The Democratic Party presidential primary polls are all over the place, and the chorus asserting that you simply can’t trust them is louder than ever.

There’s some merit to the complaints. Twenty years ago, the response rate for pollster phone calls was 36 percent, but it’s now dropped to 6 percent. Many pollsters have attempted to transition to online polls, but the practice is nascent, and its accuracy is disputed. But that doesn’t mean the polls tell us nothing of use — in fact, without them we’d have very little to go on that isn’t strictly anecdotal.

Instead of writing off the polls entirely, maybe we should take a closer look. The information buried in the polls, beneath simple candidate preference, can tell us what candidates’ strengths and weaknesses will be in the coming months.