Posted on 10/04/2008 8:06:40 AM PDT by Parmenio
Over the years, the Minneapolis Star Tribune's Minnesota Poll has been a reliable indicator of...virtually nothing. Every two years it confidently predicts sweeping victories for the Democrats. Every now and then, as in 2006, that turns out to be right.
Over the years, Scott has repeatedly dissected the Minnesota Poll's methods and findings and has had notable exchanges with the individual who runs (or ran--I'm not sure whether he has survived the paper's layoffs) the poll. In 2006 we couldn't tell whether the poll's methods improved or whether its biennial prediction was coincidentally right. Today, though, we may get a clue: the Strib's poll claims that Al Franken has leaped out to a nine-point lead over Norm Coleman in Minnesota's Senate race. The Strib attributes this to the public's revulsion at Norm's "negative" ads about Franken, which consist mostly of footage of Franken being Franken. What about Franken's defamatory attacks on Coleman? Those are apparently different, somehow.
What makes this remarkable is that just yesterday, a Survey USA poll showed Coleman ahead by ten points, while less than two weeks ago a Quinnipiac/Wall Street Journal survey, which included more respondents than any of the other Minnesota polls, had Coleman ahead by seven.
I'll leave it to Scott to see if he can figure out how the Strib was able to identify Minnesotans whose views were so congruent with its own.
Their usual method is to do a poll of the leading state race and the Presidential race at the same time, and release them on successive days. Tomorrow is Sunday so that means their front page will show a poll showing Obama with a lead of 10-13 points. But for the first time in many weeks, I've noticed that Obama is running TV ads in Minnesota again. That tells me that the Obama campaign thinks that the race is much closer here.
Has MN ever leaned RED before? I don’t know what to make of the rush in the OsAMA camp of late. Can you give me some insight?
The same can be said of all the other polls. Every last one favors the liberal cause. And every last one is repeatedly proven inaccurate by reality. Yet every day, they make millions telling the same lies they've been telling for half a century.
Up until the 1930s, Minnesota was pretty strongly Republican, helped by the fact that the left was split into two parties, the Democrats and a populist party called the Farmer-Labor party. Sometime in the late 40s they merged and formed the Democrat-Farmer-Labor party (DFL). From that point they became the dominant force in Minnesota politics, though the Republicans could occasionally win, such as in the “Minnesota massacre” of 1978, when they won both Senate seats, the governorship and swept the legislature.
Since then it’s trended back to the DFL. From time to time, the Republicans have come back. 2002 was a good year when we won the governorship, a senate seat and controlled the legislature.
Republicans can sometimes win state wide races by fusing their traditional base in Southern Minnesota, the suburbs, and the conservative, gun-clinging Democrats from Northern Minnesota. In the last 10 years or so we’ve had an influx of liberals from the East and California into the Twin Cities who have tipped things toward the DFL.
I don’t think the state will ever return to being a strong Republican state like it was from 1860 to 1932.
What is really remarkable is the Star and Sickle is still financially sound enough to run presses.
Well, look what I found buried at the bottom of the Star-Trubune report:
“The poll detected a significant increase in Minnesotans who label themselves as Democrats. Forty-two percent of likely voters identified themselves as Democrats, compared with 27 percent who said they were independents, and 26 percent who said they were Republicans.”
Mystery solved. If I were the Star-Trib, I’d be more than a little skeptical of such a huge jump in party identity in a short time and would feel compelled to educate the readers on what a 95% confidence interval really means (versus the margin of error that the public usually focuses on). In shorthand - methinks they got a wonky sample for this poll.
That explains it. Thank you.
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