The Mission:

Step 1: Induce a government shutdown specifically to cause pain among those dependent on government.

Step 2:  Get a compliant media to fix blame on the legislature;

Sylvia Hernandez Cruz holds her 5-year-old daughter on her lap and practices letters, as she sits on a couch in the small rambler she rents on the edge of Moorhead.

Cruz says she’s trying to plan for a possible state government shutdown. She’s trying to stock up on basic grocery items, and making sure her son’s asthma prescription is filled before the end of the month. She’s not sure if she will be able to afford those things next month.

“I’m pretty much making it month to month. That’s the situation I’m in,” said Cruz.

Cruz is among the thousands of Minnesotans who receive food assistance and medical assistance. She’s most worried about medical costs. She doesn’t know where she would come up with the $200 a month to pay for her son’s asthma medication.

Cruz says she’s e-mailed her local legislator, Republican Rep. Morrie Lanning. But she feels helpless following the budget standoff in the news.

…notwithstanding that the legislature submitted a balanced budget, and Governor Dayton’s latest attempt is a solid billion dollars off.

Step 3: Lather, rinse, repeat until the DFL tells them to stop.

At its very, very best, watching the Twin Cities mainstream media covering inter-party politics between the DFL and MNGOP is a zen-like experience; you hope, in the best of all possible worlds, for some rudimentary balance.

To wit: Bob Von Sternberg over at The DFL Casserole The Strib’s “Hot Dish Politics” blog tips his hand as re his editorial sympathies, just a tad (with emphasis added):

Members of a legislative budget commission met for the fourth time Wednesday, for the first time moving past their shopworn soundbites as they picked through the details of Gov. Mark Dayton’s just-released plan to shut down state government if a budget deal isn’t reached by July 1.

Hm.  Wonder if any of Dayton spokesbot Bob Hume’s “soundbites” – which, on Twitter, read exactly like a chron job executing a Perl script – qualify as “shopworn soundbites” to Mr. Von Sternberg?

And in something of a role reversal, Republicans — whose budget-balancing strategy relies entirely on spending cuts…

Nope.  No bias there.

On the other hand:

…accused the Democratic governor of proposing the shuttering of government services that will deprive Minnesotans of essential services. They cited his plans to shut off the flow of aid to public schools and halt payments to health and human services providers.

“Whose budget is more draconian,” demanded Sen. Julianne Ortman, R-Chanhassen, using the word Dayton has often employed to describe the GOP’s spending cuts [albeit not, apparently, a “shopworn soundbite” – Ed.]; she called his shutdown plan “complete hypocracy. [sic – Ed.]”

On the one hand, it’s the first coverage I’ve seen in the regional mainstream media of the accusations that Dayton has been staging the shutdown, and seeking to amp up the “pain”, at all.  That’s good.

On the other hand, I have this strong sense that it’ll be the only coverage the Strib spends on it – tucked safely away in a blog that only wonks read.

After the commission meeting House Minority Leader Paul Thissen returned Dean’s fire. “I am stunned about the Republicans’ concern about the delay in the delivery of certain government services as a result of the shutdown, but have shown absolutely no concern about permanently and devastatingly cutting those same services,” he said. The GOP’s health and human services cuts “are what I would call breathtaking,” Thissen said,

Note to Rep. Thissen; then perhaps you and your party should have advanced a budget of your own…

Republicans also used the hearing to resume their drumbeat of criticism [Let me guess – a “shopworn” drumbeat? – Ed.] of Dayton’s negotiating style, complaining that he has remained aloof from the process.

“We had a meeting a week ago, I guess, and the governor didn’t attend that,” said Rep. Keith Downey, R-Edina. “I’m just curious in the last week, the last couple days, do you have any information you can provide to us[about] how many meetings the governor has actually been in on the shutdown versus how many meetings the governor has been in on the detailed grunt work of negotiating a budget agreement versus how many meetings the governor has been in on the Vikings stadium?

“That might be telling to us [to show] where the governor’s priorities are, based on where he’s spending his time.”

Yes.  It does, doesn’t it?

I have a couple of predictions for you.

Prediction 1:  Polled To Death – Take this to the bank:  sometime before July 1, the Strib will run another “Minnesota Poll” in re the shutdown.

The poll’s headlines will be within one rhetorical standard deviation of  “65% of Minnesotans Favor Compromise On Budget Impasse”.

The crosstabs, carefully buried, will show that DFLers are oversampled by 50%; those trying to investigate the faint whiff of metrocentrism in the polling will be frustrated by the absolute lack of crosstabs showing geography.

Prediction 2: Dead Silence – Despite the avalanche of evidence coming out of the state bureaucracy that Dayton is not only pushing for the shutdown, but actively trying to make it “hurt” as much as possible, there will be not one word on the subject from the Strib, WCCO, the PiPress, the KARE Bears (whose John Cronan is rapidly shaping up to be an Esme Murphy-grade stealth-DFL  propagandist), or MPR.

Place your bets.

Or make your own predictions, in the comment section.

Yet again, as we watch the political contortions of Anthony Weiner, we see the great political truism; it’s not the act, it’s the cover-up.

And as we’ve seen over and over and over again, there’s nothing the media likes more than unravelling a coverup.  Of a Republican (or a Democrat who, like Weiner, has been deemed a liability).

So let’s talk cover up.

While the GOP presented a balanced budget in May – long before the DFL had done in the previous couple of biennia – Mark Dayton, who never presented a balanced budget and thus in effect never presented a budget at all, vetoed it after weeks of stonewalling.

Evidence is emerging from various Human Services and Department of Transportation sources that Dayton planned this shutdown all along.  The fact that the Administration and the Legislature were eight tenths of a percent apart shows that Dayton has no interest in negotiation.  In the meantime, he – his surrogates at “Alliance For A Better Minnesota”, the attack-PAC funded by the unions, Dayton’s ex-wife Alita Messinger, the Dayton family and Mark Dayton himself – are running ads, constantly, trying to blame Republican intranigence for the shutdown.

And you only hear about it on the blogs.

On Channel Four, where Esme Murphy spends her every Sunday morning painting the toenails of DFL politicians?

Nothing.

On Minnesota Public Radio, which just finished a huge lobbying campaign to defend their federal and state subsidies because their “no rant, no slant” news coverage is just too vital to allow to allow any cuts?

Where are Mike Mulcahy, Tom Scheck and Tim Pugmire?

The Strib?  It’s no secret we don’t expect much of the newspaper of the “Minnesota Poll“; the paper that ran its sole story about Mark Dayton’s history of alcoholism and mental illness in January of 2010; half a year before the DFL primary, and a good nine months before 90% of the voters even knew there was an election coming up.  Still, one might think someone at 425 Portland would figure there was some utility in, y’know, covering the news.

Rachel Stassen-Berger?

The PiPress?  Does Bill Salisbury actually transgress the DFL?

Channel 5? Paging Tom Hauser; there’s a there, there.

Where is the media?

It was probably Sunday or Monday when the lefties started tittering about Sarah Palin’s visit to the Old North Church.

And “tittering” was all they managed.  Even Erik Black, one of the phalanx of “deans of Minnesota political journalism”, was reduced to embedding a “ThinkProgress” flakvid without any additional commentary – which is, in and of itself, a pointed commentary on the regional leftymedia.

Jill  Burcum, editorial writer for the Strib, is seemingly being groomed to take Lori Sturdevant’s place in the “smug, entitled DFLer” slot on in the stable of columnists.

And she boldly strode where no talking head had gone before.

During a visit this week to Boston, she recounted a twisted take on Paul Revere’s historic ride. In a nearly incoherent stream of phrases full of folksy dropped “g’s” (ringin’ those bells, warnin’ shots), Palin appears to have said that Revere warned the British, when in fact he warned Americans about the British.

I’m a kidder; I kid. Burcum followed the same narrative the entire leftysphere follows. up and down its chain of command, from Media Matters down through the Strib’s editorial row to the Twin Cities’ leftyblogosphere; “Wimmins who are conservative are teh stoopid”.

With the dropped g’s and the history flub, Palin is such a caricature of herself that it’s hard to tell if this now-viral video is a Saturday Night Live skit or the real thing.

For whatever reason, Burcum comes back to Palin’s accent over and over in this piece – to a degree that I’d call “a Saturday Night Live skit”, if SNL ever did skits about Midwestern editorial writers so desperate to confirm their parochial need to feel superior that they have to resort to catcalling someone’s accent.

