In a bizarre perversion of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s inspirational platitude, the only thing today’s Minnesota DFL Party has to offer is fear itself.

The DFL (and its chanting points repeater blogs MNPublius, mnpACT and Minnesota “Progressive” Project, among others, not to mention the regional mainstream media) are tossing about the figure “$6.2 Billion” as the defict the next Administration and Legislature will need to deal with.

This, of course, is the first step in the Left’s big-government-through-fear playbook:

1. Note a gap between planned spending and available revenue.
2. Warn of the “Service” cuts involved in cutting planned spending.
3. Ram that warning home with threats to gut police and fire departments, along with draconian cuts among teachers (while, mysteriously, leaving administators, pensions, convention and visitors bureaux, human rights offices and other such waste untouched) if politicians at all levels don’t raise the revenue needed by any means necessary – which means, inevitably, tax hikes.

As Tom Emmer pointed out over and over during his gubernatorial campaign, it was nonsense, of course.  The “budget” against which revenue left a “deficit” was not a “budget”, it was an “autopilot” adjustment of the existing budget based on increasing existing “services” by the amount the DFL-dominated bureaucracy says they’ll need to be increased.  It’s like setting a family budget according to your kids’ Christmas wish lists.

Gary Gross at LFR breaks it down (with emphasis added):

…what’s being called a $5,000,000,000 deficit is based on last biennium’s budget tails, which were wildly oversized vs. the projected revenue. According to the figure from the campaign trail, Minnesota is projected to take in almost $33,000,000,000 compared with $30,700,000,000 for the current biennium.

When omnibus spending bills are put together, the spreadsheet contains the amount that will be spent for that biennium and the amount that they’d like to spend in the next biennium. The second biennium request is called a budget tail. It’s what the MMB people are required to use for their budget projections. It isn’t something that must be spent.

The media don’t tell you this because – well, I’m not sure.  Maybe they figure that everyone is a government wonk and they already know all this. 

The DFL and its chanting-points-bots won’t you because, again, all they have to offer is fear.   And because an ignorant citizenry is a DFL citizenry.

It’s rare that they spend what the tails call for. In fact, the legislature can just as easily choose to spend significantly less. In fact, I suspect that’s what will happen, partially because Republicans have a number of reforms that will save significant amounts of money, starting with King Banaian’s reform to ZBB and Steve Gottwalt’s Healthy Minnesota Plan.

Those 2 reforms will save Minnesota taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars this biennium.

Your mission this next month, before the next session (which starts on January 3, a month from today): when you hear your neighbors and co-workers worrying about “the six billion dollar deficit”, set them straight.  And tell them to call their Reps and Senators; the GOP ones need the encouragement to do the right thing; the DFL ones need to know that the long electoral knives of last autumn aren’t nearly done yet.

Just you remember when any liberal calls any conservative “extremist” for any reason short of, y’know, showing actual extremist activity, that these are the people the DFL is running for office:

Minnesota Secretary of State Mark Ritchie is regarded as a “non-party friend” by the Communist Party USA.

So highly does the Communist Party regard Mr. Ritchie, that he has been allowed to attend an high level “not to be publicized” Party meeting in Minneapolis.

Remember the fit the left threw over Todd Palin’s flirtation with a group that advocated – academically – Alaskan secession?:

Ritchie and three of the Communists had just returned from the “Battle in Seattle” – the mass riots that broke out around the World Trade Organization meeting in that city.

Though he was an official U.S. delegate to the W.T.O. meeting, Ritchie gloats that the rioting and protests “stopped the WTO,” and that “It is a tremendous victory”.

I’m not the first to run this story.  But apparently the regional media was too busy digging through Tom Emmer’s resume to bother with Mark Ritchie’s past.

Especially his past with groups that enshrine the ideal that the ends justify the means.

(Via the Random Candice, who really needs to attend the next MOB party)

Franken and Klobuchar vote for pork:

Today’s cloture vote on an amendment from Sen. Coburn to ban earmarks from legislation in the U.S. Senate failed while both of Minnesota’s Senators voiced their lack of concern over pork-barrel spending by voting “no”. A similar measure was passed recently by the House of Representatives and the Coburn motion would have banned earmark spending from being attached to bills through 2013.

Are they- especially A-Klo – banking that the electoral climate will swing back to mindless Obamamania by 2012?   That next year’s tax hikes will leave people unperturbed, even here in Minnesota?

Or is the spell of boundless power to spend other peoples’ money that powerful?

This email, from a GOP election recount-watcher, has been making the rounds of local conservative activists.  I’m keeping the writer’s name off the record for now. 

Emphasis is added by me:

Well, it’s been a good (better) day today here at Hennepin County for the recount. Lots of notable errors in judgment…

For instance, we found one precinct with ALL Dayton ballots challenged (103 total) that appeared to be a “mass” group of blank ballots run thru without a judge’s signature – all in a row. Shows how easily certain folks of a party’s persuasion can cheat so easily – and have it counted?

Let’s repeat that for those of you who glaze over:  103 votes, run through in a group, without a judge’s signature, apparently consecutively.

Whew.  Good things the Supreme Court ruled that we don’t need to reconcile vote totals against signatures, much less investigate our whole rotten system!

It will certainly (still) be an uphill challenge, but a worthwhile one. There are so many debatable and questionable ballots – it should concern all.

Of course there are.

Which is the whole, sole, entire reason the DFL/media have started the “Frivolous Challenge” drumbeat.

The REAL question and problem being anticipated is the ‘gross’ discrepancy statewide via ‘reconciliation’ of the precincts. I’m told there are a LOT of precincts statewide that don’t reconcile their registered voter lists (count) with the number of actual ballots cast… 8,700 doesn’t appear to be a lot of difference for 87 counties with this problem.

All for today…

But there will be more.

Remember – whenever lefties attack conservatives practices or ethics, it’s to cover up their own, er, shortcomings.

Katherine Kersten – just about the only decent columnist at the Strib these days – notes the bleeding obvious and, of course, Berg’s Seventh rearing its head:

Since Nov. 2, we’ve heard lots of grumbling from Minnesota Democrats. In a year of unprecedented GOP gains across America, they’re not satisfied that their candidates won every statewide office in our state (subject to a recount in the governor’s race).

DFLers, it seems, are sore that they didn’t win the Minnesota House and Senate as well — completing their sweep. They don’t seem to grasp that the tide that washed through the Minnesota Legislature was a nationwide phenomenon, as voters shouted “enough” to a Democrat-led glut of taxes, spending and deficits. Today, Republicans hold more legislative seats across the country than at any time since 1928.

DFLers should be counting their blessings. Instead, from their blinkered perspective, the GOP’s capture of the Minnesota Legislature appears aberrant and dreadful. And they’ve found a bogeyman to blame: Minnesota businesses. Their gripe seems twofold. First, business, through independent groups like the Coalition of Minnesota Businesses, spent too much — i.e., “bought and paid for” the Legislature. And, second, business groups unconscionably exploited voters with negative advertising.

Kersten caught it.

I caught it.

A good chunk of Minnesota’s voters caught it.

The DFL doesn’t want people to catch it (emphasis added):

We hear this so much that the reality comes as a surprise: Minnesota Democrats and their allies actually outspent Republicans and their allies in 2010 roughly 2 to 1, though final totals won’t be known for some time.

The Senate DFL caucus raised four times more than the Senate GOP caucus, and the House DFL caucus raised two times more than its GOP counterpart. The DFL state party raised over three times more than the state GOP. Mark Dayton raised more than one and a half times what Tom Emmer did.

