Follow the bouncing Dayton funding.
Taxpayers League of Minnesota website here.
Sign up to be a poll challenger.
Minnesota Majority here.
The Sons of Liberty? Right here!
Joel Demos’ website. And his latest ad:
As I’ve written in the past, single-sex marriage is not my marquee issue, personally.
Oh, I know what I believe; that marriage is about having kids, and kids grow up best with functional parents of both genders. It’s a belief that should inform a lot of family-law issues (which is why I support gay adoption; two functional same-sex “parents” are not preferable to different-gender parents, but they are much better than a single parent, if that’s the choice.
But I think that as a rule government should stay out of most personal choices; that people should be able to sign a civil contract that ties them into a legal construct that gives them all the legal rights that a “Married” couple has – and that people like me should be able to opt out of the government contract and follow the purely religious contract that we believe in. And if you belong to a religious demomination that can come up with a theological justification for it, then that’s your first amendment right – just as it’ll be mine to debunk it.
I’m not going to argue about it, either.
But the fact is that while Tom Emmer is not focused on gay marriage – this election is, quite rightly, about jobs to him – he also stands in sharp contrast to Dayton and Horner in that he does not want the issue decided by a DFL-dominated legislature or an “elite” court that jams the issue down the state’s throat.
Which is the subject of this ad:
Let the legislature do its damn job. For that matter, let the courts do their job, and interpret laws, not create them from whole cloth.
Emmer is right on this issue. I think most Minnesotans agree.
Dayton wants our self-appointed “elites” to decide this issue. Horner too, although he’s irrelevant.
Pass the word.
It’s go time for Republicans in Minnesota. And by “Republicans”, I mean conservatives, and people who can be convinced that Minnesota’s liberal traditions and Barack Obama/Mark Dayton’s takeover of society will leave us all the worse for wear.
If you live in the Third Congressional District, you are in a semi-competitive race – but Jim Meffert clearly doesn’t pack the gear. Still, if you live and work in the Three and support the GOP and conservative ideals, you will need to hunker down, help out Paulsen and your local state House/Senate candidates, and maybe dig deep and see if you can free up a buck or two to help those races out.
If you live in the Fourth or the Fifth – you know you’re the underdogs. I’m one of you. And yet you have great candidates with great messages, facing weak candidates (especially the Fourth CD’s Betty McCollum, one of the most inconsequential people ever to serve in Congress). And you’ve been working; somehow, the GOP found a reserve of people whose spirits had not been trounced by decades of living in one-party cities, and have been campaigning in precincts that haven’t seen a GOP voter in a generation. We’ll come back to you.
If you live in the First District, you are seeing signs of hope; Walz is weak, Demmer is raising good money, Walz backed a lot of deeply stupid legislation – Demmer could pull this off. Hang in there, and above all, keep working.
Of course, if you live in the Seventh and Eighth, you might be feeling like you just climbed into a car with the accelerator stuck to the floor. Lee Byberg has raised more money than Colin Peterson’s last generation’s worth of challengers combined, most of it local. And Chip Cravaack has not only blown the lid off of the usual polling in the Eighth District, but uncovered what looks like a wave of populist conservative enthusiasm in that long-benighted part of the state.
I don’t want to get too excited, but Byberg, Demmer and Cravaack could all catch fire here.
I’ve never felt that about the Seventh or Eighth in all the years I’ve lived here.
Now – if you live in the Sixth District, Michele Bachmann is going to win by 10 points. Maybe 12. So while the leadership of the Sixth District will scream at me for suggesting it, I’m going to say “howzabout you take a moment to peel off a few bucks to help out one of the swing districts? Maybe help conquer one of the districts that hasn’t seen sane representation (or in the case of the Eighth, seen their representative at all) in a generation or two?
And if you live in the Second District, you know in your gut that if Shelly Madore gets within twenty points of John Kline, it’ll be with the aid of a lot of corpses in cemeteries in Apple Valley. Kline is going to demolish Madore. Now, in 2008 I suggested peeling off some money and some volunteer time to help out in some of the swingier districts, and Janet Beihoffer – the 2nd CD chair at the time – nearly took out a hit on me. But I’m going to do it again. John Kline is going to win, and win huge. So will Bachmann.
So if you live in those districts and see fit, and want to help back up some of the confidence that’s buzzing around the state, please consider peeling off some volunteer time to drive from the Second to the First, or from the Sixth up to the 7th or 8th, to help Randy, Lee or Chip. Or send a few bucks to Randy, Lee and especially Chip and, if you really want to pray for an upset that’ll shock the world, for Joel Demos and Teresa Collett.
Here’s where to start:
More – much more – later.
My predication that Michele Bachmann would win the Sixth District race by ten points is sounding better and better as we go:
Today, it’s Bachman 49%, DFL State Senator Tarryl Clark 40%. Compared to an identical SurveyUSA poll released 2 months ago, little has changed: each candidate is up 1 point.
If my theory is correct – if none of the polls’ likely voter models properly account for Republican turnout and enthusiasm – then ten might be conservative. But I’m not going to get irrationally exuberant.
I’m of Scandinavian descent.
I’m not naturally wired for optimism.
But down in my gut, this feels like it could be Chip Cravaack’s year.
Maybe it’s the fact that Oberstar’s got so many friends in high places, and yet so few in his district.
Maybe it’s that poll from two weeks ago.
I dunno.
I’m just feeling good about this race.
Gary Gross shocks nobody by endorsing my friend and radio colleague King Banaian in House District 15B, the eastern part of the Saint Cloud metro area.
And he explains why. I’ll cut out most of the summary; you go and read:
1. King understands what makes an economy tick…Simply put, it’s been painful listening to the DFL in past legislative sessions because their understanding of basic economic principles is all but non-existent.