And I have a hunch you could look in vain through Jill Burcum’s entire clipfile in vain, trying to find any mocking of Hillary Clinton’s artificial swerves into “Sista” slang, or President Obama’s curious habit of slipping out of his Ivy-League pronunciation into a phony “Black” patois, when speaking in front of black audiences.

Revere, according to historical documents, was captured by the British. Under questioning, sometimes with a gun to his head, Revere said he had warned revolutionary forces that the redcoats were coming.

Arguments that this means he warned the British, as Palin defenders claim, are more than a stretch. That Palin had that detailed level of knowledge about Revere’s ride is even more unlikely, especially in context of her meandering statements about Revere’s “ringin’ those bells.”

It’s “unlikely”?  One wonders why Burcum is slaving away as an editorial writer when a career as a mind-reader awaits.

The Massachusetts Historical Society was asked about the matter on Monday. In a statement, it said Revere’s mission was to warn the revolutionary forces: “The Society holds three accounts written by Paul Revere. Based on these accounts, Revere was sent out to warn colonists that troops were marching west.”

Gauging by the excited people around Palin in her video — none of whom went “huh?” at the Revere reversal — she’s lost none of her star power. That should concern the Minnesota Republicans who also harbor presidential ambitions.

But gauging by the excited people around her — none of whom went “huh?” at the Revere reversal — she’s lost none of her star power. That should concern the Minnesota Republicans who also harbor presidential ambitions.

Bachmann – unfairly derided as Palin-lite — is expected to declare her presidential candidacy soon. Former Gov. Tim Pawlenty has already announced his bid.

A quote that didn’t make the Palin video makes her gaffe even more head-scratching and hilarious.

Somewhere during the course of her Boston visit, she uttered this phrase, according to the Boston Globe: “You’ve got to know a lot about our past in order to know how to proceed successfully into the future.’’

Words to live by.

Oh, yeah – according to historians, Burcum and Black and “Think” “Progress” are wrong, and Palin was, well, closer to right than any of then would credit her for being:

Palin prompted howls of partisan derision when she said on Boston’s Freedom Trail that Revere “warned the British that they weren’t going to be taking away our arms by ringing those bells and making sure as he’s riding his horse through town to send those warning shots and bells that we were going to be secure and we were going to be free.”

Palin insisted yesterday on Fox News Sunday she was right: “Part of his ride was to warn the British that were already there. That, hey, you’re not going to succeed. You’re not going to take American arms.”

In fact, Revere’s own account of the ride in a 1798 letter seems to back up Palin’s claim. Revere describes how after his capture by British officers, he warned them “there would be five hundred Americans there in a short time for I had alarmed the Country all the way up.”

Boston University history professor Brendan McConville said, “Basically when Paul Revere was stopped by the British, he did say to them, ‘Look, there is a mobilization going on that you’ll be confronting,’ and the British are aware as they’re marching down the countryside, they hear church bells ringing — she was right about that — and warning shots being fired. That’s accurate.”

Patrick Leehey of the Paul Revere House said Revere was probably bluffing his British captors, but reluctantly conceded that it could be construed as Revere warning the British.

You should read the whole thing.

And remember – a conservative is smarter after a concussion than a liberal who’s just graduated from Princeton when the subject is history, as anything; if you read it in the leftymedia, distrust but verify and, almost inevitably, distrust even more.

The regional leftysphere is tweeting up a busy little storm today; as the MNDFL noted on Twitter, “Former head of the MN Business Partnership: the @mngop budget is a “job-killer””.

The uninitiated might think “Wow. That’s quite an indictment of the GOP budget!”

And the tweet linked to a Strib article, entitled “The governor’s budget plan won’t send businesses scurrying“, by one Roger L. Hale, which didn’t do much to disturb that conclusion.  I’ll let you read it yourself; if you’re observant, you’ll note the subtle red herring; tax hikes might not send businesses “scurrying”, but it’ll inhibit them from forming in the first place, or hiring more Minnesota workers.  What good does having 3M or Best Buy or Ecolab plopping their headquarters here do us if they’re not expanding, building and hiring?

But the DFL and Strib (pardon the redundancy) are even less transparent and more perfidious than meets the eye.

The Strib piece notes that Hale is “…a former: CEO of Tennant Co, director of five NYSE companies, chairman of the Minnesota Business Partnership and the Governor’s Workforce Development Council, and successful start-up investor.

And to those who don’t pay much attention, a businessman is a businessman is a businessman.  And probably a Republican.  Right?

Wrong.

Roger Hale, as I noted last summer, contributed six figures to “Alliance For A Better Minnesota”; $110,000 as of this time last year, and tens of thousands more to other DFL candidates and organizations.

But the Strib didn’t see fit to let the reader know that.

The fix is in.

On the one hand, I guess conservatives should be happy the Strib actually published Michael Brodkorb’s a takedown of the Strib’s systematic bias in covering political rhetoric:

…I’m always impressed by the speed in which the Star Tribune editorial page will throw the foul flag on comments from [State GOP chair Tony] Sutton and me, while ignoring hyperbolic rhetoric from Gov. Mark Dayton, DFL Senate Minority Leader Tom Bakk and Minnesota DFL Party Chairman Ken Martin over a potential government shutdown (“Sutton’s boorish behavior,” editorial, May 28).

It’s nothing new, of course; exposing the Strib’s institutional bias and ethical perfidy has always been the seed corn of the Minnesota conservative blogosphere.

But the double-standard has shifted into high gear this year, as the Strib’s editorial board circles its wagons to try to protect Dayton.

In the final days of the 2011 legislative session, GOP leaders in the Minnesota House and Senate provided DFL Gov. Mark Dayton with an opportunity to speak directly to both legislative caucuses. It was a historic bipartisan meeting, filled with the discussion and debate that Minnesotans expect. In this private meeting, both Gov. Dayton and the GOP legislators were respectful of differing views.

How did Dayton reward this olive branch from the GOP leadership? He publicly attacked the legislators who politely asked questions of their governor by calling them “extremists” and by saying they “know little about government and care even less.”

Rather than using his powerful soapbox to rally Minnesotans together, he chose to take a swipe at the mothers, fathers, teachers, veterans, Cub Scout leaders and small-business owners who serve as citizen legislators. Dayton attacked, but the Star Tribune editorial page was silent.

Did I say double-standard?

Good:

[Senate Majority Leader Tom] Bakk, who earlier in the session flat-out refused to produce a budget solution, was speaking to the press, comparing these same hardworking GOP legislators to members of “cults.” It’s worth noting that while Bakk has time to stroll the halls of the State Capitol launching personal attacks on citizen legislators, his caucus hasn’t found any time to provide substantive budget solutions.

It seems the only “budget” work the Senate DFL Caucus has done this year is cashing in its legislative pay and per-diem checks. Bakk attacked, but the Star Tribune editorial page was silent.

Finally, Martin ended the week with a frantic news release, decrying Sutton’s and my political statements about Dayton’s “erratic” leadership style. This, of course, is the same Ken Martin who said on TV hours earlier that GOP legislators would have “blood” on their hands if state government shuts down. Martin attacked, but the Star Tribune editorial page was silent.

I’ve been writing this for months; the DFL is running the first-year law school play; “if the law is against you, argue facts; it the facts are against you, argue law; if the facts and law are against you, argue like hell”.  They’re stuck with a population that tossed them from office by the palette-load last fall, and a governor who has won awards for his political ineptitude.  They are desperate.

As home prices are falling, and as gas prices have risen to nearly $4 a gallon, Gov. Dayton is preparing to shut down state government for a tax increase that Minnesotans can’t afford — something that candidate Dayton said he wouldn’t do. I guess if I were the DFL, I’d distract, too!

As Michael points out, the GOP accomplished its mission – or close to it.  They raised the budget, without touching anyone’s taxes.  In addition, they passed some historic reforms to government.

What does the DFL minority and our isolated, embattled governor have to show?

Delaying.  Name-calling.

And the Strib is covering for them.

Kwama Heaton of Richfield wanted to sign his kids up for basketball camp.  But when he got laid off from his job as a car salesman, due to a lack of used cars (due to Obama’s Cash for Clunkers program and cost cutting for Obamacare), he had to cancel those plans.

Cynthia DelAmitri of Woodbury told her family that their annual trip to visit her parents for a week of camping and fishing in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan were on ice because the small recruiting company for which she works is cutting staff (they can’t afford the taxes) and she couldn’t afford to take time off; the big national recruiters would eat her lunch.