But Dayton, the DFL and their benefactors, just don’t want you to know that:

Contrary to the DFL mantra, voters’ attention to business groups’ message was perfectly logical. On Nov. 2, the No. 1 issue was jobs — how to grow them, how to keep them here, and how to attract new, job-creating businesses to our state…Without business’ involvement, Minnesota’s electoral field would largely have been left to Democrats and their biggest donors: public employee unions such as Education Minnesota, AFSCME and SEIU, and Indian tribes with big-bucks casino interests.

Look for a huge PR and media campaign against corporate and business spending, including solemn “analysis” pieces at the Strib and MPR.

When I saw some of the regional DFL talking points bots tweeting that “Pawlenty pardoned a sex criminal!”, I figured this has got to be about as accurate as every other DFL hit meme this past six months.

And having read  the Strib’s telling of the story, I see I was right.  But then, when it comes to the DFL inflating “dirt” about Republicans far beyond anything the facts would justify, the Dems are always in a league of their own.   We saw it with last week’s Hackbarth

Two years ago, Gov. Tim Pawlenty and two other officials pardoned Jeremy Giefer, who had served a short time in jail in the 1990s as a young man for having sex with a 14-year-old girlfriend whom he later married.

So far so good.  Giefer, then 19, got his girlfriend, then 14, pregnant.  It’s illegal, of course; he did his time, and then married the girl when she reached the age of consent at 16. 

So given the facts at hand, the Governor – along with Attorney-General Swanson and then-chief-justice Eric Magnuson – unanimously voted to grant Giefer a “pardon extraordinary”, a qualified pardon granted to people who’ve served their time and, by a set of criteria that are more than a little exclusive, including having completed their sentence for at least ten years.  Pawlenty voted to grant three of them out of ten opportunities.

Blue Earth County prosecutors now say Giefer was sexually assaulting another young girl hundreds of times before and after he received his pardon…charges filed this month allege seven years of abuse by Giefer, now 36, of a girl who is now 17.

Giefer was charged with five counts of first-degree criminal sexual conduct, five counts of second-degree criminal sexual conduct, one count of third-degree criminal sexual conduct and one count of incest.

The girl told authorities that she had been sexually abused by Giefer more than 250 times since she was 9 years old, according to a criminal complaint.

The county attorney also notes that there was not a solitary hint of the new allegations against Giefer until long after the pardon extraordinary.

Not good enough for the DFL’s chanting-point bots, who apparently think all government officials must be clairvoyant in all their actions.

Allowing for the fact that Gieffer is innocent of the allegations until proven guilty, and that pretty  much everyone agrees that the allegations, if true, are reprehensible (I have to clarify that, since if I don’t some leftyblogger will claim that I’m “supporting sexual abuse of minors”, albeit never to my face), the regional left’s take on this case is curious.

Clairvoyance: Pardons have to be issued on their merits.  Pawlenty (and Magnuson and, let’s remember, DFL Attorney-General Swanson) seemed to have held applicants for pardons extraordinary to a fairly high standard, granting them to a decided minority of applicants.  Those that are bagging on Pawlenty for this pardon seem to want an additional, higher level of proof – the extra-sensory perception of activities utterly unknown to law enforcement in any way, shape or form.   To the left, apparently, the movie Minority Report was a documentary, not sci-fi.

Would we want government to be that clairvoyant, even if it were possible? (All of you who say citizens should just suck it up without question or complaint when the TSA gropes your children at the airport are recused with prejudice)

Pardon Me?:  Isn’t it the left that usually chides the right for being too hidebound on sentencing and punishment?  Or is that only when it comes to election time and the left is courting the felon vote that felons are considered rehabilitated?

Bear in mind, this is not quite the same as Mike Huckabee’s pardon of a violent offender who went on to kill four cops; Giefer showed no evidence of violence, or even coercion (beyond the whole “ick” factor of being a 19 year old knocking up a 14 year old; even in rural Blue Earth county, the “Creepy” formula was and remains “(Age / 2) + 7”.  That’s science, so don’t bother arguing).

But as we discovered in this past governor’s race, what it’s really all about to the DFL is to have a prejudicial sound bite; people who tend to vote liberal will absorb a seven second sound bite (when it can’t be boiled down to a two-second slogan) but be immune to sixty seconds of context-setting.

Pretty ingenious, in a very depressing sort of way.

Today’s recount has resulted in my friend and NARN colleague King Banaian officially winning the District 15B House race.

Congratulations, KB!

According to the Strib, Voter ID is just not needed…

…according to a survey of people who’d have to work harder if it were implemented…

…conducted by two groups that benefit from inflated vote counts.

Minnesota does not need a law requiring photo identification at the polls because there have been relatively few cases of ineligible voting, two advocacy groups said Monday.

Citing data collected from county attorneys from the 2008 election, the two groups said that there were 26 convictions statewide of felons voting illegally – a figure representing 0.0009 percent of voters that year.

It’s a figure that also represents investigations in Ramsey, and only Ramsey, County.  The only county for which the Minnesota has done the County Attorneys’ jobs by doing all the investigating for them.

Allegations of felons voting represented 77 percent of voter fraud investigations, the groups said. The other 23 percent of the investigations from the 2008 election – which did not lead to any convictions – involved charges of non-citizens voting, double voting, voting outside of jurisdiction and impersonating a voter, the groups said.

Right.  That’s because under Minnesota law, pleading ignorance of the law is enough to get you acquitted.  Only paroled felons have to sign a form stating they know they’re not supposed to vote.

The study was conducted by Citizens for Election Integrity Minnesota and the Minnesota Unitarian Universalist Social Justice Alliance. The groups said the study was based on responses from 71 of the state’s 87 counties.

The “Center for Election Integrity of Minnesota“?  Sure sounds like an important group!

The Strib doesn’t see fit to mention that “CEIMN” is an offshoot of “non-partisan” liberal pressure group “Common Cause MN” (check out CC of MN’s and CEIMN’s addresses), whose motto is “Holding Power Accountable”, and which spent the 2010 election demanding accountability of conservative groups while ignoring the rafts of liberal special interest money.  They favor rationing speech to regular Americans, but exaggerating the influence of unions and liberal special interests.

One wonders if Strib reporter Mike Kaszuba didn’t feel this was relevant, or if he just didn’t know.

Joe Doakes, from Saint Paul’s Como neighborhood, has been looking into Saint Paul’s new proposed budget. 

And he emails:

In this time of economic trouble, when families are tightening their belts and doing with less, it’s refreshing to see that at least some of our loyal public servants know where their priorities lie . . . in their own pockets.

I’m depressingly un-surprised.

Proposed property tax statements are available on-line from the County’s website. [Joe looked at] samples from the Como-Northdale area; Newell Park; and University Ave area (Charles and Simpson).

Values dropped in all samples.

Taxes rose in all samples.

They’re happy to make you pay for A Better Minnesota, even if your little corner of Minnesota is just plain worse.

The County and City mostly held the line (not really, since the City intentionally adopted a Blackmail Budget which assumes fully funded LGA that won’t happen – the City’s tax increases will come later).

Bingo.  It’s one of those DFL patterns of behavior that is very, very close to becoming another Berg’s Law; DFL city governments will always use the city budget in such a way as to exert pressure for DFL priorities. 

“Vote DFL so that the state gives us more money, or we’ll pass the taxes directly on to you.” 

The school district, though, saw fit to raise the levy. And not just a bit, like 5% across the board.

I didn’t get a 5% raise this year, did you?

Pffft.

Yesterday’s ruling at the SCOM sums up about like this:  Bureaucrats trump legislators.

Gary at LFR puts it well:

When bureacrats’ ruling has more bearing on election law than legislators and governors, then it’s clear that bureaucrats have overstepped their authority. The minute that happens, the legislature needs to step in and limit the bureaucrats’ authority.