2. …King will set sensible priorities that limit the reach of government while still funding the things that government is responsible for doing.
3. King’s devotion to limited government will send a signal to businesses that spending will finally be put under control…
5. King knows that there are tons of regulations that don’t serve a useful purpose…
And he concludes:
Simply put, I’m not voting for King just because he’s my friend. I’m voting for him because his policies (a) will get Minnesota’s economy back on the right track and (b) will eliminate the overregulation that’s strangling Minnesota’s businesses.
The fact that he’s my friend is just a great bonus.
If you live in the greater Saint Cloud area, consider not only voting for him, but helping him in the home stretch.
Over the past few weeks, the MNDFL and the Dayton campaign have been trying to hammer on the fact that Tom Horner – who voted for Obama, and hasn’t publicly supported a conservative Republican for office in years – is “A Republican”, just like Tom Emmer. They also note that former governor Arne Carlson and former senator Dave Durenberger – liberal Republicans who rejected Ronald Reagan while he was in office – are endorsing Horner. Who, by the way, is a “Republican” who proposes a tax-and-spend agenda only marginally less noxious and big-L liberal than Mark Dayton’s.
“What about that big tent?”, they snark.
The quick answer is that the tent is plenty big; all who favor limiting government and holding the line on spending are welcome. Neither Horner, Durenberger nor Carlson have ever stood for either.
But since we’re on the subject of big tents…
Yesterday, Maurice Hinchey had to get Bill Clinton out to Binghamton to try to rescue his re-election bid and save his House seat. Today, Republican challenger George Phillips trumps Hinchey with a surprise endorsement from former New York City Mayor Ed Koch, a Democrat who has a track record of backing common-sense Republicans.
So all you DFLers who were trumpeting the Carlson and Durenberger endorsements last month; shall I expect you to start sending checks to George Phillips? Because Ed Koch is obviously the reasonable, responsible, non-extreme, big-tent Democrat?
Of course you should – if you follow your own logic.
And then, after the election, you can send Randy Kelly a few bucks and an “attaboy” for fighting for principle back in 2005.
Assuming you really believe all that “big tent” crap.
We Republicans don’t need a big tent. We need to get as many people as we can to crowd into the tent we have, with us.
The DFL – and their national benefactors – went all-in on Tarryl Clark against their bete noir, Michele Bachmann.
Clark is getting clobbered. Hammered. Beaten like a cheap steak. She’s going to lose by 10 points, and I actually starting to think I’m being conservative.
And the regional left is starting to have second thoughts about their monomania.
A few weeks back Dave Schultz – former head of überliberal “Common Cause Minnesota” and reliably lefty professor at Hamline University – bemoaned the imbalance of the spending:
There is virtually no chance the Democrats will defeat Bachmann. I have argued this for months. Bachmann’s sixth district seat is apportioned approximately six points ahead for Republicans. She is a conservative candidate in a conservative district. She is the Tea Party leader in a Tea Party GOP year. She fits her district well and has already survived several attempts to knock her off in previous years (most recently ’08) more favorable to Democrats. Democrats would be better served to wait until 2012, after reapportionment, when new lines may change the Sixth and make it more competitive, or when Bachmann makes the foolish move to run for the senate againt Klobuchar and gets waxed by her.
Yet Democrats cannot resist themselves. Democrats from around the country are pouring millions into this race and yet there is no evidence that Clark is catching up or gaining ground. Yes, Democrats have to challenge her and force her to campaign at home so that she does not travel and fundraise and campaign for others. But from a cost-benefit perspective, pouring millions here makes no sense. Sure there might be a symbolic victory in knocking her off, but with Democrats having to defend so many seats and having to decide where to best spend, resources need to be placed where it makes the most sense. That is why Minnesota’s Third District makes more sense.
Nick Coleman – still writing for the Strib (who knew?) notes the dearth of attention paid to Shelly Madore, whom John Kline is going to beat by eleventy billion points in the Second District next month:
The media either go gaga or go to sleep. In the northern suburbs, it’s gaga all the way: Republican Michele Bachmann and her opponent, Democrat Tarryl Clark, have drawn donations and attention from near and far. Still, just 40 percent of likely voters supported Clark in a recent poll, and the New York Times’ influential “FiveThirtyEight” website gives Clark tiny 1.2 percent odds of beating Bachmann.
It’s hard not to conclude that most of the attention to Minnesota’s Sixth District race is due to the flamboyant incumbent, not her worthy challenger. But at least Bachmann has agreed to debate Clark three times. That will allow voters to consider their choices and balance their view of the candidates, evaluating their message and their performance. However the race turns out, that’s good for the voters.
John Kline isn’t about to let that kind of thing happen in the Second District
But then, either is Keith Ellison in the Fifth. Or Betty McCollum in the Fourth – yet. Or, as far as I know, Oberstar in the Eighth, or Peterson in the Seventh. Because candidates who perceive themselves – rightly or wrongly – to have insurmountable leads realize – rightly or wrongly – they have nothing to gain and plenty to lose by debating dark-horse challengers. It’s a testimony to Bachmann’s love of the scrap and the fact that she just plan destroys Clark on facts (and the fact that both parties perceive the race as at least hypothetically competitive) that she’s debating at all.
At any rate – by November 3, the DFL will have wasted millions trying to unseat the, effectively, un-unseatable Bachmann.
Would the solid, long-term incumbent John Kline have been vulnerable to the skittery Madore?
Would the fringey, netroots-y Meffert have had a shot against an Erik Paulsen that seems to be growing more conservative as his district seems to follow suit?
We won’t know this year.
Cha ching.
Earlier, we talked about the internal poll that shows Kurt Zellers leading Kate Rodriguez by 24 points in a district where the DFL has staked a lot of mojo – with Margaret Anderson-Kelliher going so far as to say that the district was in the bag for Rodriguez.