Rey Jimenez, your grandmother’s oncologist, quietly decided that added onto the state’s confiscatory business tax rates and absurd healthcare mandates, the added income on couples who earn over $135,000 (he and his wife, your grandmother’s internist) was the last straw. He’s moving to Phoenix.

The media doesn’t cover those sorts of stories (and yes, mine are fictional, but only literally).

But let the government suddenly feel not all fat and happy, and “human interest” is the order of the day for the Twin Cities media:

Camille Miller hasn’t signed her daughter up for Girl Scout camp this summer. The state health care analyst from Woodbury is not sure she’ll have the $500 to pay for it.

Wow.

Not sure I ever paid $500 for kids camp…

Jim Ullmer has told his extended family to forget their annual July 4th get-together at Lake Itasca State Park. Ullmer, a state truck inspector from Crystal, is unsure if the campground will be open.

Because everyone knows family get togethers in local or national parks, or private camp areas, just aren’t the same.  There’s something about that patina of “state ownership” that brings people together, right?

They are just two of more than 54,000 state workers bracing for an uncertain summer as the Capitol budget impasse threatens to shut down government services on July 1.

To which the roughly two million of us in the private sector say “welcome to every day in our world, government worker”.

And half of us add “so quit electing obstructionist DFL governors”.  The GOP submitted a budget – one that’d keep government running, increase most spending that “needs” it and demand some new efficiencies.

Look for the same cavalcade of woe to accelerate; the Strib seems to be even more in the bag for the DFL this year than they did in 2005.

Session ends and, if you believe the the media, the MNGOP spent the entire time sightseeing:

All that and more must now await a special session this summer, as the Republican majority and DFL Gov. Mark Dayton ended an acrimonious five-month session with very little business done and a $5 billion projected shortfall mostly untouched.

There’s no sign more time in St. Paul would spark a deal to avoid a bruising government shutdown. A long season of legislating only hardened and widened the deep, bitter divide between Dayton and the new legislative leadership.

Read: The Governor used the only tactic he has: stalling, and counting on the media to shape public opinion for him.

Expect a “Minnesota Poll” showing Minnesotans favor “compromise” 60-40, with a 3:2 oversample of DFLers.

And probably a “Humphrey Institute” poll showing it’s more like eleventy-teen to one.

Here you go, Star Tribune and KARE11 and Esme Murphy; it’s your moment to shine.

The poll was as drearily predictable as the annual stadium extortion-fest; notwithstanding last November’s electoral GOP legislative sweep, yet another Star/Tribune “Minnesota Poll” shows that the public is, mirabile dictu, entirely on board with the DFL agenda:

Sixty-three percent of respondents said they favor a blend of higher taxes and service reductions to tackle the state’s $5 billion projected deficit. Just 27 percent said they want state leaders to balance the budget solely through cuts.

The poll comes [with utter predictability – Ed.] as the Republican-led Legislature and the DFL governor head into the final week of a legislative session still dug in on their vastly different approaches to balancing the budget.

Dayton said the results show the public backs his position. Republicans said the results run counter to last fall’s election and what they are hearing from Minnesotans.

Predictable?  Absolutely.  Whether through editorial perfidy or lazy methodology, the Strib/”Minnesota” Poll has a long history of releasing “news” the DFL needs, exactly when it needs it.  Especially when the issue is especially close-fought; the harder-fought the issue, the more absurdly lopsided the  Strib poll, like the “Humphrey Institute” Poll run for many years by the U of M and MPR polls, seem to be.  Right when the DFL needs it.

My theory; the DFL knows full well how the “bandwagon effect” in polling works for manipulating public perception; the Strib serves the DFL, wittingly or not.

And, sure enough, the poll’s methodology was as predictable as the Strib’s smug headline; emphasis is added by me:

Today’s Star Tribune Minnesota Poll findings are based on 565 landline and 241 cellphone interviews conducted May 2-5 with a representative sample of Minnesota adults. Interviews were conducted under the direction of Princeton Survey Research Associates International.

Results of a poll based on 806 interviews will vary by no more than 4.7 percentage points, plus or minus, from the overall population 95 times out of 100.

The self-identified party affiliation of the random sample is 33 percent Democrat, 23 percent Republican and 37 percent independent. The remaining 7 percent said they were members of another party, no party or declined to answer.

Results for the question about the best approach to solving the budget deficit — primarily through service reductions or through a combination of tax hikes and spending cuts — are based on interviews with 548 of the 806 respondents. The question was reasked in follow-up calls to all respondents because of a problem in the original wording of the question, and 548 of the respondents were reached. Results of a poll based on 548 interviews will vary by no more than 5.7 percentage points, plus or minus, from the overall population 95 times out of 100.

In other words, a group which self-reports its political leaning, whose geographical weighting and mix are unknown (remember the Humphrey Institute’s overweighting of Minneapolis respondents? Which they didn’t bother to report until after the election, even though their actual poll, which indicated a 12 point blowout for Mark Dayton, went out on schedule, right before the election?), and where the “independents” are given no known context, and which gives the DFL a completely unearned 50% head start, shows the public solidly behind Mark Dayton.

Just like it needed to.

I doubt the Twin Cities media will ever admit that the “Minnesota Poll” and the “Humphrey Institute” polls are, intentionally or not, pro-DFL propaganda. But it’s gotten to the point where the evidence doesn’t support any other conclusion.

Heather Martens – formerly of “Citizens for A “Safer” Supine Minnesota”, now with some other astroturf group that is, most likely, a re-branding of CSM, wrote a “Commentary” on Minnesota Public Radio today in re Rep. Cornish’s “Stand Your Ground” bill (HF 1467).

Here’s the “Commentary“.

Here’s the bill.

I’ll have a piece out on it tomorrow.  Actually, I’ve found 15 serious outright lies – as in, statements that are 180 degrees divergent from reality – and 2-3 major logical fallacies so far.  So much, in fact, that I may break the piece up into, well, 15-18 pieces, running every half hour all day tomorrow.

The piece is that bad.

And there is just no way I should have all that fun by myself.

So I’m going to do something I haven’t done in years; I’m going to sound the horn.

Bloggers, Tweeter and Facebookers; it’s time for a good old-fashioned feeding frenzy; a Blog Swarm on Martens.  And on MPR for printing a “commentary” that can’t pass even the most rudimentary fact-checking, as part of what is seeming more and more like an editorial position to start pushing for more gun control.

If you write a piece – a blog post, Facebook update or Tweet – about Martens and MPR, leave a note in the comment section.  I’ll post a “Carnival of Truth” tomorrow recapping everyone’s efforts.

For background, I’ll refer you to…:

The Huckabee Corollary the McCain Corolloary To Berg’s Eleventh Law: The Republican that the media covers most intensively before the nomination for any office will be the one that the liberals know they have the best chance of beating after the nomination, and/or will most cripple the GOP if nominated.

If you’re like me, you looked at the polls “showing” Donald Trump “leading” the GOP field and thought “Huckabee Corollary!”.

Nate Silver – fresh from playing a role in engineering the DFL’s “Bandwagon Effect” in the Minnesota gubernatorial election last year – notices the media blitz on Trump without, I suspect, getting the “Why“:

One of the few pieces of statistical evidence that we can look toward at this early stage of the presidential campaign is the number of media hits that each candidate is receiving. Apart from being interesting unto itself, it’s plausible that this metric has some predictive power. At this point in 2007, Barack Obama and John McCain were receiving the most coverage among the Democratic and Republican candidates respectively, and both won their races despite initially lagging in the polls.

In contrast to four years ago, however, when the relative amount of media coverage was fairly steady throughout the campaign, there have already been some dramatic shifts this year. Sarah Palin’s potential candidacy, for instance, is only receiving about one-fifth as much attention as it did several months ago.

In the past, I’ve usually used Google News to study these questions, but I’ve identified another resource — NewsLibrary.com — that provides more flexibility in search options and more robustness in its coverage. (One problem with counting things on Google is that the number of hits can vary fairly dramatically from day to day, for reasons I don’t entirely understand.)

(Another downside to Google News: it seriously overweights the left).

I’ve counted the number of times on NewsLibrary.com in which the candidate’s name appeared in the lead paragraph of the article, and a select combination of words appeared down in the article body. In particular, I’ve looked for instances in which any combination of the words “president”, “presidential” or “presidency” appeared, as well as any of the words “candidate”, “candidacy”, “campaign”, “nomination” or “primary.”