Hopefully, the new GOP legislators are writing that legislation as I’m writing this post. We pay legislators to write laws. We don’t pay administrative law judges to tell us that existing law isn’t relevant. Also, we don’t pay Supreme Court justices to write new law. Theoretically, we pay appellate court justices to tell us what the law says. PERIOD.

It disturbs me, personally, how frequently “administrative law” – law as interpreted by bureaucrats – overrides the law as passed by elected representatives of the people.

The worst example I’ve seen remains the City of Saint Paul’s administrative lynching of “Saint Paul Firearms”, a gun shop that briefly opened on Snelling Avenue.  The store obeyed all applicable laws – exceeded them, at least in terms of security, in every particular – but some of the religiously DFL-voting neighbors got the victorian vapors over the thought of sharing the neighborhood with a gun store.

So they didn’t bother with real courts; they went to the “Administrative Law” court.  And they got the ruling they wanted; the ruling that said “forget Minnesota law, to say nothing of the United States Constitution; bureaucrats see it the way you want to see it!”  And so the store was forced to close, destroying an honest entrepreneur’s investment of his life’s savings in the process.

I’m n0 lawyer – I have some standards – so I frankly don’t know what to think about the SCOM’s ruling yet.  It wouldn’t be the first time they’ve sided unconscionably with the bureaucrats against, y’know, the law.

We’ll see.

I’m going to depart from my usual impeccably high standards to indulge in a little pure speculation.

How could Emmer win the recount?

It’s worth asking – largely because the Dayton Campaign and the media keep repeating so long, loud and stridently that it’s not.  Dayton ran a purely vaporous campaign of absolutely no substance – but he spent three times as much as Tom Emmer did to do it.   The main underlying message of the entire campaign was “Dayton Is Inevitable, Resistance Is Futile”.   We saw how that turned out; an 8,000 vote margin, around four tens of a percent.  The campaign is continuing, of course, with the DFL calling in its markers with the media to take up the chant that “Dayton Is Inevitable!”.

And his odds look prettty good, naturally. 

But it’s by no means airtight.

Here’s one way it ends with an Emmer win.

There were about 2.1 million votes cast for Governor this year, with Dayton getting about 919,000 and Emmer getting 910,000 along with about 250,000 throwaway votes (I’m looking at you, “Independence” Party).

In 2008,  the Minnesota Majority claimed that there were over 40,000 “overvotes” in Minnesota.  Secretary of State Ritchie responded in his department’s defense that the figure was closer to 30.000, although he really wasn’t very sure.

That’s means there were a little over one percent more ballots than signatures at polling stations.

Let’s say that we had about the same number this year; let’s take  Ritchie at his word, and call it 30,000 votes.

Let’s say the overvotes were concentrated in Hennepin, Ramsey and Saint Louis counties.  For purposes of rough, hypothetical numbers, let’s say virtually all of them did. 

If the reconcilation process goes as it’s supposed to, then precincts with overvotes will be required to remove random ballots from the stack until the number of ballots gets down to the number of signatures.

For purposes of roughing out some numbers, let’s say that 10% of the randomly-selected votes are for throwaway candidates.  That leaves about 27,000 votes. 

Dayton won Hennepin, Ramsey and Saint Louis counties by nearly a 2:1 margin.   Let’s say that ratio holds among the votes discarded during reconciliation.  That means Dayton loses 18,000 votes, and Emmer loses about 9,000. 

Which gives Emmer a margin of victory of just under 1,000 votes, before we get into dealing with undercounted military absentee ballots.

Within the realm of possibility?  We shall see.

We’ve been discussing the MPR/Humphrey Institute and Minnesota polls for the past two weeks.  Indeed, it’s been one of the ongoing “go to” subjects of this blog for almost eight years now.

Why?

Because while  the polls themselves are risible, they have an effect on elections in Minnesota.

Part of it is in terms of people – “undecided”, “independent” voters – going to the polls at all.  I’ve related on this blog several stories of people who’ve pondered not going to the polls this past year.  Part of it was  because of the overwhelming negativity about Tom Emmer portrayed by the media – negativity, partly driven by the “Alliance For A Better Minnesota’s long, Dayton-family-funded, largely dubiously-factual smear campaign, but pushed hard in the media via the “polling” that they, themselves, commissioned.

Larry Jacobs at the Hubert H. Humphrey (HHH) Institute is the most over-quoted person in the Twin Cities media.  And during the campaign, Jacobs was seen as relentlessly as always in the Twin Cities media, flogging the Humphrey Institute’s polling first during the primaries (where the HHH’s polls showed Dayton with a crushing lead even though Dayton won the primaries by a margin not a whole lot bigger than the one we currently have in the governor’s race) and, finally, during the run-up to the election when the HHH poll showed Dayton winning with a 12 point blowout.

We’re still working on the recount for the 0.4% race.

Jacobs defended the poll (quoted in LFR):

JACOBS: Well, you know, a poll is nothing more than a snapshot in time. We’ve begun the interviewing nearly 2 weeks before election day. Barack Obama visited and we talked openly about the fact that this would likely change. There are, of course, all kinds of other factors that happened at the end, including the fact the almost 1 out of 5 undecided voters in our poll started to make up their mind.

The other thing to remember is that there were alot of other polls being conducted that showed the race closing at the time, something we were watching at the time, also.

That’s right, Dr. Jacobs.  There were a lot of other polls.

And except for the HHH and Minnesota polls, all of them showed a “snapshot in time” that was something close to the reality that eventually emerged on election day.

All of them.

So what?

Because opinion polling has an inordinate effect on media coverage and, less directly, the money and effort that people put into campaigns.

As to the media?  The New York Times has absorbed Nate Silver’s “Five Thirty Eight” stats-blog for its election polling coverage.  And throughout the race, the Times ran with the idea that Dayton was overwhelmingly likely to win.

And that supposition was based entirely on a statistical tabulation of opinion poll results.  And the stats were heavily based on the Minnesota and Humphrey polls, especially through the middle of the race, when the tone of the campaign was being set.  All together, the crunching of the opinion poll numbers led Silver to claim the stats showed Minnesota would be a convincing 6.6 point victory for Dayton; since political statistics are an essentially weaselly “science”, Silver also ran with an eight point margin of error.

Naturally, the media ran with the 6.6 points; a little less with the margin of error.

Now, there’s some media attention – the Minnpost, the City Pages – to the ludicrous nature of the polls.  Jacobs:

“If a shortcoming is identified, we will fix it. If not, we will have third-party verification that our methods are sound.”

Dr. Jacobs:  take it from this third party; it’s flawed.  Flawed to the point of illegitimacy.

More on the Minnesota Poll later…

———-

\The series so far:

Monday, 11/8: Introduction.

Wednesday, 11/10: Polling Minnesota – The sixty-six year history of the Strib’s Minnesota Poll. It offers some surprises.

Friday, 11/12: Daves, Goliath:  Rob Daves ran the Minnesota Poll from 1987 ’til 2007.  And the statistics during that era have a certain…consistency?

Monday, 11/15: Hubert, You Magnificent Bastard, I Read Your Numbers!:  The Humphrey Institute has been polling Minnesota for six years, now.  And the results are…interesting.  In the classic Hindi sense of the term.

Wednesday, 11/17: Close Shaves: Close races are the most interesting.  For everyone.  Including you, if you’re reading this series.

Monday, 11/22: The Hay They Make: So what does the media and the Twin Cities political establishment do with these numbers?

Wednesday, 11/24: A Million’s A Crowd:  Attention, statisticians:  Raw data!  Suitable for cloudsourcing!

