Interesting Minnesota Poll Results
By Gerry Daly Posted in User Blogs — Comments (5) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
Here and here. Two writeups on the same poll from the Star-Tribune, rolled out over two days, giving the Governor's race one day and the Senate race the next. Topline: Pawlenty has a small, possibly insignificant lead over Hatch, while Klobuchar has a 19 point lead over Kennedy.
Those who are familiar with the history of the Star-Tribune's polling efforts know that their poll consistently overstates Democrat support (as Captian Ed notes. That said, it is very interesting to note to what degree Kennedy is running behind Pawlenty, and to what degree Klobuchar is running ahead of Hatch.
My best guess as to why the difference can be found in the image and name recognition questions. In the Gubernatorial race, the candidates are well known to the voters; only 2% say they do not know who Pawlenty is, and just 9% more say they aren't sure if they view him favorably or not. Hatch is less-well known, but still has decent saturation for a challenger; 12% did not recognize the name and 15% aren't sure about how much they like him.
Compare those numbers to the Senate race. 28% do not recognize the name of Klobuchar, and 13% don't know how they feel about her-- a total of 41%. Meanwhile, 16% don't know Kennedy, and 19% don't know how they feel about him-- a total of 35%.
This suggests to me that, to a large extent, the Senate race right now is reflecting more of the natural partisan tendencies of the state. Although Republicans have been making headway in the state, the fact remains that Minnesotans have a history of looking more favorably towards the DFL than they do towards the GOP. My thesis: the less well the candidates are known in Minnesota, the more the polling will favor the DFL candidate.
Regardless of if the Senate race is a 19 point one or a 2 point one (as Rasmussen recently found), I believe the numbers suggest that Kennedy needs to saturate the airways earlier rather than later. He needs to define himself to the voters before their partisan inclinations pidgeonhole him into a deficit he will not be able to overcome. And he needs to drive up Klobuchar's negatives. Right now just 12% view her unfavorably, and unless he can, at a minimum, more than triple that then he is going to lose. One does not win in a state with such strong Democrat roots if the Democrat is looked at so favorably. And this analysis holds even if one discounts the margin of Klobuchar's lead due to it being a Star-Trib poll; he will not win if he is running double-digits behind Pawlenty. Kennedy needs to change the dynamic by filling in as much of the blank canvas for him and his opponent as possible.
That sort of advertising effort, especially this early, will require significant campaign funds. Donations to the Kennedy campaign can be made here.
But even when one gets a bad sample, one can glean useful info. In this case, that Kennedy is running so far behind Pawlenty-- and that the name recognition is so much lower in the Senate race than in the Governor's race. Even if there are too many Democrats in the sample or other balance problems, factoring them out would not likely change either of those observations.
Part of it is just name recognition. Amy Klobuchar in Minneapolis (and greater Minnesota) would be the equivalent of an "Amy Royko" in Chicago. The name is well known because her father, Jim Klobuchar, was a Minneapolis Star Tribune columnist for 30 years (retired now.)
Dales, I actually wrote up a diary on these same polls yesterday but it somehow got eaten by the site. Let me add on my two cents here.
First, I think it is possible that this is a bad sample. This could be that 1 in 20 that is outside the margin of error due to a (unintentionally) skewed sample. I say that because of the internals.
Both Pawlenty and Kennedy are winning 60+% of the under 25 age group. While that would be incredibly positive news for the future of Republicans in Minnesota it does not match up with recent Rasmussen polls that I checked which show Hatch and Klobucher winning the youngest groups and the oldest groups while the Republicans win the 30-50 age group. That pattern is more in line with national trends and makes me put more faith in the Rasmussen Polls.
Second, allow me to crib from Captain Ed a bit to support the thesis that the Strib is not a good pollster:
It's helpful at this juncture to recall the MinnPoll's history in predicting elections. Over the last twenty years, the poll has miscalculated Republican support every election cycle, getting increasingly worse as time goes on while overestimating Democratic support. When Al Gore narrowly won the state in 2000 (by 2.4%), the MinnPoll estimated a ten-point gap in its final result days before the election, claiming that Bush would only take 37%. He wound up with 45.5%. In the 2002 Senate race, the MinnPoll predicted Walter Mondale would beat Norm Coleman by five points; he lost by two, as MinnPoll underestimated Coleman's support by over eight points.
Their incompetence doesn't just apply to two-way races. In 1998, they predicted that Skip Humphrey would win the governor's race and draw 35% of the vote, with Jesse Ventura coming in last place with 27%. Those positions were reversed on Election Day, with Humphrey only able to attract 28%. They did manage to predict that Tim Pawlenty would win the 2002 three-way race to replace Jesse, but they underestimated his support by nine percentage points.
All in all, it's hard for me to take the poll seriously. Which is actually unfortunate given the very high numbers for the Republicans among young voters.
Adam and Captain Ed are right about the Strib poll, which has been erratic for 30 years. It makes no sense that they would find Klobuchar that far ahead when all prior polls have found a tight race. Strib polls should generally be ignored.
OTOH, MN voters do have a history of "splitting their tickets" between Gov and Sen races. In 1990, when Arne Carlson (R) won fairly easily over incumbent Gov Rudy Perpich (D), Paul Wellstone (D) beat incumbent Sen Rudy Boschwitz (R) quite handily.
How'd that happen? Hundreds of thousands of people voted in one contest but not the other. If you go back and look, the total number of votes cast in the two contests is dramatically different.
Just part of the oddball Minnesota dynamic. None of the major party nominees for the two offices are going to relax until November 8.
And the governorship of Jesse Ventura is one more bit of evidence to support that theory.