I agree on not getting carried away with the polls. I typically see them as just a very cheap thermometer. It gives you some idea of the temperature to discern between freezing and boiling, but I wouldn’t use it to bake a cake. As has been implicated over time, most of the reporting on polls is meant for one thing, news generation for the media.
As for the second part of your comments, Mark Stein may disagree a bit, not because of Trump getting out “his” voters . . . The timeline he put together does not look good for Cruz, both in execution and in explanation. The top three all broke previous records which only speaks to the very high interest and focus of the voters, or maybe even combined with an Operation Chaos scenario. It was reported that at virtually all the Republican precincts they ran out of voter registration forms.
http://www.steynonline.com/7445/that-smell-isnt-the-ethanol
Virtually nothing of the Iowa Caucuses this cycle can be translatable into previous events. How many crossed over because they could not stomach either the truth challenged (on a grand scale) Clinton or the Socialist Sanders.
As for breaking records, 1) it’s interesting that the vaunted Cruz “ground game” STILL left 13% of its voters at home, and b) that collectively Trump and Cruz did not get out an astounding 37% of the voters who expressed an interest in voting. Now, talk about a real tsunami. If you get THOSE voters out in November, game over.