The story was presented without comment – three Minnesota county attorneys “blasted” the Emmer campaign and  GOP’s  request for vote reconciliation, the process which is required by state law which we discussed last week.

Hennepin County election officials argued that being forced to undertake a count of voter signatures, as Republicans want, would “add confusion, delay, and uncertainty in the service of an exceedingly suspect goal of randomly removing properly cast ballots of fully eligible voters.”

That’d be the Hennepin County Attorney’s office run by former DFL gubernatorial hopeful Mike Freeman.

Ramsey County officials called the GOP argument “fundamentally flawed” and based on “obsolete” information.

That’d be the Ramsey County attorney’s office, run by former DFL gubernatorial hopeful Susan Gaertner.

In Hennepin County, auditor Jill Alverson told the court that “randomly disenfranchising eligible voters after the fact is a statutory remedy that should be used only in the narrowest of circumstances and then only after careful, transparent and deliberate study.”

Other than that whole it’s the freaking law business, anyway.

You mention “urban theorists”, and not a few conservatives roll their eyes and snort “…another ivory-tower wannabe slurper-at-the-public faucet”.  Not without considerable justification, mind you.

I’ll ask the conservative reader to suspend his/her instincts in re Joel Kotkin, a Stanford demographer whose demographic and economic theories acknowledge the reality that people operating in pursuit of their own enlightened self-interest will develop patterns of living and working that defy the efforts of utopian urban planners.

More – much more – on that as the next legislative session gets under way.

Kotkin’s latest big effort, from earlier this week, was in Forbes, and  covers California’s extended economic tailspin, and the rise of pro-business states like Texas, and the political currents behind both.

Perhaps you’ve heard – California is America’s Greece:

In the future, historians may likely mark the 2010 midterm elections as the end of the California era and the beginning of the Texas one. In one stunning stroke, amid a national conservative tide, California voters essentially ratified a political and regulatory regime that has left much of the state unemployed and many others looking for the exits.

California has drifted far away from the place that John Gunther described in 1946 as “the most spectacular and most diversified American state … so ripe, golden.”  Instead of a role model, California  has become a cautionary tale of mismanagement of what by all rights should be the country’s most prosperous big state. Its poverty rate is at least two points above the national average; its unemployment rate nearly three points above the national average.  On Friday Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger was forced yet again to call an emergency session in order to deal with the state’s enormous budget problems.

This state of crisis is likely to become the norm for the Golden State. In contrast to other hard-hit states like Pennsylvania, Ohio and Nevada, which all opted for pro-business, fiscally responsible candidates, California voters decisively handed virtually total power to a motley coalition of Democratic-machine politicians, public employee unions, green activists and rent-seeking special interests.

Exactly the sort of “solution” the DFL put before Minnesota in this past election…

In the new year, the once and again Gov. Jerry Brown, who has some conservative fiscal instincts [by Kotkin’s standards, naturally – Ed.] will be hard-pressed to convince Democratic legislators who get much of their funding from public-sector unions to trim spending. Perhaps more troubling, Brown’s own extremism on climate change policy–backed by rent-seeking Silicon Valley investors with big bets on renewable fuels–virtually assures a further tightening of a regulatory regime that will slow an economic recovery in every industry from manufacturing and agriculture to home-building.

Kotkin goes on to shred the Cali Dems’ current fairy tale – that “green jobs” will save the day.

Compare and contrast with the prototype pro-business big state, Texas:

Texas’ trajectory, however, looks quite the opposite. California was recently ranked by Chief Executive magazine as having the worst business climate in the nation, while Texas’ was considered the best. Both Democrats and Republicans in the Lone State State generally embrace the gospel of economic growth and limited public sector expenditure. The defeated Democratic candidate for governor, the brainy former Houston Mayor Bill White, enjoyed robust business support and was widely considered more competent than the easily re-elected incumbent Rick Perry, who sometimes sounds more like a neo-Confederate crank than a serious leader.

I read White’s bio and record in Houston, and I thought “what a wonderful world, Texas, where the the “lefty” candidate has not only a platform, but a record, to the right of the “Republcian” in California – or, for that matter, far enough to the right to make Lori Sturdevant and Nick Coleman yakk up their skulls”.

To be sure, Texas has its problems: a growing budget deficit, the need to expand infrastructure to service its rapid population growth and the presence of a large contingent of undereducated and uninsured poor people. But even conceding these problems, the growing chasm between the two megastates is evident in the economic and demographic numbers. Over the past decade nearly 1.5 million more people left California than stayed; only New York State lost more. In contrast, Texas gained over 800,000 new migrants. In California, foreign immigration–the one bright spot in its demography–has slowed, while that to Texas has increased markedly over the decade.

And the conclusions?

A vast difference in economic performance is driving the demographic shifts. Since 1998, California’s economy has not produced a single new net job, notes economist John Husing. Public employment has swelled, but private jobs have declined. Critically, as Texas grew its middle-income jobs by 16%, one of the highest rates in the nation, California, at 2.1% growth, ranked near the bottom. In the year ending September, Texas accounted for roughly half of all the new jobs created in the country.

I bring this up not  just to get you to read Kotkin’s whole piece – although I think you should – but to urge you to compare and contrast the competing visions facing Minnesota today.

Because Minnesotans today do face two starkly-different futures.  There’s the future presented to us by Mark Dayton, if he (heaven forfend) wins the recount, and there’s the one that the GOP majorities in both chambers have been sent to fight for.

Dayton’s vision is fundamentally the same as the one that led to Califorinia’s catastrophic decay; fat and happy public unions, high taxes, hostility to any real economy’s genuine strengths.  The GOP’s – if they do their job, and I’m here to say I’m not the only one who’s gonna make sure they do – is to shade things more toward the Texas model.

This next legislative session will see these two ideals battling like Godzilla and Mothra. 

Or maybe, given Mark Dayton’s fundamental weakness as a candidate and governor, like Godzilla and Andy Dick.

To: The New GOP Majority in the Legislature

From: Mitch Berg, once-bitten Conservative

Re: The 2011 Session Agenda

Dear GOP House and Senate Caucuses:

Congratulations on the big win two weeks ago.  

Now, we gotta talk.

You have a historic opportunity here; not only do you have the most power of any group of Republicans in recent Minnesota history, but you got there for all the right reasons – atop a swave of populist conservative discontent over the policies of Barack Obama and the Minnesota DFL.

Better still, even if we lose the recount, we’re up against a governor that’d be in a weak position even if he were Hubert H. Humprhey.  And Mark Dayton is no Hubert H. Humphrey.  I’ll be frankly amazed if we’re not reverring to “Governor Prettner-Solon” by 2014; in any case, you have the opportunity to drive this car.

So drive.

I’m just a schlemiel voter.  But since the holidays are coming up, I’d like to give you my legislative wish list.

Go Deep.  Tom Emmer ran on a zero-based budget promise.  It was a great idea; follow through on it.  Pass a budget – over the (rhetorically) dead bodies of the DFL left in the Legislature, if need be – that slashes the fat, initiates zero-based budgeting for the big entitlement programs, guts the pork, and holds the line on spending.  Freeze state worker employees’ salaries until the revenues start picking up (meaning all the rest of us are getting raises again).  

And then, let Dayton – or whomever – veto it. 

And pass it again, with just enough changes to make it fly.

And let him veto it again. 

And pass it again.

And let him veto it, and risk shutting down state government. 

Because the people who sent you to office aren’t the ones that are going to rebel over a government shut-down.

But the ones that sent Dayton to office – real or imagined?  They will.  So when that happens?  Dayton loses.

So do it.