But there’s more good news.
The Tarrance Group, which polled 250 people and whose poll has a 6.2 point margin of error, also polled the Governor’s race in 32B.
Now, 32B is a part of the Third CD, which is an area that the “conventional wisdom” has been calling “purple” ever since it was represented by moderate Republican and fellow Jamestown ND native Jim Ramstad. The DFL continues to push the idea that the Third is “purple”, and incipient DFL turf.
More germane? It’s the second poll in six weeks that Tarrance, and the GOP, have conducted in 32B.
And in August, things looked grim for Emmer; indeed, this corner of the 3rd CD was looking pretty dark purple:
In August, Dayton led Emmer 39 to 36 percent.
Scary!
The DFL’s narrative looked to be holding up!
But what a difference six weeks makes:
The same poll shows Emmer’s numbers increasing since August while his DFL opponent’s support has decreased. The October poll shows Emmer overtaking Dayton in the district, 41 to 31.
Crosstabs? The poll was 38% GOP, 32%DFL and 30% independents, which – given that it’s a likely voter poll in what by all accounts will be a bitchin’ conservative year, seems unlikely to be a gross oversample. I don’t know Tarrance’s likely voter model, but if it’s valid (and for argument, let’s say that it is; Tarrance’s memo is included below the jump), it could very well be a sign that the Humphrey Institute and Minnesota Polls’ turnout models are too pessimistic, and that the one-percent GOP ID lead in the latest Rasmussen Poll is more accurate than some may have though.
This, if true, is a huge pickup in a purple district; if it’s being replicated elsewhere in third-tier-land and, if the Cravaack poll and the contributions in the First and Seventh districts can be trusted to indicate any synchronicity beyond 32B, it’s a great sign for Emmer – and perhaps a sign that the Twin Cities Big Media and Big Polling have been too bearish on the enthusasm for voting GOP.
One of the state legislative races the DFL’s been hitting hardest this cycle has been 32B, in Hennepin County. It’s Kurt Zellers’ seat. Zellers is the House Minority Leader – one of the MNGOP’s pack of young conservatives, Brod and Emmer and Seifert and the others that have made such an impact at the State House this past couple of sessions.
So getting Zellers’ head on a plaque would be a huge spiff for the DFL in what is likely to be a trying year. They’ve been pouring money and time into Katie Rodriguez‘ campaign. More than that, they’ve been pouring prestige into it; last week at a fundraiser in the district, Margaret Anderson-Kelliher proclaimed Rodriguez had the district tagged, bagged and on the slab.
If true, this would be huge, akin to the GOP knocking off Dean Johnson a few years back.
If true.
But according to a poll last week from the Tarrance Group of 250 likely voters in 32B, it’s just not true (emphases added):
The survey, conducted October 3-4, found Zellers leading his DFL-endorsed opponent by 24 points, 57-33, replicating a lead he displayed in a poll conducted in August. Zellers also shows a sizable advantage over his opponent among independent voters, leading by more than four-to-one.
Kelliher’s got some ‘splaining to do.
This little portion of the Third District seems to be getting redder and redder as we go along.
But wait – there’s more. Tune in right after noon.
This post was largely written for the national audience at Hot Air’s Greenroom, where it is posted.
My radio colleagues Ed Morrissey (with the A-squad Hot Air) and King Banaian (of SCSU Scholars, also found in the Green Room) will post on occasion about politics in Minnesota, where the three of us live, work, blog and do a bit of talk radio.
And when we do write about Minnesota – especially its freaks of electoral fate, like Al Franken and Jesse Ventura – we get a long string of similar comments; “What do you expect from Minnesota?”, “That’s those crazy Minnesotans” and, when the Emmer/Dayton gubernatorial race comes up, “I don’t have a whole lot of hope for Minnesota”. We were the only state that never voted for Reagan – although to be fair, the state voted for Walter Mondale, a native son, in 1984 (a year before I moved here).
If that’s what you feel, you’re wrong, and you need to re-think things. And I’m going to try to start that rethinking right now.
Don’t get me wrong. Minnesota is a strange place, in a lot of ways. It’s an adopted home for all three of us; Ed’s from LA, King was born in New Hampshire and arrived in Minnesota via California among a few other places, and I grew up in North Dakota (and moved here 25 years ago as of this coming Wednesday). And I think we’ve all scratched our heads, agog, at some of the political weirdness this state has spawned.
Everyone recalls the bizarre 2008 election, where former comedian and failed talk show host Al Franken beat incumbent Norm Coleman in a race that Coleman led by 200 votes on election night – and Franken won by 300 after eight months of recounts and legal maneuvering, exposing many flaws in Minnesota’s electoral system (like the law allowing people to vote without showing ID, but being vouched for by another registered voter).
More infamously, Jesse “The Body” Ventura, running for Minnesota’s “Independence” party, which was essentially a vanity offshoot of Ross Perot’s “Reform” Party, won the 1998 gubernatorial election, beating Hubert Humphrey’s son Skip and…Norm Coleman.
Minnesota has had plenty of electoral weirdness in the past; the Democratic/Farmer/Labor Party (the “DFL”, as we call Democrats here) had long ties to the far, far left; Stalinists were a powerful force in the party until Hubert H. Humphrey managed to purge them in the mid-forties; former Eighth District congressman John Bernard, of the antecedent, radical-left “Farmer/Labor” Party, cast the sole vote in 1938 against embargoing arms to the Stalinist side in the Spanish Civil War. Gus Hall, long-time head of the Communist Party USA and one-time perennial presidential candidate, was a Minnesota native, who cut his teeth as a radical organizing the mines of Northern Minnesota.