The idea is to identify cases in which a candidate was the main focus of the article (as opposed to being mentioned in passing) and when the article was about the presidential campaign itself (as opposed to, say, Mr. Trump’s reality show). The technique isn’t perfect — there are always going to be a few “false positives” from out-of-context hits — but it ought to be a reasonably good benchmark for the amount of press attention that each candidate is getting.

And the results?

So far this month, however, Ms. Palin has accounted for just 124 hits out of 1,090 total, or roughly 11 percent. Instead, her place has been taken by Mr. Trump, who has accounted for about 40 percent of the coverage.

The decline in media coverage for Ms. Palin tracks with a decline in her polling numbers. Whereas she was pulling between 15 and 20 percent of the Republican primary vote in polls conducted several months ago, she’s down to about 10 percent in most surveys now.  ¶Mr. Trump, meanwhile, whose media coverage has increased exponentially, has surged in the polls, and is essentially in a three-way tie for the lead with Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee over an average of recent surveys.

Hm.  What do you suppose the odds were that the mainstream media would pump the hell out of a buffoonish cartoon like Trump at the expense of the serious GOP candidates?

After the MN Gubernatorial election we noted that  the “Bandwagon Effect” is known to have an effect on election turnout,  shown in academic studies on the subject.  As studied, it’s a negative effect – people are less likely to turn out for candidates that the media says are getting drubbed in the polls (like the Humphrey Institute’s polling last fall, which showed Emmer near-tie race as a 12 point loss with all-too-convenient timing.

So why would the media not be building up Trump as a “force to be reckoned with”?  It’s a win/win for the Media and the Democrats (pardon the redundancy); as long as Trump is pictured as a contender, GOP candidates have to waste time and money fighting the strawman with the bad combover.  And if by some freak of fate he gets the nomination (he won’t, because he’s no conservative, but let’s run with it) the media will tear him down promptly, because – let’s be honest – that’s what he’s there for.

This blog will be watching the libs/media and their bandwagonning over the next year and a half.  It’ll be a growth industry.

It’s been a running gag among cultural conservatives for the past decade or so; if a drunk Chechen wearing a suicide vest swerves off the road and knocks over a lightpole, the headline will read “SUV DESTROYS CITY PROPERTY”.

And apparently any reference, no matter how oblique, to the “Tea Party” when reporting news is enough to impugn the mass movement that dealt the Democrats their biggest setback in generations last fall.

We ran into this briefly – and comically – last year, when the Minnesota Birkeydependent ran a piece about a “threatening” message that an AFSCME office reported.  On April 15, the day of the Tea Party rally.  From a guy claiming to be a leader in the local Tea Party.  About whom absolutely nobody in the Minnesota Tea Party had ever heard.  Having spoken at (as of last weekend) five of ’em, I claim some authority there.

Anyway – magically, on the eve of the Tea Party, voila, another threatening message…

Officials with Minnesota’s largest public employee union say they have received several threatening phone calls and e-mails in response to their recent “tax the rich” ad campaign.

One voice message left at AFSCME Council 5 headquarters in South St. Paul prompted the union to file a complaint with police.

…from – guess who?:

In the profanity-laced message, a man implied a connection to the tea party movement and a tea party event scheduled for Thursday evening outside of the State Capitol. He also said the union’s days were numbered.

The story doesn’t release the caller’s name.   Or attempt to document in any way the “connection” to the “Tea Party”.

And I’m going to guess he was no more “connected” to the Tea Party than any of the other millions of people who have had enough of Obama and the special interests that float him.

But I suspect that this is going to be an annual tradition, as long as there is a Tea Party; the Twin Cities media dutifully reporting that a big bad tea partier (probably, maybe)  has, er, threatened a union, and they’ve called the police.

Any bets?

I was thinking of an old Soviet-era joke that I remember from high school.  A radio station in Minsk was broadcasting a chat show.  A commentator declared “Minsk is the most beautiful city in all of the Soviet Union”.

A phone call comes on the air. “What do you think about the  rumors that the Americans have a nuclear missile that would wipe out any Soviet city?”

The commentator promptly declared “Smolensk is the most beautiful city in the Soviet Union”.

———-

Kerry Miller at MPR spent an hour this morning talking about the perils of partisanship and the supreme virtue of compromise.

Here’s the blurb:

Depending on your political outlook, Gov. Scott Walker was either showing leadership or over-reaching when taking on the unions. In today’s highly-charged, partisan climate, is it possible for politicians to play to their base without going to extremes?

The interesting bit is the guests:

Now, there’s a balanced panel – not only do we have a progressive from the East Coast, and one from the West, but we have one that works for an academic “progressive” hothouse, and one from the putative “private sector”!

Just saying, MPR – when the entire conversation about “compromise” is framed in terms of “how do we get conservatives to stop acting like conservatives”, and the one about “partisanship” sounds entirely like “why do you conservatives have to disagree wtih us”, we might question your commitment to balance.

Or at least Miller’s.

Just so we’re clear, National Public Radio has raised questions about the editing of James O’Keefe’s piece on NPR’s news coverage being for sale:

One “big warning flag” [Al Tompkins, a senior faculty member for broadcasting and online at the Poynter Institute]  saw in the [edited] tape was the way it made it appear that Schiller had laughed and commented “really, that’s what they said?” after being told that the fake Muslim group advocates for sharia law. In fact, the longer tape shows that Schiller made that comment during an “innocuous exchange” that had nothing to do with the supposed group’s position on sharia law, David reports.

Tompkins also says that O’Keefe’s edited tape ignores the fact that Schiller said “six times … over and over and over again” that donors cannot buy the kind of coverage they want on NPR.

Scott Baker, editor in chief of the conservative news site The Blaze, tells David that after watching the two-hour video he came away with the impression that the NPR executives “seem to be fairly balanced people.”

Well, at least in their approach to covering news, perhaps.

They still don’t like Republicans much:

Still, [NPR spokeswoman Dana Davis Rehm] added, Schiller made some “egregious statements.”

As we said yesterday, those included Schiller calling the Tea Party a “weird evangelical” movement that has helped push the “current Republican Party” to become “fanatically involved in people’s personal lives.”

As Time magazine’s James Poniewozik writes at his Tuned In blog, “the close-up look [at the longer tape] doesn’t let the executive, Ron Schiller, off the hook. But it shows O’Keefe edited the short version of his video to fit his anti-NPR agenda. Explaining why both things can be true at once requires, well, a lot of context.”

If O’Keefe edited his piece to falsely imply that NPR was selling favorable coverage, that’s a bad thing.

But O’Keefe didnt’ have to do anything to coax a voluble anti-conservative opinion out of Schiller.

“It was just Schiller’s personal opinion” is the defense I’ve heard from not a few of NPR’s defenders.

But  O’Keefe’s editing had nothign to do with departed NPR CEO Vivian (“No Relation”) Schiller and her News chief when they  vetted the firing of Juan Williams for appearing on Fox News, over an interpretation of his remarks about Muslims that was so grossly lacking in context as to be a virtual defamation.

Or – given that it was long before O’Keefe entered the public eye – the hand-wringing that the left, the establishment at NPR and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and their various hangers-on over the appointment of two Corporation for Public Broadcasting board members who had donated money to Republicans.  Left-leaning pundits agonized over the “potential for politicization” that the Bush-era appointment might point to…

…in a way that they just seem not to be with NPR’s new CEO-designate, Joyce Slocum – whose donations to Democrats seem not to be a danger to democracy according to those same pundits.

In other words, NPR doesn’t need to be paid to have contempt for conservatives.

Matthew Boyle in the Daily Caller writes about Politico’s Amie Parnes, who covers the Michelle Obama beat…

…where “cover the beat” means “relentlessly flaks for her supposed subject”:

Politico

reporter Amie Parnes is a watchdog, but not in the traditional journalistic sense. Critics say Parnes is a vigilant protector of Michelle Obama’s public image, a beat reporter who acts as a press agent for the official she covers.

Parnes’s fawning coverage of the first lady has inspired Betsy Rothstein of FishbowlDC.com to launch a “Parnes-o-Meter,” which ranks Parnes’s pieces about Michelle Obama on a scale of 1 to 10 kisses. “People have asked me, over and over again, for the past three weeks, ‘Why do you hate Amie Parnes? Why do you have such a personal thing against her?’” Rothstein told The Daily Caller. “The fact is that I’ve never met her. I don’t know her and this isn’t personal. It’s totally professional. I’ve watched her work, I’ve read her work, day in and day out, and there is never anything, not even slightly, critical of the first lady. It’s absurd coverage. As a media reporter, I don’t know how I couldn’t point that out.”