Fix The Election System:  Adopt Voter ID; require some form of identification.  You know the drill – make identification safe, cheap and available – but require every voter to present an ID, and make sure that ID is enterered as part of their signing-in process.

And kill off vouching.  Now.

Wanna appear “bipartisan”?  Keep same-day voting.  With a valid, cross-referenceable ID.  Because if accessible same-day voting is what the DFL really wants, provided we can keep it accountable and fraud-proof, why not?

I don’t think that’s what they really value in same-day voting, but that’s just my opinion.  So far.

And if Dayton wants to get into a fight over the right to carry out invalid, fraudulent elections, so be it!  Let him veto that bill too! Let the DFL stand and fall, statewide, over the right to game the electoral system.

You have a huge opportunity here.  Let’s use it. 

That’s why we sent you there, after all.

UPDATE:  A highly-placed GOP source whom I will not name at the moment writes:

NO Photo ID until every name on the voter registration list is checked for citizenship. There are names on the list of people who are not citizens. They are supposed to be challenged: “Challenged: Citizenship” is stamped right next to their name. Make everyone who gets a voting photo ID card prove citizenship; make it a renewable card every 5 years; the renewal cannot be tied to a driver’s license renewal. The Dept. of Public Safety must clean up all citizenship issues: temporary (those who are supposed to have “status check” on their ids; permanent residents who are not citizens). MN Constitution requires citizenship to vote.

 Yes, eliminate vouching and eliminate same-day registration – zero compromise here…  

Yes, play hardball; show backbone; appeasement doesn’t work – the Dems will never appease – we hold the majority, use it.

Well, it was a rough draft. 

Like everything else on this blog.

As we speak, the MNGOP is announcing that it plans to seek “reconciliation” of the state’s vote totals before the recount begins.

The DFL is going to spread a lot of, frankly, BS about this process.  Here are the facts.  For starters…:

It’s The Law: The DFL is going to portray this to the uniformed (which the media will do their best to ensure the entire state is) as a wholesale disenfranchisement of voters.

The simple fact is, it is the law.

Under Minnesota law, the vote totals and the total number of actual, identified voters – the registered voters that signed in at the polling station – are supposed to be “reconciled”, or  shown to be equal, by about six weeks after the election.  The deadline this year is December 15.

Naturally, Mark Ritchie has bobbled that job as badly as he has every other facet of his job as Secretary of State and chief executive of our election system.  In 2008, it took close to eight months for the reconciliation process to happen.

Which has potentially dire consequences, if you want a clean, accurate recount of an election.

We’ll come back to that.

How Reconciliation Works:  If  your precinct had 100 voters sign in, and there are 110 ballots, then ten ballots are picked out at random and discarded.

Really.  That’s the state law.

Now, you might say “but that disenfranchises the ten voters that got picked out of the pile”.  And there’s something to that.  But by another token the ten extra votes disenfranchise ten voters in and of themselves; if it happened through fraud, then ten legitimate voters were negated; if through administrative incompetence (because precinct election staff don’t know how to do simple things like tally numbers or test ballot-counters before the election), then those ten ballots are equally disenfranchised, not by decree of Tony Sutton or Tom Emmer, but under state law.

Stupid?  Maybe.  We’ll come back to that later.

So why bother?  Because there very well may be…

More Votes Than People: In 2008, the Minnesota Majority claimed that there were about 40,000 more votes cast than there were identified, signed-in voters in Minnesota.   Mark Ritchie – Minnesota’s Secretary of State – said in effect “No, no no!” – it was only somewhere under 30,000 votes.

That’s right.  Even Mark Ritchie, the chief executive of our electoral system, admitted that that out of a little over 2.75 million voters, there were nearly 30,000 more votes cast than there were identified, signed-in voters.  That’s a little over a percent of the entire voting pool.  Over one in a hundred.

That’s over double the margin between the candidates in this year’s governor race.

That’s an awful lot of votes that, at first glance – via incompetence or fraud, and it really doesn’t matter which at this point – seem to have no connection with real, signed-in humans that showed up at the polls.

By Minnesota law, this needs to be taken care of.  And it needs to be done before any recount takes place, to make sure that we’re dealing with real numbers, not inflated/mistake-driven/fraudulent ones.

Let’s make sure we re-iterate two things here:

1. Discrepancies may or may not be fraud, and it really doesn’t matter what the cause is, because…
2. Reconciliation is a legal requirement, regardless.

Are there more votes than identified, actual voters?  We don’t know yet.  And before we recount the votes for the office of this state’s chief executive, we need to find out.

If there is a surplus of voters, is it fraud? We don’t know – and in a sense, it’s irrelevant to the question.  Reconciliation is not a legal tactic; it is the law.

But the recount effort – led by former Supreme Court Chief Justice Eric Magnusson – has noticed that there seems to be an…

Odd Pattern: There appear to be quite a number of precincts – concentrated in Hennepin, Ramsey and St. Louis Counties – where Tom Emmer grossly underperformed the rest of the GOP ticket, and Mark Dayton significantly overperformed the rest of the DFL’s floundering line-up.

There also are reportedly a very large number of ballots listing nobody but Mark Dayton.  As in someone went in to the polls, registered, stood in line…and filled in only Mark Dayton.  Nobody else.

So the law calls for reconciliation.  Let’s reconcile!

“What a stupid system!”: Perhaps, but you don’t get to pick and choose the laws you want to follow (unless you have really good lawyers and your opposition doesn’t; see OJ Simpson.  Or if you fight a legal battle with furious intensity and your opponent does not; see Al Franken vs. Norm Coleman).

Don’t like the law?  Change it.  Better yet, replace it – with a photo ID system by which poll staff can match real voters with real registrations.  And get rid of vouching, and maybe same-day registration.  Why shouldn’t voting, the  most important of our civil rights, be reserved for those who pay enough attention to voting to actually register in advance?

But that’s a discussion for another day.

When we left Monty Jensen, it was Friday, October 29.  He’d just seen a scene that disturbed him; supervisors from a Brainerd-area group home voting for their charges who, while they had the legal right to vote, didn’t seem to have much idea where they were or what they were doing (which, if I were much less sober and reflective than I am these days, I would say “makes them a perfect DFL constituency”.  But I am more sober and reflective these days).

Jensen chewed on what he’d seen overnight – and then took a shot in the dark.

“I called George Burton”, he says, referring to the Constitution Party candidate for Jim Oberstar’s seat.   Burton got Jensen in touch with the Minnesota Freedom Council, one of a small network of grassroots groups that is scrutinizing Minnesota’s election system.

Acting on their advice, Jensen started to work.  “About 10:30 Saturday morning (October 30), I looked up Don Ryan, the Crow Wing County attorney, in the phone book.   I tried him a couple of times, with no answer. ”

“Then I tried Ron Kaus, at the Minnesota Freedom Council.  I’d never heard of him in my life.  I spoke with him – and he got right on it.  They wanted all the information – and he asked me to meet at the courthouse and tell him  how everything went down.  When we got there, he asked me if he could record the conversation.  We didn’t talk for five minutes before the recording started; I told my story”.

Here’s the story, for those who missed it the first time:
Here’s part I of the video…:

…along with Part II…:

…and Part III.

Jensen recalls “We went through and did the video.  I was kinda on the hot seat.  And from there, we  started trying to do the investigation”.  He got some advice from Kaus;  “If you want this investigated, you need to do it as an affadavit; the complaint form will just get filed away”. 

So Jensen spent the weekend writing the complaint.  On Monday morning, he was ready to turn it in.

