Can you trust the polls this time?

It’s the #1 question I’m getting from readers right now: Are the polls trustworthy?

Virtually every poll is pointing in the same direction right now — toward a potential GOP rout that will reflect widespread public dissatisfaction with President Trump and place constitutional restraints on his remaining two years in office.

The latest — and for Democrats, the greatest — set of data came from the New York Times/Siena polling operation last night, showing Democrats holding leads in five of the seven critical Senate races.

But Democrats are a lot more eager to answer pollsters’ questions right now. Republicans are generally harder to reach.

“Be careful,” veteran pollster Frank Luntz said on “Erin Burnett OutFront” last week: “I don’t believe the polling actually represents Trump voters, because Trump voters don’t like talking to the pollsters.”

Pollsters know that, and they’re adjusting accordingly. In fact, it’s possible some pollsters may have overcorrected. But Democrats are understandably jittery right now, with many cushioning their optimism with caution, wary of getting their hopes up after past polling misses.

At the same time, some Republicans are in denial about the “blue wave” polls, while others are urgently citing the data to get out the GOP vote.

So I asked Kirk Bado, editor of National Journal’s Hotline, what he tells people who ask about poll credibility.

“Not all polls are created equally,” he said. “It’s never been cheaper for some fly-by-night operations to put out bad data that just gets churned into the polling average and treated like Gospel. At the same time, it’s also incredibly expensive to gather good data.”

So, Bado said, “my best advice is to pay the most attention to the gold-star pollsters like New York Times/Siena, AARP, Fox News, and CNN/SSRS that invest in gathering good data and presenting it in the proper context.”

“Journalists and readers should interrogate the polls and diversify their sources of information, just as they do for any other topic they want to learn about,” he said. “If folks are just watching the polls instead of watching debates, candidate interviews, or ads, that’s like watching the win probability metric rather than the actual game.”

Hotline has lots of other useful metrics, and a “how to watch the election like a pro” guide, right here.