Nate Cohn: “The New York Times/Siena Poll has traditionally been a telephone survey, but over the last few years we’ve experimented with most of the major methods for contacting voters. These include sending them text messages (and sometimes offering financial incentives to participate), sending them mail with financial incentives, and getting data from panels of people recruited online to take polls. At the end of it all, the Times/Siena poll is still a telephone survey.”

“The phone, while expensive, is still much faster and cheaper than high-incentive mail surveys. And the phone still seems to reach a more representative population — based on measures like educational attainment and record of voting in recent elections — than supplementing the phone with text-message links to surveys or online panels.”

We’re about to enter the season when polls seem to arrive by the hour.

So I’ve partnered with FiftyPlusOne to use their data to create a new, quick read Polling Dashboard.

It tracks three things that will matter enormously heading into the midterm elections: President Trump’s approval rating, the generic congressional ballot and eight of the most important Senate races.

The methodology for the Senate polls is intentionally simple. The averages use only nonpartisan public polls released over the previous seven days.

There are certainly more elaborate polling averages available elsewhere. They use longer time periods, weighting formulas and other adjustments that can make them look more sophisticated.

Whether that makes them more useful is another question.

Patrick Ruffini: “In the last few election cycles, we’ve seen a pattern of Democrats looking competitive in red state Senate contests during the summer only to fade by election day. I wanted to test if this was a consistent pattern, not just the selective memory of a Republican.”

“3,312 polls over the last four election cycles in the old FiveThirtyEight archive confirmed the pattern. In each of those four cycles, the Democratic candidate’s margin was overstated. The average polling error across all polls was D+3.7, and 73% of polls released overstated the Democrat relative to the election result. Again, that’s across more than 3,000 polls, so that’s hardly just statistical noise.”

“A poll claiming Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass was leading Councilmember Nithya Raman by a wide margin — and picking up support from most voters who backed Spencer Pratt in the mayoral primary — was bogus, the company behind the poll acknowledged Monday,” the Los Angeles Times reports.

“The fake poll by Median Strategies showed Bass leading Raman by nearly 12 percentage points ahead of the Nov. 3 mayoral runoff.”

Said the company: “Median Strategies was created as a short term social experiment to examine how purported polling information could enter and spread through the political information ecosystem without independent verification. We are not seeking publicity or attribution for the individuals involved and are declining interviews.”