The polls are all over the map because the fundamentals that allow polls to measure public sentiment are broken. We gave up door to door polls years ago in favor of telephone based polls. Phone calls don’t work very well anymore with the drop in land line phones and the dominance of cell phones. So, everyone has come up with their own special sauce to normalize the results and since their is no agreement on what works, you get different results.
Add to that the newspaper and TV woes which means that less money is being spent on public polls, and therefore they aren’t as good as they used to be. We never see the private polls that the campaigns pay for, they are probably better than the public ones, but it’s hard to tell.
Prediction: Gowdy’s performance running the Select committee will catapult him into consideration for the VP spot in 2016