To the leftymedia, criticism equal “hate”.  Fascinating.

Now, please read Boyle’s entire piece; it does a great job of setting up one of the more egregious cases of media bias out there.

But it brings up a fascinating idea; why not adapt the Parnes-O-Meter to covering the regional media?

Why not rate regional media for the soft-balliness (?) of their coverage of Mark Dayton and the DFL?

Rate the coverage on a scale of 1-5 smooches?

I’ll work on some objective (!) criteria.  It’s almost too good not to run with…

You’ve heard the old saying – “the definition of insanity is repeating the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. 

The joke writes itself.  Nearly every election season, Minnesota’s media runs the results of the Star-Tribune Minnesota Poll and the Humprey Institute/MPR Poll on its front pages; front and center on its 6 and 10PM newscasts; up-front in its hourly news bites; in the New York Times; prominently on that big news crawl above Seventh Street in downtown Saint Paul.   To those who don’t dig into the numbers – and that’s probably 99 percent of Minnesota voters – that’s all there is to it.  “Hm.  Looks like Dayton’s winning big!”.

In most elections- especially the close ones – both polls (along with their downmarket stepsibling, the SCSU Poll) show numbers for GOP candidate that beggar the imagination.  The media – the Strib, the TV stations, MPR – run the polls pretty  much without any analysis.  The job of actually fact-checking the polling falls to conservative bloggers – myself, MDE, Ed Morrissey, Scott Johnson and John Hinderaker, Gary Gross, the Dogs, Sheila Kihne and others; poll after poll, election after election, we shout into the storm “the numbers are a joke! Democrats are oversampled to an extent that is not warranted by electoral results we’ve seen in this state in nearly a generation!  Would someone look into this?”

The elections take place.  There is hand-wringing about the inaccuracy of the polls.  Two years pass.  Larry Jacobs and the  Strib release still more polls, repeating precisely the same pathologies, over and over and over.  Forever and ever, amen.  Lather, rinse, repeat.

Now, “journalism” is supposed to be about accuracy and clarity.  About telling the story, and telling it in a way that your sources reinforce your credibility and clarity.  If you are a reporter, and you report a story based on a source’s information, and that information turns out to be wrong, it’s a bit of a vocational black eye.

This morning I asked, rhetorically, “do you think that if a source burned Tom Scheck or Pat Doyle or Rochelle Olson or Rachel Stassen-Berger over and over, year in and year out, by feeding them laughably inaccurate information, not just once or twice but on nearly every story on which they are a key source, would they keep using them as sources?”  Without really serious corroboration, if indeed it could be found?  Ever?  

And yet the regional media not only continues running the Strib and HHH polls, election after election, without any serious question – until after the election, anyway.  Notwithstanding the fact that the Strib’s Minnesota Poll has been very regularly wrong for a generation now.  Notwithstanding the fact that the Humphrey Poll has been even more consistent in its systematic shorting of GOP candidates.  The polls are still treated not only as useful news, but front-page material.

This would prompt a curious person to ask a whooooole lot of questions:

Why do the pollsters continue to generate such a defective product?:  While I focused heavily over the past few days specifically on Gallup’s Frank Newport’s critique of the Humphrey Institute poll, that gives the impression that this is a one-time issue.  And yet both the major media polls have had nearly the same problems, election in, election out, for a generation (or in the case of the Humphrey Institute Poll,  in every major election since 2004).   It’s gotten to the point where I want to stand outside 425 Portland, or outside the Humphrey Institute’s building at the U, and wave a sign about; “It’s the same thing, every time!”.

Why do the media continue to present such a routinely defective product as newsworthy?:  Scott Johnson has been lighting up the “Minnesosta Poll’s” shortcomings for a solid decade now; the Strib’s poll is rarely even close, and performs worse in close elections than in blowouts.  And at the risk of repeating myself, let me repeat myself; the Humphrey Institute poll has underpolled Republicans by an average of nine points.  This past election was distinguished from the previous years’ ineptitude only in degree, not in concept.

Does it never occur to our “watchdogs” and “gatekeepers” to look into this?  Wasn’t “insatiable curiosity” once a pre-requisite for being a reporter?

Do the editors at the Strib, the PiPress, KARE, MPR, WCCO and the rest of the regional mainstream media genuinely consider “polls are a snapshot in time” an excuse for decades worth of a pattern of inaccuracy, not only in polling technique but in their own coverage of elections?

If a city councilman is caught cashing checks to herself, would saying “it’s just a snapshot in time!” get the Strib to call their dogs off?

Appearance Of…Something?: I’ve said it before; I’m not a fundamentally conspiracy-minded person.  I don’t necessarily believe that the media is involved in a conscious, considered conspiracy to short conservative candidates in close elections.

Still – given that…:

• There is no randomness to the pattern – the errors always short the GOP, and favor the DFL, and…
• The pattern has been unchanged for over two decades, and…
• There is evidence to suggest that the “Bandwagon Effect” can be driven by misleading poll results, especially with the “swing” voters that make all the difference in close races…

…I’ll ask again: if the Humphrey Institute (whose institutional sympathies lean definitively left-of-center) and the Strib (ditto) wanted to create a system that would help tip close-call contests toward the DFL, how would it be any different than the system they’ve developed?

Not accusing.  Just asking.

Contrary to the impression some wrote about on various blogs, I never worked for the Emmer campaign.  Oh, I did a fair amount of writing about Emmer’s bid for governor – I thought he had what it took to be the best governor we’ve had in a long time, and I was a supporter from long before he actually declared his intent to run.  I volunteered a lot of time, and a lot of this blog’s space, to fight against the sleaziest, most toxic smear campaign in recent Minnesota electoral history, and I do believe the better man lost this election.

But I never got any money for it.

What I did get – although not to an extent that would make a Tom Scheck or a Rachel Stassen-Berger in any way jealous – was a certain amount of access.  I heard things.

One of the things I heard from sources inside the Emmer campaign, especially during the long, dry, advertising-dollar-free summer before the primaries, when all three DFL contenders curiously spent their entire ad budgets sniping at Emmer, and the media played dutiful stenographers for Alliance for a Better Minnesota’s smear campaign, was that the Emmer campaign had its work cut out for it.  In late July and early August, a source inside the Emmer campaign, speaking on MI-5-level deep background, told me the internal polls showed Emmer trailing by 12 points.  It wasn’t good news, certainly – but it was early in the race, it was a byproduct of being outspent roughly 16:1 to that point, and it was just part of doing business.   “We gotta pick up six points, and Dayton’s gotta lose six”, the source told me, as the campaign dug its way out of “Waitergate”.

I observed to the source that that should have been nothing new for Emmer; he’d come back from a bigger margin in the previous nine months or so, from being way back in the pack at the Central Committee straw poll about this time last year, where Marty Seifert won by a margin many considered insurmountable.

The source expressed confidence it could be done.

He was, statistically, exactly right. Emmer brought the race back from a 12 point blowout to a near-tie, with numbers that pretty steadily improved – according to the party’s own internal polling.

Steadily?

On October 11, I held a “Bloggers For Emmer” event at an undisclosed location in the western subs.  It had been ten busy weeks since my off-the-record conversation with my source in the campaign.  An Emmer functionary told me – off the record – that it was now a four point race.  

A week later, within ten days of the election, the same internal poll said the race was a statistical dead heat.

Then came the last-minute hit polls from the Humphrey Instititute, the Strib and Saint Cloud State – after which Emmer released his internal polling, which was reinforced by a Survey USA poll that more or less reinforced the internal polls’ results.

And then came the election.

Last week, David Brauer at the MinnPost interviewed Emmer campaign manager Cullen Sheehan.  As part of the piece, he graphed the respective polls: Emmer’s internal polling (orange), the Strib poll (wide dashes) and the HHH poll (dots), showing the indicated size of the Dayton lead.

Graph used by permission of the MinnPost

Brauer:

Although “internal numbers” often become propagandistic leaks, Sheehan insists the data was not for public pre-election consumption. Though he wound up releasing the most favorable result during the campaign, it proved prescient, and two independent pollsters subsequently showed similar results.