There are reasons Minnesota is an odd place:
Culture: Minnesota’s dominant culture in its formative years was immigrants from rural Scandinavia, especially Norway and Sweden. Both nations have long histories of being poor, and developed communitarian traditions to cope with the grinding poverty of life in the Norwegian mountains, the endless woods of Sweden, and the motti of Finland. These communitarian traditions were easy to co-opt for political ends.
Institutions: Minnesota’s prosperity over the past 100 years has been built around several key institutions:
Legend: Minnesota was a sleeping economic giant for decades before the late sixties – when the confluence of resources, an educated populace, infrastructure (the Mississippi, the Great Lakes and the rail system) and booming markets launched Minnesota into prosperity. The media, Minnesota’s academy and the big-government interests assigned the success to a series of government programs that essentially redistributed tax wealth from the Twin Cities to the poorer outstate regions, christened it the “Minnesota Miracle”, and launched a myth that survives to this day.
Events: Minnesota was 20-odd years late to the Reagan Revolution. The Minnesota GOP closely mirrored the national Republican Party throughout the fifties and sixties, the years of the Rockefeler/Eisenhower axis of very, very moderate, big-government Republicanism. The aftermath of Watergate and the rise of the social conservatives in the national party in the mid-seventies caused then-ascendant “progressive” wing of the MNGOP to essentially secede from the national party, rebranding itself the “Independent Republican Party“, which lasted for twenty years and the governorships of very liberal Republicans Wendell Anderson and Arne Carlson (and Al Quie’s single term, during which his mid-stagflation budget-cutting enraged the DFL establishment enough to get him tossed from office). The Republican grassroots didn’t actually get on board with the rebirth of conservatism until the mid-nineties.
So Minnesota’s got some dodgy history when it comes to politics.
But there are also grounds for hope – maybe immense hope. Like most “purple” states, Minnesota is really very sharply divided between conservative and “progressive” voting.
Link courtesy Minn-Donkey, a leftyblog that doesn't completely insult ones' intelligence.
The inner cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul – the 5th and 4th Districts, respectively – and the “Arrowhead”, the northeast part of the state, DFL-dominated Duluth and the Iron Range – are traditional DFL strongholds.
And it’s there that we see the encouragement. Here’s why:
Demographics: The deepest-red districts – the southern and western suburbs of the Twin Cities – are where most of the growth is happening. Most business and population growth is in these districts, which include the Second CD (John Kline, a staunch conservative who will win his race by at least 30 points this November), the Third (Erik Paulsen, who is growing more conservative in office as his district, once considered “purple”, drifts rightward) and the Sixth (Michele Bachmann, of whom more in a bit).
The Wave: It’s hard to tell, but it seems big things are happening in the hinterland. First, the First District – the traditionally-Republican, ag-dominated southern tier of counties, represented by second-term DFLer Tim Walz – is considered in play; Walz supported Obamacare, which will gut one of the region’s major employers, the world-famous Mayo Clinic, which is already diversifying its operations outside the state and US to hedge against the worst.
Better yet? The Seventh District – the tier of counties along the western border, represented for a generation by blue-dog Colin Peterson – are restless. Lee Byberg, a Norwegian immigrant and bio-tech entrepreneur, has raised more money in this campaign than all of Peterson’s opponents together in recent memory. The ag-dependent district is not thrilled about Obamacare, and there is speculation that those red counties could be one major tipping point away from sending a Republican to Washington.
Best of all? That tipping point may be brewing up in mining country. Last week, news broke that Chip Cravaack, an Annapolis grad and retired Navy chopper pilot, was within three points of 18-term Representative Jim Oberstar in an internal poll in the Eighth District, the “Arrowhead”, which has sent DFLers to Washington since 1947. Oberstar hasn’t had less than a 29 point margin of victory in a generation. If it’s even close in the Eighth, anything can happen. The voters in the Eighth are union voters, largely, and have been voting DFL for several generations – but they are largely pro-life, as was Oberstar, until he threw his lot in with the Administration on flipping the Stupak coalition toward Obamacare last year. Worse? Cap and Trade will shred the mining industry, which uses immense amounts of energy whose price spike after passage will put many mines out of business.
The Loyal Opposition: Conservatives in Minnesota are a close-knit political Band of Brothers; we’ve had to fight two wars in the past fifteen years. We had to win over our party before we could even take on the DFL. And the veterans of those struggles are tough as nails, immune to abuse, and so clear on principle that debates against DFL opponents usually resemble turkey shoots. The rest of the nation knows Michele Bachmann as the vice-queen of the Tea Party, at Sarah Palin’s side.
But Bachmann didn’t start in Congress. She started out fighting the Stillwater (MN) school board, a Twin Cities exurb clogged with liberals tired of the DFL’s failed cities, but unable to leave the failed policies behind. She had to battle her own district’s IR legacy to get endorsed, first for State Senate (where she was a conservative lightning rod for six years) and then against a moderate-leaning establishment in the Sixth District in 2006, even before facing the DFL.
Many Minnesota conservatives have similar stories; years spent fighting the “Independent Republican” establishment before even being able to take on the Democrats.
This has created a grass-roots conservatism in Minnesota that has slowly insinuated conservative ideals and, eventually, policies into parts of Minnesota that would have been inconceivable a few decades ago.
How do we know? The latest Rasmussen poll shows that while voter ID in Minnesota is very close between the GOP and DFL, that Tea Party sympathy is actually higher in Minnesota than the national average.
Conservative Unity: Minnesota’s “craziness” was as much a symptom of the Minnesota GOP’s schizophrenia over the past forty years as it was to any liberal tradition. For several elections, Minnesota’s “moderates” duked it out with, and defeated, conservatives; in 1990, while the grass roots endorsed social conservative Alan Quist, Arne Carlson – a man more liberal on many issues than the DFL incumbent Rudy Perpich, including gun control and abortion – ran and won a primary challenge, and spent two terms as a free-spending, surplus-gobbling governor.