“On Monday morning, I brought four copies in.  The auditor notarized them, and kept one”.  Then, Jensen went to the County Attorney’s office.  “Being that it was Monday before election day…I handed it to him personally.  He said he didn’t know what he could do with the election the next day, so all the votes would count.  But he said they’d follow up with the investigation.”

Later on, Jensen said the County Attorney’s office called to say the Crow Wing County Sheriff’s office had assigned an investigator.  On Thursday, November 4 – two days after the election – Jensen met with that investigator for about 90 minutes.  “He stated that they’d been speaking with certain group homes, had a list of ballots turned in during the time frame, and had everything to back up the story”.

And that, for the most part, was the last Monty Jensen has heard from Crow Wing County.

———-

Toward the end of our conversation, Jensen reflected.  “The other day, I was talking with my girlfriend.  I asked “Am I crazy, or is something going on here?”

We’ll get the girlfriend’s answer straight from her, later this week.

It’s almost become a cliche, among conservative observers of Minnesota elections.  You’re supporting a Republican.  You know the race is close.  You can feel the race is close.

And the final Humprhey and Minnesota polls come out, and the DFLer leads by an utterly absurd margin – like this year’s Humphrey Institute Poll, which showed a 12 point race…

…which, two days later, came in a statistical dead heat, with much less than half a point separating the two candidates.

And yet the Minnesota and Humphrey Institute polls have their defenders.

———-

Remember the 2006 Senate race?  Mark Kennedy vs. Amy Klobuchar?

The Minnesota poll did pretty well, all in all.  The final Minnesota poll showed Mark Kennedy getting 34 points, to Amy Klobuchar’s 55.  The race ended up being 58.06 to just shy of 38.    The Minnesota poll showed both candidates doing a little worse than they eventually wound up doing – Klobuchar a little worse, in fact.

Defenders of the Minnesota Poll – media people and lefty pundits – chimed in.  “See?  The Minnesota poll is OK” or at the very least “The Minnesota Poll is an equal-opportunity incompetent”.

But if you’re a cynic – and when it comes to the Minnesota and Humphrey Polls, I most certainly am – the answer there is obvious; if you accept that the polls exist to help one party or another out of close jams (and let’s just say I think there’s a case to be made), then the real question is “how do the polls stack up when it really counts – during the close elections“?

I took a look at the Minnesota poll’s history with close races – Gubernatorial, Presidential and Senate races that ended up less than five points apart – over the past 66 years.   Since 1944 in these races – twenty of them – the DFL ended up getting 47.69% to the GOP’s 47.57% in the final elections.  The Minnesota Poll has shown the DFL getting 44.3% to 43.28% in the final pre-election poll.  Both numbers are very close, of course.  The Minnesota Poll has underrepresented Republicans by an average of 4.3 points, the DFL by 3.39.  So while the poll underrepresented Republicans in 14 of 20 races, it was by less than a point, on average.

But that’s over 66 years.  And if you recall from episode 1 of this series, the Minnesota Poll used to systematically undercount the DFL.  But long story short – looking at the poll’s entire history, things are fairly close.

When you look at the Rob Daves era at the Minnesota poll, though, things change.

In close races (<5 point final difference) during the Rob Daves era, the GOP has actually gotten a slightly higher average vote total – 46.77% to 46.48% – in actual elections.  But the final Minnesota Poll has shown the DFL outpolling the GOP 43.33% to 40.78%.    Republicans come up an average of six points light in the final Minnesota Poll before the election, with DFLer finishing a little over three points short – nearly a 2-1 margin in underrepresentation.

In other words, in close races the Minnesota Poll has shown the GOP doing six points worse than they actually did, compared to three points for the DFL.  And the average Minnesota Poll has shown the DFL leading the GOP, when in fact the races have been mixed, with move Republican winners than in the previous 20-odd years of Minnesota history.

If you are an idealist, you could think that  it’s just a statistical anomaly.  To which the cynic notes that of eight close races, the GOP has been undercounted by less than the DFL exactly once.

The cynic might continue that it’s entirely possible that the Minnesota Poll doesn’t systematically short Republicans in close elections.  But given that the poll shorts Republicans in races that end up less than five points apart by an average of considerablymore than five points, the cynic would ask “if the Minnesota Poll were designed to keep Republicans home from the polls out of pure discouragement, how would it be any different than what we have now?”

Well, it could look like the Humphrey Poll.

Because the Humprey Poll is worse.  Granted, it’s a smaller sample size – there’ve been four “close” races (2004 Presidential, and the 2006 Governor,  2008 Senate and 2010 Governor races, which were/are very close indeed).

But in those race, the DFL won by an average of 45.43% to 44.7% (most of the gap coming from the four-point 2004 Presidental race; the other three had/have tallies within a point in difference).   But the final HHH poll showed the DFL/Democratic candidate winning by an average of seven points – 42.5 to 35.75%.  The DFL, is underrepresented in the HHH’s final pre-election poll by just a shade under three points; GOP is underpolls its real-life results by an average of almost nine points.

It’s possible that this is an honest error.  It is possible that the Humphrey Institute really, really believes that they have a likely voter model that accurately reflects Minnesota.  Perhaps it even does; maybe Minnesota really is a land of people who answer “DFL” on polls but come racing over to the GOP on election day.  But again – if the Humphrey Institute intended to help the DFL and keep Republicans home, it’s hard to see what they’d do differently.

Especially given the media’s reaction to these polls.

More on Friday.

———-

The series so far:

Monday, 11/8: Introduction.

Wednesday, 11/10: Polling Minnesota – The sixty-six year history of the Strib’s Minnesota Poll. It offers some surprises.

Friday, 11/12: Daves, Goliath:  Rob Daves ran the Minnesota Poll from 1987 ’til 2007.  And the statistics during that era have a certain…consistency?

Monday, 11/15: Hubert, You Magnificent Bastard, I Read Your Numbers!:  The Humphrey Institute has been polling Minnesota for six years, now.  And the results are…interesting.  In the classic Hindi sense of the term.

Wednesday, 11/17: Close Shaves: Close races are the most interesting.  For everyone.  Including you, if you’re reading this series.

Friday, 11/19: The Hay They Make: So what does the media and the Twin Cities political establishment do with these numbers?

Monday, 11/22: A Million’s A Crowd:  Attention, statisticians:  Raw data!  Suitable for cloudsourcing!

Hasn’t the Twin Cities media – especially the “alternative”, liberal version – been barbering for years about how Rep. Michele Bachmann just doesn’t do “mainstream” media?

Why, yes – they have! 

But – did I hear Michele Bachmann doing an extended interview with Cathy Wurzer on MPR’s Morning Edition this morning?

Why, yes I did!

Someone tell Andy Birkey!

No, don’t.  Rather, tell Keith Ellison, Betty McCollum, Al Franken and Amy Klobuchar, all of whom I’ve invited onto the Northern Alliance Radio Network in the past two years, none of whom have so much as responded.  (In the interest of completeness, note that Minneapolis Mayor RT Rybak appeared, as did “Growth and Justice” majordomo Dane Smith.  We had a great time talking with both of ’em, because – shibboleths about conservative talk radio aside – Ed Morrissey and I will put our cross-aisle interviews up against anything in the commercial or public media today in terms of civility and fairness (while allowing that we are, in fact, conservative).

So whatdya say, Reps Ellison and McCollum?  How about it, Senators Franken and Klobuchar? 

For that matter, we’ve had an invite out to Common Cause Minnesota for six weeks now – submitted on this blog, via email, via a voice mail message, and on Twitter.  Not a word.

How about Denise Cardinal of “Alliance for a Better Minnesota”?  Perhaps she could come on the show and discuss the Dayton-family-finance slime campaign she orchestrated?