And while Brauer points out that internal numbers “aren’t holy” – and many leftybloggers openly guffawed when Sheehan released them – the GOP’s internal numbers have a long record of accuracy, in my experience.  In 2002, when the Strib poll had Roger Moe measuring the drapes in the mansion, a GOP source leaked me internal polling showing that Pawlenty was tied and rising.  And internal polling released to a group of bloggers a month before the election showed Chip Cravaack pulling close to Jim Oberstar; numbers that the campaign asked be kept off the record showed that with “leaners”, Cravaack was actually leading.

So for all the leftyblogs’ caterwauling about “push polling”, the GOP’s internal polls – as seen both publicly and behind the scenes – called things as they were.  There’s a reason for that; parties need to accurate polling to help them allocate scarce resources effectively.  The DFL has not released their internal polling – but the Dayton campaign’s behavior indicates to me that they also saw Emmer’s late surge, leading them to re-roll-out the “Drunk Driving Ad” (the closest the Dayton campaign ever came to a coherent policy statement, with full irony intended).

But neither sides’ internal polling is affiliated with a major media outlet.  The Strib, Minnesota Public Radio and MinnPost all have symbiotic relationships with Princeton, the Humphrey Institute and Saint Cloud State, respectively (though to be accurate the MinnPost only paid for three questions in the SCSU poll, and those were, according to Brauer, on ranked-choice voting).  Those relationships, presumably, exist so that the news outlets can get “their” results out to the public first.

No matter how they’re arrived at, or so it seems.

Brauer confirms after the fact what my sources in the campaign told me, off the record, at the time; it was a real numerical rollercoaster ride:

Although “internal numbers” often become propagandistic leaks, Sheehan insists the data was not for public pre-election consumption. Though he wound up releasing the most favorable result during the campaign, it proved prescient, and two independent pollsters subsequently showed similar results.

“It really is, internally, a compass,” Sheehan says of the campaign’s polling.

Emmer’s own numbers show a candidate trailing — sometimes badly — for nearly the entire race.

On July 28 — three weeks after Emmer’s interminable “tip credit” debacle — the Republican trailed Dayton by 11 points. Ironically, the Star Tribune poll — which Republicans say overstates DFL support — had it closer: Dayton plus-10.

It was a demonstrable fact that the Strib poll oversampled DFL voters by a big margin – but that’s a poll-technique discussion to be held some other time.

In the wake of the double-digit gap, Sheehan took over as campaign manager. But by early October, the internal numbers had barely budged: Emmer was still down 7. A Strib survey taken a week or so earlier showed the Republican down 9 — again, pretty close to what the campaign was seeing.

Finally, on Oct. 13, Emmer got his first great inside news: he was only down 1. But the next media poll (SurveyUSA/KSTP) had him down 5, and an Oct. 18 internal poll repeated that number. It was two weeks before Election Day.

And then came the Big Three media polls, one after the other – the Strib, SCSU and the Humphrey polls – showing Emmer 9, 10 and 12 points down, respectively.  At which point Sheehan opted to release the internal numbers – which were shortly reinforced by SUSA.

Sheehan:

“At that point [right before the election – the polls on which I’ve focused throughout this series], undecided voters are making up their minds and supporters are getting anxious, having seen 7 down, 10 down and 12 down,” Sheehan says. “It impacts fundraising and volunteers. It’s definitely not the only factor, but it is a factor.”

Sheehan, now the Minnesota GOP Senate caucus chief of staff, is a Republican, but Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s pollster feels similarly. Reid’s internal numbers proved better than media polls predicting his opponent would win.

Says Sheehan, “The point I am making is that outside public polls have an impact on campaigns — ultimately, some impact on eventual outcome of campaigns, especially in close races.”

At least one media outlet agreed even before the results were known. This year, the Star Tribune declined to do its traditional final-weekend poll. A key reason, editor Nancy Barnes told me, is that “a poll can sometimes influence the outcome of an election.”

Sheehan’s plea? Withhold questionable numbers. “I’m under no illusion that public polls will cease, but I do think news organizations have a responsibility to ask themselves, when they get their results, if they really believe they’re accurate,” he says.

I’ve met Sheehan not a few times.  Great guy.  Big future in politics.  Now, I’m not sure if he’s ever read this series; if he has, I’m sure he needs to be diplomatic.  He’s gotta get along with the regional media.

But the fact remains that the closer the race got, the farther off-the-beam the Strib and HHH polls swerved.

Just the same as they do in practically every election, especially the close ones.

So Sheehan has a point; the news media should treat suspicious polls as they would a source that’s burned them. 

Seriously – can you imagine Erik Black or Bill Salisbury or David Brauer putting a story on the front page (or “page”) based on the uncorroborated word of a source that had burned them, over and over again?  As in, not even close, but really, really embarassingly burned?

And the Strib and Humphrey Polls have burned the regional media – over and over and over again.

Presuming, of course, that accuracy is what they’re shooting for.

More later today.

Writing in defense of the Humphrey Institute Poll – which indicated our tie governor’s race was headed for a 12 point blowout – Professor Larry Jacobs says:

Careful review of polls in the field conducting interviews during the same period indicates that the MPR/HHH estimate for Emmer (see Figure 2) was within the margin of sampling error of 3 of the 4 other polls but that it was also on the “lower bound” after accounting for random sampling error. (Its estimate was nearly identical to that of MinnPost’s poll with St. Cloud.)

Which showed the race a ten point blowout for Dayton.

Jacobs is, in effect, saying “yeah, our poll was a hash – but so was everyone else’s”.

This pattern is not “wrong” given the need to account for the margin of sampling error, but it is also not desirable. As part of our usual practice, the post-election review investigated whether there were systematic issues that could be addressed.

Research suggests three potential explanations for the MPR/HHH estimate for Emmer; none revealed problems after investigation.

Indeed.

Here are the three areas the Humphrey Institute investigated:

Weighting: First, it made sense to examine closely the weighting of the survey data in general and the weighting used to identify voters most likely to vote. Weighting is a standard practice to align the poll data with known demographic and other features such as gender and age that are documented by the U.S. Census. (Political party affiliation is a product of election campaigns and other political events and is not widely accepted by survey professionals as a reliable basis for weighting responses.)

Our own review of the data did not reveal errors that, for instance, might inflate the proportion of Democrats or depress that of Republicans who are identified as likely to vote. To make sure our review did not miss something, we solicited the independent advice of well-regarded statistician, Professor Andrew Gelman at Columbia University in New York City, who we had not previously worked with or personally met. Professor Gelman concluded that the weighting was “in line with standard practice” and confirmed our own evaluation.

“And an expert said everything’s hunky dory!”

Our second investigation was of what are known as “interviewer effects” based on research indicating that the race of the interviewer may impact respondents.11 (Forty-four percent of the interviewers for the MPR/HHH poll were minorities, mostly African American.) In particular, we searched for differences in expressed support for particular candidates based on whether the interviewer was Caucasian or minority. This investigation failed to detect statistically significant differences.

And the third was the much higher participation in the poll from respondents in the “612” area code – Minneapolis and its very near ‘burbs.  Jacobs (with emphasis added by me):

When analyzing a poll to meet a media schedule, it is not always feasible to look in-depth at internals.

It’s apparently more important to make the 5PM news than to have useful, valid numbers.

With the time and ability that this review made possible, we discovered in retrospect that individuals called in the 612 area code were more prone to participate than statewide — 81% in the 612 area as compared to 67% statewide in the October poll.13 Given that Democratic candidates traditionally fare well among voters in the 612 area code, the higher cooperation rate among likely voters in the 612 area code may explain why the estimate of Emmer’s support by MPR/HHH was slightly lower than those by other polls conducted at around the same time. This is the kind of lesson that can be closely monitored in the future and addressed to improve polling quality. 

Except we bloggers have been “closely monitoring” this for years.  It’s been pointed out in the past; on this very blog, I have been writing about this phenomenon since 2004 at the very latest.  Liberals looooove to answer polls.  Conservatives seem  not to.

That Jacobs claims to be just discovering this now, after all these years, is…surprising?