Even Tim Pawlenty, who had a reputation as a pragmatist if not an outright moderate during his time as House Minority leader, had to tack hard to the right to fend off a challenge to get endorsed in 2002, against fiscalcon challenger Brian Sullivan, winning the nomination after promising “No New Taxes”.
This years MNGOP convention was distinguished by the fact that the front-runners – House minority leader Marty Seifert and eventual nominee Tom Emmer – while impeccably conservative, had three challengers to their right. There was no “moderate” in the race (after Norm Coleman declared he wasn’t running).
For the first time in recorded history, the Minnesota GOP is a unified conservative bloc (to the consternation of the regional media, which audibly slavers for a return of the old, “moderate”/liberal “IR”, basically liberals with better suits.
So this is not your father’s Minnesota. This is not the same Minnesota that voted for Walter Mondale. This is a hungrier, less-prosperous Minnesota than the one that voted for Jesse Ventura in the cha-cha nineties, when the state was running multi-billion-dollar surpluses. This is not the Obama-crazy state that delivered Al Franken to Washington – and the conservative movement is not the naive bunch of trusting schlemiels that let the DFL bully its way through a recount process that was designed to manufacture votes for Franken and toss votes for Coleman. The wave of conservative, anti-Obama sentiment is washing up in Minnesota as well; there is evidence that the regional media has no idea how much so.
But as Ed and my radio colleague King Banaian – who is running for the Minnesota House of Representatives, in the exurban northwestern part of the metro – wrote this morning, there are no guarantees, and even in the best of times conservatives in Minnesota have to work harder than most:
For whatever reason (as discussed on the NARN shows on AM 1280 Saturday) and with Michael Barone at the Center of the American Experiment talk this past Tuesday, “Minnesota is different.” Whether it’s genetics, an isolated view of ‘liberalism’ or something else, in order for our great, conservative candidates to win, we simply have to work harder, dig deeper and make those voter ID phone calls. Yes, they can be a pain but we need to do them. Why? In 48 states, voters declare party affiliation at time of voter registration. They don’t have to spend $$$$ trying to find out who votes how. Any candidate can apply for the list of R or D or all voters and get it. We don’t have outside $$ funding id for us, we have to do it ourselves.
And so we do.
Don’t write Minnesota off. This race is just getting interesting.
The regional leftybots are a-buzz over…
…some really, really mundane news.
Tom Emmer is the subject of a legal malpractice lawsuit by a former client.
Given the typical leftyblogger’s understanding of the law, many of them are making a lot of this “story”.
However, the facts are these:
And, gosh golly, look at when the summary judgment hearing is scheduled (emphasis added):
OTHER EVENTS AND HEARINGS
09/17/2010 Summons and Complaint
09/17/2010 Certificate of Representation
09/17/2010 Notice and Acknowledgement of Service
09/17/2010 Notice of Motion and Motion
09/17/2010 Memorandum
09/17/2010 Affidavit-Other
09/17/2010 Affidavit-Other
09/17/2010 Affidavit-Other
09/17/2010 Affidavit of Mailing
09/21/2010 Notice of Case Filing
09/21/2010 Schedule Pre-Trial
09/24/2010 Affidavit-Other
09/24/2010 Affidavit of Service
11/08/2010 Motion Summary Judgment (10:00 AM) (Judicial Officer Halsey, Stephen M.)
Right after the election.
While there is no reason to believe that this case was filed by a political enemy of Emmer’s (the plaintiff is a businessman; businesspeople don’t care which party their customers are from, as long as the checks cash), it’s not unreasonable, given how legal malpractice cases work, to speculate that the timing makes perfect sense to the plaintiff.
Rachel Stassen-Berger, writing in the Strib yesterday:
Republican candidate for governor Tom Emmer is all over the new Republican theme — Democratic candidate Mark Dayton doesn’t have a complete budget plan.
Emmer hammered the point, made by supportive Republicans repeatedly during the past few days, on a Tuesday spot on Minnesota Public Radio.
“Let’s start talking about the elephant in the room that nobody wants to acknowledge. Sen. Dayton has proposed a plan that is billions of dollars short,” Emmer said. He went on to suggest that Dayton will have to increase taxes more folks than he’s specified — couples making taxable income of $150,000 and singles earning $130,000. “How far are you willing to go?”
Let’s extend that thought for a moment: Mark Dayton is not a dumb guy. And he’s got people on his campaign staff who are even smarter. They don’t own a supercomputer – but they don’t need one to put together the broad outlines of a budget. Their campaign isn’t short of staff or funding, obviously.
So if you think the only budget that the Dayton campaign has is the one that’s on the website – the one that grins a big dumb grin and says “we’re $890 million short” with the same seriousness of a junior high kid saying the dog ate his homework – then I have to say with all due respect that you’re beggaring reason. Either the campaign is incompetent, or they know where that extra $890 million is coming from, and would rather the electorate not know.
And if you assume Democrats and Dayton aren’t just plain stupid, that leaves you with only “b”
“Put it on paper, Sen. Dayton,” Emmer said. (Republicans on Twitter and on blogs have taken to accusing individual reporters of negligence for not following suit.)
Stassen-Berger links to my Twitter account, as well as my “AWOL Media” piece yesterday. I wouldn’t use the phrase “accusing of negligence”, really – it’s got a legalistic tinge to it that’s a little unseemly for free speech.
It just seems that the media, which six weeks ago were hot to get all the details of the Emmer budget, has suddenly gotten incredibly incurious. And yet now that Dayton’s budget has a large, suspicious hole – and there really is no solution but to jack up taxes on the middle class – suddenly it seems that the people don’t have a “right to know”, accorinding to our regional political media.
I mean, did you see Esme Murphy?
