the months to come.”

“For now, if you’re interested in whether Trump or Clinton is likely to be our next president, I’d pay attention to the average of national polls. Let’s wait until we’re closer to the election and we have a lot more state polling before we zoom in closer than 30,000 feet.”

Jonathan Bernstein: “Political scientists have found that, historically, polls on potential general-election matchups don’t become more reliable in a steady, gradual arc as the months and weeks go by. Instead, after starting off as essentially meaningless, they ratchet up sharply in two steps.”

“We are just nearing the end of the first stage, when primary and caucus voters first learned about the candidates and formed opinions about them that can be reflected in the November matchups. The second phase occurs at roughly 100 days before the election, corresponding to the parties’ conventions. Once the nominees are known and the general-election campaigns begin, polls do a good job of predicting the outcome.”

Sam Wang: “There seems to be a persistent meme that polls are in trouble. There was no evidence for this. Primaries and caucuses are volatile situations – this is a well-known fact. I have been assuming that home-stretch polls can be off by an average of 5 percentage points. Any fuss tonight is based on the fact that in Iowa, with its tiny turnout and odd voting procedure, Trump was polling 3 points ahead of Cruz, and ended up losing by 3 points. It would be a mistake to conclude that Trump’s support is illusory in other states. Quite the opposite. A 6-point error would not affect his ranking anywhere else. For now.”

Politico: “According to calculations from the website FiveThirtyEight back in 2014, the average polling error in presidential primary and caucus polls in the final three weeks before an election has hovered between 7 and 9 percentage points.The results for the Iowa GOP caucuses fall within that error range.”

Carl Bialik: “No votes have been cast yet in the 2016 election, but there may already be one set of losers in the campaign: pollsters’ reputations. And that’s according to the pollsters themselves.”

“We asked people working at some of the nation’s most prominent polling outfits whether pollsters’ public image has improved or declined since the 2012 election. Of the 21 who answered, none said their public image had improved, and two-thirds said it had declined.”

“The number of polls of Republican voters in the first three primary and caucus states — Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina — has skyrocketed nearly 90 percent compared with the 2012 GOP primary,”: according to a Boston Globe review of polls.

“The trend toward saturation polling shows little sign of abating, with online polls now cheaper than ever and polling firms and universities competing to satisfy an insatiable media appetite for the latest upticks and downturns, the trends in the minute-by-minute drama of the contest.”