Frank Newport at Gallup critiques Jacobs’ report:

The authors give the cooperation rate for 612 residents compared to the cooperation rate statewide. The assumption appears to be that this led to a disproportionately high concentration of voters in the sample from the 612 area code. A more relevant comparison would be the cooperation rate for 612 residents compared to all those contacted statewide in all area codes other than 612. Still more relevant would be a discussion of the actual proportion of all completed interviews in the final weighted sample that were conducted in the 612 area code (and other area codes) compared to the Census estimate of the proportion of the population of Minnesota living in the 612 area code, or the proportion of votes cast in a typical statewide election from the 612 area code, or the proportion of the initial sample in the 612 area code. These are typical calculations. The authors note that residents in the 612 area code can be expected, on average, to skew disproportionately for the Democratic candidate in a statewide race. An overrepresentation in the sample of voters in the 612 area code could thus be expected to move the overall sample estimates in a Democratic direction.

That Jacobs finds an excuse for failing to weight for higher participation in a city that is right up there with Portland and Berkeley as a liberal hotbed would be astounding, if it weren’t the Humphrey Institute we’re talking about.

The authors do not discuss the ways in which region was controlled in the survey process, if any. The authors make it clear that they did not weight the sample by region. This is commonly done in state polls, particularly in states where voting outcomes can vary significantly by region, as apparently is the case in Minnesota.

Summary:  The HHH poll is sloppy work.

Professor Larry Jacobs – by far the most-quoted non-elected person in Minnesota – defends the Humphrey Institute Poll:

Differences between polls may not be substantively significant as illustrated by the case of MinnPost’s poll with St. Cloud State, which showed Dayton with a 10 point lead, and the MPR/HHH poll, which reported a 12 point lead.

The “margin of sampling error,” which is calculated based on uniform formulas used by all polling firms, creates a cone around the estimate of each candidate’s support, reflecting the statistical probability of variation owing to random sampling.2 The practical effect is that the results of the MinnPost poll with St. Cloud State and MPR/HHH are, in statistical terms, within range of each other. Put simply, the 2 points separating them may reflect random variation and may well not be a statistically meaningful difference.

What might be a “statistically meaningful difference” is that Survey USA and Rasmussen all came much, much closer – as in, one-third to one-quarter of the Strib, HHH and St Cloud polls – to getting the actual election right, and tracked much closer to the GOP’s internal polling, which turned out to be dead-nut accurate (as we’ll see tomorrow).

Figure 2 creates a zone of sampling error around estimates of support for Dayton and Emmer by the five media polls completed during the last two weeks of the campaign.3 In terms of the estimates of Dayton’s support, the MPR/HHH poll is within the range of all four other polls. Take home point: its estimate of Dayton’s support was consistent with all other polls.

Well, no.  It was consistent with the other polls who have developed a reputation for inaccuracy that inevitably favors the DFL.  The other polls – Survey USA, Rasmussen, Laurence – were not consistent with the Humphrey poll at all.

Frank Newport of Gallup responds to this:

It is unclear from the report how much the write‐up of results from the October 21‐25 MPR/HHH poll emphasized the margin of error range around the point estimates. Although this is not part of their recommendation, if the authors feel strongly that the margin of effort around point estimates should be given more attention, future reports could include more emphasis on a band or range of estimated support, rather than the point estimates.

In other words, if the Humphrey Poll is really a range with no particular confidence in any particular number within the range, publicize the range.

But that’s not what the Humphrey Institute, or the media, led with just before the election.  It was “DAYTON LEADS BY 12”.  Not “Dayton leads by 8 to 16, maybe, sorta”.

The distinction might make a difference.

This is generally not done in pre‐election polling, under the assumption that the point estimate is still the most probable population parameter. Any education of the public on the meaning of margin of errors and ranges and comparisons of the margins of errors surrounding other polls is an admirable goal. It does, however, again raise the question of the purpose of and value of pre‐election polls if they are used only to estimate broad ranges of where the population stands. This topic is beyond the scope of this review.

In other words – if you take Jacobs at his word, then there’s nothing really newsworthy about the HHH poll.

Do you suppose they’ll stick with that line in the runup to the 2012 election?

I’ve been raising kids for a long time.  Before that, I grew up around a bunch of them.  Indeed, I was one myself, once.

And I know now as I knew then the same thing that every single person who watches Cops knows, instinctively; if you think someone did something, and their response is “you can’t prove it”, it’s the same as an admission of guilt.

Oh, it doesn’t stand up in court – and it’s probably a good thing.

And in the rarified world of academics – and its poor, profoundly handicapped accidental offspring, political public opinion polling – I’m going to suggest it works the same way.

If there is a poll that is, year in and year out, just as ludicrous as the Humphrey and Strib polls, it’s the Saint Cloud State University poll.  I haven’t heretofore included it in my “Great Poll Scam” series, because it’s sort of out of sight and out of mind.

But in David Brauer’s interview with Emmer campaign manager Cullen Sheehan, the director of the SCSU poll – which is done in conjunction with the MinnPost – a fellow named Stephen Frank, tips us off; he concludes…:

Frank says. “Campaign managers like to find excuses rather than looking at their candidate or performance. Do you think if we stopped [publishing results] others would — or the candidates would and the latter won’t go public or only partially public?”

True, to a point.

But he began the statement by saying:

“Please show me one credible study that shows people change their mind on the basis of a poll,”

On the one hand:  “You can’t proooooooooove we did it!”

On the other hand – allow me to introduce you to Dr. Albert Mehrabian, who published a study entitled “Effects of Poll Reports on Voter Preferences”

From the abstract summary, with emphasis added:

Results of two experimental studies described in this article constituted clear experimental demonstration of how polls influence votes. Findings showed that voters tended to vote for those who they were told were leading in the polls; furthermore, that these poll-driven effects on votes were substantial.

How substantial?  I don’t know.  As I write this, it’s 5AM, and I have no way of getting to the University of Minnesota library to find a copy of Journal of Applied Social Psychology (Volume 28).  But I will.

But Mehrabian noted a decided “bandwagon effect” in voter responses to poll results.

Effects of polls on votes tended to be operative throughout a wide spectrum of initial (i.e., pre-poll) voter preferences ranging from undecided to moderately strong. There was a limit on poll effects, however, as noted in Study Two: Polls failed to influence votes when voter preferences were very strong to begin with.

Bingo.

I’d have voted for Tom Emmer even if he did finish 12 points back, as the Humphrey Institute suggested.  Or ten points out of the game, as Frank’s survey (which I ridiculed in this space), or thirty points back.  But then, nobody really doubted that.

But people who don’t live and breathe politics?  That’s another story – says Dr. Mehrabian.

Additional findings of considerable interest showed that effects of polls were stronger for women than for men and also were stronger for more arousable (i.e., more emotional) and more submissive (or less dominant) persons.

Which would be important, in a year when the DFL was worried about women flaking away from Dayton, and moderates being drawn (successfully!) to the Tea Party.

Wouldn’t it?

Especially noteworthy is my discussion of similarities and differences between the study methods and real- life political campaigns beginning with the middle paragraph on page 2128 (“Overall, results …).

I’ll dredge up a copy of Mehrabian’s study (unless any of you academics out there can shoot me a pointer…).

Mehrabian was cited in this study of the subject – “Social information and bandwagon behaviour in voting: an economic experiment“, by Ivo Bischoff and Henrik Egbert, a pair of German economists; the paper isn’t about the bandwagon effect – but it touches on it pretty heavily (all emphases are added by me):

The political science literature contains a number of empirical studies that test for bandwagon behaviour in voting. A first group of studies analyses data from large-scale opinion polls conducted in times of upcoming elections or on election days. The evidence from these studies is mixed (see the literature reviews in Marsh, 1984; McAllister and Studlar, 1991; Nadeau et al., 1997). One essential shortcoming of these studies is that it is very difficult to disentangle the complex interrelations between voting intentions, poll results and other pieces of information that drive both of the former simultaneously (Marsh, 1984; Morwitz and Pluzinski, 1996; Joslyn, 1997). Avoiding these difficulties, a second group of studies are based on experiments. Mehrabian (1998) presents two studies on bandwagon behaviour in voting. In his first study, he elicits the intended voting behaviour among Republicans in their primaries for the presidential election in 1996. He finds that the tendency to prefer Bob Dole over Steve Forbes depends on the polls presented to the voters. Voters are more likely to vote for Dole when he leads in the opinion poll compared to the situation with Forbes leading. The second study involves students from the University of California, Los Angeles. These are asked to express their approval to proposals for different modes of testing their performance: a midterm exam or an extra-credit paper. Mehrabian (1998) uses bogus polls in his studies. Results show that bogus polls do not influence the answers when subjects have clear and strong preferences. However, bogus polls have an impact when preference relations are weak. In this case, bandwagon behaviour in voting is observed. Next to Mehrabian (1998), there are a number of others experimental studies that find evidence for bandwagon behaviour in voting (Laponce 1966; Fleitas 1971; Ansolabehere and Iyengar 1994; Goidel and Shields, 1994; Mehrabian 1998).