She might as well have been giving the Senator a massage. “Do you have any plans?” Er, nope. And it ended there!
Did you hear Keri Miller’s interview with Tom Emmer? Back before Emmer released his budget? She went after him like a barracuda after Charlie the Tuna.
Does the public – especially us middle-class schnook taxpayers – still have a right to know now that it’s the favorite son of Minnesota’s political “elite?”
I mean…:
Dayton has acknowledged that his budget plan comes up nearly $1 billion short. That’s in part because his income tax plan won’t bring in as much money as he had hoped. He has specified how he would make the cuts he’s found, although some are estimates and others have been deemedunrealistic. But he admits a “gap,” which leads opponents to believe he’ll raise more in taxes.
…I’m a complete schlemiel as a “reporter”, and even I see that these are some huge, valid questions!
So David Brauer – who’s never covered up his lefty sympathies, but seems to try to do a decent job anyway – asked via Twitter:
@mitchpberg regarding @Rachelsb & @MinnPost, does thishttp://bit.ly/c4f26t and thishttp://t.co/jj16mXx get them off your bad list?
He links to a this Rachel Stassen-Berger story in the Strib, and a Doug Grow piece in the MinnPost. Stassen-Berger did, indeed, note that Dayton’s budget comes up short – but there’s no evidence that I’ve seen (I’m willing to be corrected!) that she’s gotten up at a Dayton presser and said “OK, Chauncey Fauntelroy, if you don’t have to hit the middle class, who do you have to get the $890 million? We’ve got all day, Yale boy” (Those might be my words rather than Stassen-Berger’s).
Grow makes the valid point that…:
…no governor, no matter how popular, will be able to zip a budget package through the Legislature without major changes. In this case, whoever is governor likely will not be elected with a majority of the vote, meaning there will be little chance to claim any mandate, so you can expect nasty legislative fights.
…while basically claiming a pox on all their fiscal houses.
And, most importantly, both of these pieces were two weeks ago. Juuuuust about the time that the non-wonk class – all those actual voters – started thinking about the election.
Which was why I took exception to Brauer’s followup tweet:
@mitchpberg Fair question. Would venture Dayton’s gap is well-known, covered and acknowledged. For many weeks, Emmer seemed to be ducking.
Well-known to whom? Political reporters and political junkies and fire-breathing political bloggers? Sure!
The average voter – especially the ones who start paying attention to politics sometime between the first and fifteenth of October?
Hell – I’ve talked with candidates for the State House who haven’t read anything about this yet.
So while I’m not going to say that our assembled mass of journalists are “negligent” for not asking, I’m still curious; when the public has a right to know, does it imply they’re supposed to exercise that right by developing a jones for research?
Look, journos; if your line is “all three of the candidates’ budgets leave questions”, then ask them. That’s what you get the big bucks for. Hell, I’d do it, if any of them (but Emmer) returned my calls! And since neither of them do, I – and, more importantly, we, the entire body politic – have to depend on y’all, Tim Pugmire and Tom Scheck and Bill Salisbury and Rachel Stassen-Berger and Pat Kessler to do it.
Thing is, so far in the race, it’s Emmer that’s been getting the questioning; Dayton seems to be the only one who can get away with saying “I’ll get back to you on November 3”.
Am I wrong?
What say you, Tim and Rachel and Tom and Bill and Pat?
Remember in June and July?
When the Dayton Campaign, and their minimum-wage minions in the leftyblogosphere, demanded that Tom Emmer release his budget plan?
Because without an Emmer Budget Plan in place for their perusal, democracy itself was in mortal danger!
The entire media was in on it. of course.
Tom Scheck at MPR? Yep. He was asking.
Tim Pugmire at MPR? Yep, he wanted the details, too.
Eric Black at the MNPost? It was surely important to him!
The question certainly fascinated Rachel Stassen-Berger at the Strib!
Over the past five weeks, Tom Emmer has released a budget plan that balances the budget, and lays the groundwork for the kind of economic growth that actually sets economies up for the kind of long-term prosperity that makes budget fiascoes like the past four years dim, comic memories.
In the meantime, Mark Dayton’s first budget cratered – came up $3 Billion short – and his second attempt is well over a billion off the mark, and Dayton is now saying budgets don’t really matter that much anyway until he’s elected.
So I’m wondering – where are the media who were so strident about having a budget to fact-check last summer?
Rachel Stassen-Berger? Tim Pugmire? Tom Scheck? Pat Kessler? Bill Salisbury? Eric Black? David Brauer?
Where are all the great journalistic instincts of one of the nation’s putatively top-twenty media markets?
Or don’t the people have a right to know anymore?
Let’s start counting up days until someone in the regional mainstream media – MPR, the Strib, the PiPress, WCCO-TV, anyone covers the vaporous vacuity of the Dayton “budget plan”.
Good thing I don’t pay for ink, huh?
I participated in a conference call with Chip Cravaack and his campaign yesterday; it was where he officially released the news that his internal polling shows him in a statistical tie with 17-term representative Jim Oberstar.
And Cravaack quipped that while he’s trying to run a local campaign with local activists, he noted that all of the bloggers on the call – Ed Morrissey (CD2), Derek Brigham (CD3), Gary Gross (CD6) and I (CD4) were from outside the district.
And I thought – wow. Could it be there are no conservative bloggers in the Eighth District?
If so, that needs to change.
If you are a conservative blogger up in the Eighth District, and you’ve been covering the Oberstar/Cravaack race, drop me a line, either in the comments or on my email address.
And if you’ ve ever wanted to start a conservative blog up there in Duluth or Two Harbors or Virginia, there’s no time like the present. Go to Blogger.com, and take two minutes to set up your blog, and devote twenty minutes a day to writing something about politics in the Eighth District, and when you’ve got a week or two and half a dozen articles in, let me know; the Minnesota Organization of Bloggers and True North will set you off in style.