For that matter, howzabout we get an invite to Mark Dayton?  I’ve heard Tom Emmer do a center-left show; d’ya suppose Dayton’s got the gumption to go across the aisle…

…like Representative Bachmann did?

More evidence that the Department of Justice’s dismissal of the voter intimidation case case against the New Black Panthers was purely political:

The e-mails show two political appointees’ involvement in Justice’s decision to dismiss, the watchdog group says. And, it notes, those e-mails contradict what Thomas Perez, assistant attorney general for Justice’s Civil Rights Division, told the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights under oath: that decision involved “only career people.”

The e-mails lend additional credence to the long-held suspicion that politics drove Justice’s decision-making in this case. They also go a long way toward answering a key question: What is Attorney General Eric Holder hiding with his stonewalling against the commission’s investigation?

“These documents show that not only was the Black Panther decision shamelessly politicized by the Obama administration but also that Obama officials lied to cover up the scandal,” says Tom Fitton, Judicial Watch president.

Remember – our system is juuuuuust fine.

Reading the Sunday Strib online (I buy a paper copy every once in a while for kindling)  I find it amusing how the Strib words the following passages…emphasis mine…

Minneapolis and St. Paul will face major budget deficits if the state reneges on its local government aid (LGA), a program that helps pay for services in hundreds of Minnesota cities.

Cities have to lock next year’s budgets into place in less than a month. Yet the governor’s race remains undecided, while Republicans have wrestled control of the Legislature from DFLers, and an estimated $6 billion state budget shortfall clouds the picture.

I might offer a revision for the former: if state legislators are forced to cut subsidies to cities not able to live within their means as the state itself now must?

…and for the latter: as voters wrestled control of a state legislature dominated by the DFL for decades and handed it to Republicans, ostensibly sending a message of confidence lost in the former and gained in the latter.

Meanwhile, Nick Coleman (I am still surprised to see him gainfully employed) suffers from the same malady as President Obama: if only we had communicated our plans better, the American people would have voted differently.

DFL legislators who never put up an effective fight against the No New Tax mantra of Gov. Tim Pawlenty and never had a comprehensive strategy for communicating the goals of all their legislative maneuverings should share the credit for the GOP takeover.

Or, they were actually, absurdly proposing resolving our employment and economic maladies by raising taxes and increasing spending and for the first time in decades, Minnesota said “Nyet!”

It will be months before we know the full scope of the corporate politics behind the legislative takeover. We may never know the sources of much of the money, since anonymous contributions are permitted in the anything-goes political climate.

Careful there Nick, remember if you point one there’s four pointing back at you.

But one Democrat who felt the sting of the corporate lash was David Bly, a state representative from the cow-and-college precincts of Northfield who was seeking a third term. Bly, a high school English teacher, has been a leader in the fight for a universal health care plan for Minnesotans and other progressive causes. He was told by DFL Party leaders that his seat was safe, then stood by helplessly as business interests paid for an endless blizzard of attack ads — a dozen or more — that were mailed to voters in District 25B. Bly abided by spending limits for lawmakers — spending about $31,000 on his campaign — while the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce Leadership Fund, the Minnesota Coalition of Businesses, and something called NFIB, the National Federation of Independent Business, may, when final reports are in, turn out to have spent far larger amounts on behalf of his opponent.

Nick, don’t confuse the DFL’s inability to hear the train coming down the tracks with treachery on the part of their opponents.

For the record, Bly has supported a balanced approach to state budgeting, including cuts and tax increases where necessary.

…and to a liberal legislator they’re always necessary. Minnesotans seem to have rejected the notion that yet another tax hike is a “balanced” approach.

So relax, everyone. Business is picking up. And business just picked up a new Legislature coming into office in January.

That’s right Nick, business – you know, the sector that actually creates jobs and pays taxes.

Many of the new lawmakers probably don’t even know where the Capitol is.

…only Nick Coleman and his ilk would think that’s a bad thing.

Mitch Berg is arriving for his press conference.  He takes his place behind the podium.  The press bustle forward to get the best spots in front of the podium.

Berg waves his hands, and the press gradually quiet down.

BERG: OK, for starters; everyone knows Tom Emmer has won the election, and that his inauguration is inevitable.  And so, while the election did fall within the statutory limit requiring a recount of the vote, as required by Minnesota State Law, I urge the DFL and the Dayton campaign not to interfere with the obvious inevitability of Emmer’s victory by pursuing the process that is legally mandated and out of their control anyway.

Furthermore, when the inevitable happens at the end of this mandatory process that the DFL should not pursue anyway, I urge Mark Dayton and the DFL from restraining their lawyers from filing stupid lawsuits, regardless of whatever grounds they say they may have, for a Better Minnesota. 

We especially urge the Dayton campaign to refrain from filing lawsuits over so-called “irregularities” or “fraud” in the process.  Everybody knows we have the best electoral system in the world, so it’s a moot point.

And when all those lawsuits are dismissed, I implore the DFL not to sic throngs of SEIU goons on Republican recount watchers, offices and the homes of GOP activists in revenge for their inevitable loss. 

I will now take questions.

ERIK BLACK: Er, Mitch?  Why are you calling Emmer’s victory “inevitable”? 

BERG: Because it is, and has always been.  Next?

RACHEL STASSEN-BERGER: Er, has there been any indication whatsoever from the Dayton campaign that they plan on filing frivolous lawsuits simply to pointlessly extend the recount process and delay the transfer of power?

BERG: You just report what I say, OK?  Next question.

TOM SCHECK: Er, this bit about “not raising objections over irregularities” – that is their legal right as part of this process…

BERG: Right, but it will only detract from the inevitability of Emmer’s victory.   It’s stupid, and just between the two of us, it’s a sign that they hate children.  Next?

TIM PUGMIRE: This reference to SEIU goons – where does that come from?

BERG: Look, I’m not saying that they will sic goons or lawyers on anyone.  Not at all.  You have the context all wrong.  I’m just saying that when they inevitably lose the recount and Governor Emmer is inevitably inaugurated – as every sensible person who doesn’t secretly yearn for child porn can say will happen, once this pointless yet legally-mandated recount is over – it’d be very bad for a party to sic hordes of union goons on those they disagree with.

MARTY OWINGS: But Mitch – nobody’s talking about siccing goons on anyone.

BERG: I’m just asking questions.

PAT KESSLER: That wasn’t a question.  That was  a statement.  You told the DFL to refrain from siccing goons on people if they lose the recount.

BERG: Well, that’s just common sense.  You want a good state, and  you believe in democracy?  Ixnay on the goons!

Final question?

BILL SALISBURY:   So to sum it up, you’re asking the DFL and Dayton to refrain from doing things they never said they were going to do in the first place, and decline to do things that are obligations that are out of their hands according to Minnesota law. 

BERG: Yep.  That, and not kill people for revenge when Tom Emmer’s inevitable inauguration takes place.  Thanks!

Berg leaves the stage, as Brian Melendez silently takes notes in the back of the room.

Rob Daves took over the Minnesota Poll in 1987.

Rob Daves

I have never met Rob Daves.  Either, to the best of my knowledge, has anyone else.  I don’t know that his alt-media bete noir, Scott Johnson, has even met him, despite not a few requests for interviews.

I have no idea what Rob Daves thinks, believes, wants, says or does.  I know nothing about his personal life, and I really don’t want or need to.  For all I know, he’s a perfectly wonderful human being.

But for a 20 year period under his direction, the Minnesota Poll turned into an epic joke.

How epic?

The numbers don’t lie.