It’s not an open-and-shut, according to Bischoff and Egbert – but there is evidence to suggest that the “Bandwagon Effect” exists, and that polling drives it.

Is it possible that the learned Professors Larry Jacobs or Stephen Frank are unaware of this?  Certainly.

Given both polls’ lock-step consistency, especially at under-polling GOP support in close elections, where people with weak initial preferences – people whose “preference relations are weak”, as Bischoff and Egbert put it, which might well be as good a good description for “independents” and “swing voters” as I’ve seen –  it’s worth a look, though.

More from Dr. Mehrabian in the near future.

In reading Professor Larry Jacobs’ defense of the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute poll – which always underpolls Republicans in its immediate pre-election survey, by an average of six points, with the tendency even more exaggerated in close races – Jacobs writes (with emphasis added):

Appropriately interpreting Minnesota polls as a snapshot is especially important because President Barack Obama’s visit on October 23rd very likely created what turned out to be a temporary surge for Dayton. Obama’s visit occurred in the middle of the interviewing for the MPR/HHH poll; it was the only survey in the field when the President spoke on October 23rd at a rally widely covered by the press. Our write-up of the MPR/HHH poll emphasized that the President appeared to substantially increase support for Dayton and suggested that this bump might last or might fade to produce a closer race:

Well.  That kinda covers all the possibilities, doesn’t it?

Effect of Obama Visit: Obama’s visit to Minnesota on October 23rd and the resulting press coverage did increase support for Dayton. Among the 379 likely Minnesota voters who were surveyed on October 21st and 22nd (the 2 days before Obama’s visit), 40% support Dayton. By contrast, among the 145 likely Minnesota voters who were surveyed on October 24th and 25th (the 2 days after Obama’s visit) 53% support Dayton. This increase in support for Dayton could be a trend that will hold until Election Day, or it could be a temporary blip that will dissipate in the final days of the campaign and perhaps diminish his support.

Did you catch that?

Obama’s presence in the city caused Daytons’ numbers to boom by five points (if you take the HHH’s numbers at face value, something no well-informed person ever does), and then lurch downward by a dozen by election day?  The presence or absence of Barack Obama is responsible for one out of eight Minnesota voters changing their mind and changing it back inside of a week?

Obama’s impact in temporarily inflating Dayton’s lead is a vivid illustration of the importance of using polls as a snapshot.

No.  The HHH polls’ impact in temporarily inflating Dayton’s lead is vivid illustraiton of how these polls need to disregarded or abandoned!.

Indeed, according to the MPR/HHH poll, Dayton’s lead before Obama’s visit was 8 points – nearly identical to the Star Tribune’s lead at nearly the same point in time (7 points). Treating polls as snapshots, then, is especially important when a major event may artificially impact a poll’s results or, as in the case of the MPR/HHH poll, there were a large number of voters who were undecided (about 1 out of 6 voters) or were considering the possibility of shifting from a third party candidate to the Democratic or Republican candidate.

Read another way:  “They’re snapshots, so we can’t be held accountable.  But keep the funding and recognition coming anyway”.

The take-home point: polls are only a snapshot of what can be a fast moving campaign as events intervene and voters reach final decisions. Polls conducted closest to Election Day are most likely to approximate the actual vote tally precisely because they are capturing the changing decisions of actual voters.

Newport dipolmatically notes the real “take-home point”:

The authors raise the issue of the impact of President Obama’s visit to Minnesota on October 23rd. The authors note, and apparently reported when the poll was released, that interviews conducted October 24th and 25th as part of the MPR/HHH poll were more Democratic in voting intention than those conducted before the Obama visit. It is certainly true that “real world” events can affect the voting intentions of the electorate. In this instance, if the voting intentions of Minnesota voters were affected by the President’s visit, the effect would apparently have been short‐lived, given the final outcome of voting. The authors do not mention that the SurveyUSA poll also overlapped the Obama visit by at least one day. It is unclear from the report if there is other internal evidence in the survey that could be used to shed light on the Obama visit, including Obama job approval and 2008 presidential voting.

Up next – at noon – what effect do bogus polls really have on voters?

I was reading Larry Jacobs’ defense of the Humphrey Institute’s shoddy work this past election.

His first point in defense is that polls are “a snapshot in time”:

Polls do not offer a “prediction” about which candidate “will” win. Polls are only a snapshot of one point in time. The science of survey research rests on interviewing a random sample to estimate opinion at a particular time. Survey interview methods provide no basis for projecting winners in the future.

So far so good.

How well a poll’s snapshot captures the thinking of voters at a point in time can be gleamed [sic] from the findings of other polls taken during the same period. Figure 1 shows that four polls were completed before the final week of the campaign when voters finalized their decisions.

I read this bit, and thought immediately of Eric Cartman playing Glenn Beck in South Park last season; disclaiming loathsome inflammatory statements with a simple “I’m just asking questions…”

Frank Newport at Gallup responded to this particular claim:

[Jacobs and his co-author, Joanne Miller] by discussing what they term a misconception about survey research, namely that polls are predictions of election outcomes rather than snapshots of the voting intentions of the electorate at one particular point in time. The authors present the results of five polls conducted in the last month of the election. The spread in the Democratic lead across the five polls ranged from 0 to 12. The authors note that the SurveyUSA poll was the closest to the election and closest to the actual election outcome. At the same time, the MPR/HHH poll was the second closest to Election Day and reported the highest Democratic margin. Another poll conducted prior to the MPR/HHH poll showed a 3‐point margin for the Democratic candidate.

Emmer’s internal poll showed a dead heat.  More on that later on this week.

Newport, with empasis from me:

The authors in essence argue that the accuracy of any poll conducted more than a few days before Election Day is unknowable, since there is no external validation of the actual voting intentions of the population at any time other than Election Day. This is true, but raises the broader question of the value of polls conducted prior to the final week of the Election – a discussion beyond the scope of the report or this review of the report.

By inference, Newport is indicating that a great enough number of voters make up their mind right before election day as to make pre-election polling essentially pointless.

Or is it?

Polling does affect peoples’ choices in elections; people don’t go to the polls when they know their candidate is going to become a punch line the next day; donors don’t turn out for races they are pretty sure are doomed.

And as I showed a few weeks ago, while Jacobs acknowledges that his poll is just a “snapshot” of numbers that may or may not have any bearing on the election itself, we noted a few weeks back that the Humphrey Poll’s results themselves are less “snapshot” than “slide show”; they have a coherent theme.  Election in, election out, they short the GOP, especially in tight elections.  Every single significant election, no exceptions.  Tight GOP wins (2006 Gubernatorial), comfy Democrat wins (2008 Presidential), squeakers (2008 Senate, 2010 Gubernatorial), every single one, without any exception, without the faintest hint of random “noise” that might indicate some random nature to the pattern, the HHH poll systematically shorts the GOP.

Given the completely non-random nature of this pattern – every election, no exceptions – there are three logical explanations:

• The Humphrey Institute genuinely believes in the soundness of its polling methodology, which systematically (in the purest definition of the word) shorts GOP representation.
• The Humphrey Institute is unable to change its methodology, or is structurally incapable of learning from its mistakes.
• The Humphrey Institute is just fine with the poll’s inaccuracies, because it serves an unstated purpose.

To read Jacobs’ defense, you’d think…:

• …that there’s nothing – nothing! – the HHH can do about fixing the inaccuracies of its “snapshot”, and…
• …it’s all a matter of timing.

As we see elsewhere in the coverage of the Humphrey (and Strib) polls, both are false.

More later this week.

The Twin Cities’ media and academic establishment is starting to try to unpack the disaster of their polling efforts this past election cycle.

Minnesota Public Radio has done us the service of printing both the Humphrey Institute’s Larry Jacobs’ defense of the Humphrey Institute poll and a counter from Frank Newport of Gallup Polling. And David Brauer of the MinnPost does some excellent coverage, including a revealing interview with Cullen Sheehan, who was Tom Emmer’s campaign manager, with some rare insights into what a complete crock of used food Jacobs’ explanation is.

I’ll be trying to unpack this over the course of the coming week.