Perhaps you can become that alt-media elite. (There are more than a few leftybloggers up there. You should do juuuust fine).
Remember last June?
According to the DFL and their buildup of minimum wage leftyblog minions, the fact that Tom Emmer hadn’t released a detailed budget plan was a finger in the eye of The People. They had a right to knoooooooooow!, after all. And they had to knooooooooooow it right then and there, dagnabbit!
Then Emmer released a budget plan – one that balanced the budget without raising taxes, lowered taxes on job-creating activities, and left K12 education untouched.
And then it turned out that Mark Dayton’s first attempt at a budget plan fell three billion dollars short on balancing the budget.
And then his second attempt fell 890 million dollars short (or maybe more!).
And now, suddenly, having a budget plan in place just isn’t that big a deal!
He even said on WCCO on Sunday morning, amid Esme Murphy painting his toenails…
Can you imagine what Esme Murphy would have done had Tom Emmer ever called his plan a “work in progress?”
Now, Mark Dayton’s a smart guy. And he’s got a lot of smart people working for him. And while they don’t have access to a “supercomputer” to figure out budget numbers, they don’t need one. A fairly complex Excel spreadsheet will get you the big-picture numbers; some not-cheap software (certianly avaiable to the compaign) can work out the fine details. Just like Emmer did.
And yet they didn’t.
Wait. Do you really believe that, after two go-arounds, that the Dayton camp doesn’t have a budget?
Rubbish.
They do. They just don’t want you to see it.
Because the real Dayton Budget Plan – the one they don’t want you to see yet – socks it to the Middle Class. There is no other way. To think that Dayton doesn’t know this beggars credulity. To think that there is any other politically-palatable answer is pollyannaish and just plain stupid.
There are huge questions to be asked about the nonexistant “Dayton Budget Plan”.
So when will the media ask?
Anyone?
Is that an echo I hear?
The Eighth District has been dominated by the DFL since 1947 – indeed, has only been held by Oberstar and, before him, DFLer John Blatnik for the past, ahem, sixty-three years.
Reading through the history of the Eighth District is a whole lot less tedious than the last 63 years of its history, though. Before Oberstar, only seven men have held that seat, going all the way back to the foundation of the Eighth District back in 1903:
An internal poll shows Chip Cravaack – the GOP-endorsed candidate for Congress in the Eighth Congressional District, within three points in his race against 17-term Representative Jim Oberstar.
The poll – by Public Opinion Strategies – was of 300 likely voters in the Eighth District. It has a five point margin of error.
It shows the race at 45-42 Oberstar, with very few undecideds.
Even if Cravaack were to finish in November within twenty points against Oberstar – who has been winning races by 40-odd points in recent memory – it would have been a huge moral victory.
Even if it’s only partly true – that Cravaack is even close – that’s going to be a huge kick in the head for the DFL.
But it gets better: with messaging thrown in at the end of the poll – Cap and Trade (which will devastate mining in the range), regulation (which has kept a couple of big precious metals mining projects from starting digging) and Obamacare, the numbers switch to 47-41 Cravaack. And the “re-elect” number – “would you reelect Oberstar” – is 40%, versus 48 for “someone new”.
If this is true – if Cravaack upsets Oberstar in the Eighth, one of the most traditionally, reliably Democrat-voting districts there is outside of Berkeley, Manhattan and Minneapolis – then all bets are truly off in this election.
I’ll be following this very closely.
Because you can bet the mainstream media will not.
There’ve been some interesting dynamics in the race this past few weeks.
And, like the inner workings of most political campaigns, the reasons for some of these dynamics are hidden.
Which doesn’t mean we can’t take a swipe at them.
The below is a narrative of the past few weeks in the Minnesota gubernatorial campaign. I will clearly label events “Fact” or “Theory”; you can file the results under “prognostication” or “science fiction”, or “wishful thinking”, or whatever you want. The only evidence – so far – is purely circumstantial.
While I will not assign hard dates to any of my “Theory” entries, the rough time-frame should be clear enough for county work, read in sequence with the context of the real events.
BEGIN: Roughly two weeks ago.
THEORY: DFL internal polling shows that Mark Dayton’s lead is eroding (as reflected in the Rasmussen poll – see below) and that Tom Horner is taking more DFL than GOP voters. A lot more. And DFL enthusiasm numbers are lagging badly, while GOP enthusiasm is exploding.
FACT: The Rasmussen poll showed that Emmer had erased Dayton’s primary-time surge and pulled into a lead (within the margin of error).
FACT: Dayton’s entire campaign staff drops what it’s doing and come to HQ for an all-staff emergency meeting. THEORY: The main subject was this putative internal polling.
THEORY: Key DFL staffers discussed this polling with their friends, colleagues and contacts at the Strib, and elsewhere in the Twin Cities’ left-leaning media, academic and non-profit community (to the extend that “Key DFLers” and those other groups are actually separate and need to be distinguished at all), indicating that Dayton is in trouble. The message just wasn’t working. The leadership decided that a) they needed to try to push Horner down, and b) the message needed more than just a little tweak; they were going to have to try to sell a “class warfare” platform as something…almost conservative and responsible.
THEORY (and a conspiratorial one at that): For reasons all their own – liberal bias, the urge to sell papers, the imperative to keep clients – the various polling organizations jiggle the “likely voter” numbers to show Dayton with a commanding lead.
FACT: MPR/The Humphrey Institute and the Strib/Minnesota Poll almost simultaneously issue polls showing improbably large Dayton leads, using samplings and turnout models that don’t pass any stink test this side of Baghdad Bob.
THEORY: DFL campaign staff contacted key Minnesota leftybloggers, and ordered them to do what they do as their primary reason to exist best; pass along a meme for them, to stanch the bleeding toward the Horner campaign.