———-

During the Rob Daves years, party politics in Minnesota skittered all over the map.  The governors office started DFL, changed hands, and maybe have changed back last week – we’ll see.  The Reagan/Bush 41 era seesawed to Clinton, then Dubya, and now Obama; both Senate seats started Republican; both switched to the DFL, eventually.

There has, in short, been a lot of variety, at least in terms of the Party ID winning the various elections.

But the Minnesota Poll has been oddly homogenous.

Throughout the Rob Daves era, the Democratic or DFL candidate in Presidential, Gubernatorial and Senate races has gotten an average of 45.68% of the vote, to 45.21% for the GOP.  That’s very, very close.

Some of the races have been blowouts – Amy Klobuchar’s 20 point drubbing of Mark Kennedy, Arne Carlson’s 30 point hammering of John Marty – and some, like our 2008 Senate and 2010 Governor races, have been (or still are) painfully close.

But you’d never know it from the Minnesota poll. The average vote totals – between the blowouts and upsets and squeakers – during Daves’ 1987-2007 tenure favored the DFL, barely, by 45.98 to 45.34%.  But the Minnesota Polls released just before all those elections showed the population favoring the DFL by 43.33 to 39.89%.

And of 18 total contests, the polling inaccuracies skewed in the direction of the DFL in 15.   The average skew toward the DFL came to almost three percentage points.

When you break things out, the differences get wider; in the five Presidential elections, the Minnesota Poll discerned a 49.67 to 36% DFL lead; the actual results were 50.13 to 41.64%.  The Minnesota Poll underrepresented the GOP by an average of 5.64% in Presidential elections during the Daves years.   The Strib Poll showed every single GOP candidate coming up short of his actual election performance:  George HW Bush polled 3.80% light; Dole, 7.00%;  Dubya, 8.50 and 6.61; McCain also polled seven points under his real performance.  The Democrats, on the other hand, seemed to be polled fairly accurately; the average error poll  and election for Democratic presidential candidates was less than half a point.

The Senate races are a little closer – the Republicans underperform the election results 4.29% to 3.14%, a difference of 1.15% under their election results, which isn’t very significant – if you just look at raw numbers.  Well come back to that next Wednesday.

In the Gubernatorial races during the Daves years, though, the polling results were pretty lockstep. In gubernatorial races since 1987, the GOP has outpolled the DFL by an average of 46.77 to 38.91% – including one huge blowout (1994) and several squeakers.  But the Minnesota Poll has shown Minnesotans’ preferences at 40.17 to 36.67 in favor of the GOP.  Republicans’ performance was underpolled by 6.6% in the Minnesota poll – that of the DFL by only 2.24%.  The Minnesota poll showed Minnesotans underselecting Republicans by almost triple the margin of the actual elections.

A classic – and large – example was the 2002 Governor race.  The election-eve Minnesota Poll showed Pawlenty tipping Moe by 35-32.  The real margin was 44-36.  While the poll oversampled Independence Party candidate Tim Penny by a fairly impressive margin, the fact is that while the final MN Poll undershot Moe’s support by 4%, it underrepresented Pawlenty’s by nine solid points.

All in all, of the 20 Presidential, Senate and Gubernatorial races during the Daves era, 16 of them showed the Minnesota Poll underpolling the GOP by a greater degree than the DFL.

And that’s just counting all the races.

———-

Daves was let go at the Strib in 2007.  The Minnesota Poll was taken over by “Princeton Research Study Group”, which also does polling for Newsweek (whose polling is generally considered atrocious).

The 2008 races were very different, of course; the Senate race was a virtual tie, while Obama beat McCain handily.

But the day before the election, the Minnesota poll said McCain was polling just 37%; he ended up with 44%.  It overestimated Obama’s support by under a point, calling him at 55% when he got 54.2%.  The Minnesota Poll sandbagged Mac by seven points.

And Franken v. Coleman?   The day before the election, the poll showed Coleman almost four points below his actual performance (38% versus 41.98) ; it nailed Franken almost dead-on (42% i the poll, 41.99% by the time the recount was over).

PRSA showed both GOP candidates performing drastically off their real pace on election eve.

And three weeks ago, a week before the gubernatorial election, the Minnesota Poll showed Emmer at 34%; he got 43.21%.  Nine points better than the Minnesota poll indicated.

The upshot?  Of the 20 total election contests in the Rob Daves and PRSA eras, the Minnesota Poll has underpolled GOP support in 17 – 85% – of those races.

And PRSA polling has, on average, underpolled the GOP by 6.12% in those three elections.   In other words, PRSA’s errors have favored the DFL to the tune of six points – which is more than the three-plus points of the Rob Daves era.

One might think that random statistics would scatter on both sides of the middle more or less equally.  And in the first 42 years of the Minnesota poll, in aggregate, they did, as we showed Wednesday.

But during the Daves years, and continuing with PRSA, the errors developed a consistency – shorting Republicans – and grew in magnitude.

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Of course, those averages hide some big swings; some races in those averages were real blowouts.

It’s been my theory that the Minnesota Poll’s “peculiarities” are most pronounced during close elections.

We’ll test that out next Wednesday, when we’ll examine races that were decided by the proverbial cat’s whisker.

First – Monday – we’ll meet the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute Poll.

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The series so far:

Monday, 11/8: Introduction.

Wednesday, 11/10: Polling Minnesota – The sixty-six year history of the Strib’s Minnesota Poll. It offers some surprises.

Friday, 11/12: Daves, Goliath:  Rob Daves ran the Minnesota Poll from 1987 ’til 2007.  And the statistics during that era have a certain…consistency?

Monday, 11/15: Hubert, You Magnificent Bastard, I Read Your Numbers!:  The Humphrey Institute has been polling Minnesota for six years, now.  And the results are…interesting.

Wednesday, 11/17: Close Shaves: Close races are the most interesting.  For everyone.  Including you, if you’re reading this series.

Friday, 11/19: The Hay They Make: So what does the media and the Twin Cities political establishment do with these numbers?

Monday, 11/22: A Million’s A Crowd:  Attention, statisticians:  Raw data!  Suitable for cloudsourcing!

Just keep chanting it.

Sheila Kihne at Activist Next Door is after Mark Ritchie now – and she’s not alone:

Our second close statewide election in two years has piqued the interest of renowed researcher and blogger, Trevor Louden, at the New Zeal blogspot. (New Zealand)

The blog post is titled “Mark Ritchie File 1 Conflict of Interest? Minnesota SOS Adjudicated Committee Colleagues’ Election results”

Loudon describes Ritchie’s connections to Wellstone Action (which are pretty well know around these parts) but he points out what should be very obvious: there is a major conflict of interest in serving on the Advisory Board for Wellstone action and being a “non-partisan” overseeing a statewide recount.

For those of you from out of state – “Wellstone Action“, named for the late Senator, is a political action organization dedicated to getting “progressive” organizing and training, to get “progressives” elected.

Ritchie is also backed by the “Secretary of State Project“, a Soros-backed PAC dedicated to getting “progressive” Secretaries of State elected – because Soros and the left’s power and money elite know that the best way to control this nation is to control its election system.

Sheila’s got plans:

This is getting interesting.

I have to hit the library tomorrow for more on Ritchie’s ties to far-left RONGEAD– a French NGO where Mark Ritchie is currently listed as a member of their Steering Committe (and Minnesota’s Secretary of State!!) Hey-Pat Doyle, did you know about RONGEAD in 2006 when you glossed over Ritchie’s coordination with a French NGO to produce United States federal government trade secrets? How about you Sharon Schmickle when you covered this story in the late 80’s when Ritchie was at the MN Dept of Agriculture? Unbelievable.

Pat Doyle, sugarcoating DFLers and cherrypicking stories against Republicans?  Who’da thunk it?