FACT: Nearly every leftyblog in Minnesota runs “Tom Horner is really teh Republican” stories, all with very similar wording and thought structure. The Alliance for a Better Minnesota releases a “Tom Horner Is Teh Republican” website – on a domain rented back in January of 2010.
FACT: Lefties have been talking jobs, jobs, jobs. Yesterday was a good example; Javier Morillo of the SEIU debated Laura Brod. Gary Gross covered it:
Let’s start with Morillo’s pathetic performance during the Face-Off segment of @Issue With Tom Hauser. Morillo said the words middle class and jobs so often, it was like he was trying to win a repitition competition. He repeatedly argued that Mark Dayton was “the only candidate who would protect the middle class.” How will Dayton help the middle class by chasing employers from Minnesota with the 2nd-highest income tax rate in the nation?
It’s painfully obvious that the DFL got the news that their message isn’t working and that their message has to shift from their tax-the-rich scheme to creating jobs. People’s first priority is getting the economy humming, not whether the rich are paying their fair share.
Dayton’s “message” has gone from “Tax the Rich” to “We love you, middle class” in a matter of weeks.
My scenario is admittedly and gleefully fictional.
So was “The Great Pacific War” by Hector Bywater. And we know how that turned out.
[I just sent the following to Mark Dean, director of Common Cause MN, which just filed a complaint against conservative PAC “Minnesota’s Future” for doing exactly what “Alliance For A Better Minnesota”, “Win Minnesota” and “The 2010 Fund” have been doing – or about 10% of what they’re doing, anyway…]
Mr. Dean,
I’m Mitch Berg, one of the hosts of the Northern Alliance Radio Network on AM1280 in the Twin Cities.
I’d like to invite you to appear on the “NARN” with Ed Morrissey and I one of these next weekends to discuss your complaint against “Minnesota’s Future”; we’re curious why Common Cause has neglected to file a similar complaint against “”Alliance For A Better MInnesota”, “Win Minnesota” and “The 2010 Fund”, which are doing exactly what you allege Minnesota’s Future has done, only with many times more money.
On the chance it was all a ghastly oversight, I’ll bring a complaint form. We can fill it out on the air together.
While the request is pointed, the Northern Alliance prides ourselves on doing civil, respectful interviews. Previous “non-partisan” guests include RT Rybak, Dane Smith, Eric Black and Rochelle Olson.
We would sincerely love to discuss this before the election.
Let me know if any of the next few Saturdays work. Our program airs from 1-3PM.
I do hope to hear from you.
Sincerely,
Mitch Berg
Co-host, The Northern Alliance Radio Network,
AM1280 (WWTC-AM) Radio.
“Shot In The Dark” (www.shotinthedark.info)
“True North” (www.looktruenorth.com).
Remember when we first looked at the Dayton Dustbowl, back on Labor Day?
We looked at all the holes in the original Dayton Dustbowl – the 1.0 version of Mark Dayton’s budget plan.
One bit that got carried through verbatim in Dust Bowl 2.0 was this plan – to save $425 million per biennium by halving the number of contractors employed by the state.
Has it really only been a month?
At any rate, Catherine Richter of MPR’s “Poligraph” reports on what SITD readers have known for a month, now; that this just isn’t going to work:
Dayton’s correct that the state spends approximately $850 million per biennium on outsourcing. And cutting such activity in half could save the state more than $400 million.
But in practice, Dayton’s plan appears difficult to implement. Many of the state’s contracts provide essential services that the state would still have to supply one way or another.
And I had forgotten about this next bit, here (emphasis added):
Further, Minnesota law requires departments and agencies prove no state workers can take on these tasks before they contract with a firm.
Minnesota contractors already provide services that are either legally mandated, completely unavailable on the state workforce, or both; bridge engineers, business analysts, concrete workers, surveyors, usability engineers, prison doctors and the hundreds or thousands of other jobs that state doesn’t need at all, until they absolutely, positively do.
If the state gets rid of “half” of the contractors – who are already doing jobs that the state needs, but does not have in the workforce – then in most cases someone’s gotta do it.
And that “someone” is going to be union labor, in all its exquisite expense, and racking up all those hideously expensive defined-benefit pensions that are going to eat this state alive about the time our kids start paying taxes.
The way I see it, that’s a $425,000,000 hole per biennium blown in the Dayton 2.0 budget. Tack that onto the $890,000,000 shortfall it already has – by the Dayton campaign’s own admission! – and the Son Of Dayton Dustbowl is actually $1.315 billion short of solving the deficit.
The conservative alt media has called another one.
Common Cause Minnesota is a “non-profit, non-partisan” organization whose every initiative is, mirabile dictu, exactly in sync with the “progressive” wing of the Minnesota DFL.
No huge shock there.
Speech rationing – “campaign finance reform” – has long been one of their main initiatives. Read for yourself. They want – so they claim – transparency in politics.
Of course, as Luke Hellier notes at MDE, they are a 501c4 lobbying organization which, in 2008, took in over $665,000 on donations, entirely from anonymous “individual” sources (check it out starting on Page 13 of this very large PDF file).
Sample swiped from MDE
Now, the law doesn’t require them to divulge exactly who their donors are – which is kind of a weaselly out for a group that wants government to limit and regulate your First Amendment right to political speech.
At any rate, yesterday they released word that they were going to file a complaint against a series of Minnesota political action committees (PACs) that were playing a shell game with third-party donations, trying to make accountability difficult.
And given how hard Common Cause has been proclaiming their ecumenicism and non-partisan mission, I thought “Halleluiah! They’re going to do something about the epic three-card monte game the Dayton campaign has going on!”
As we discussed last June, the Dayton campaign was being supported by a huge ad campaign from a group called “Alliance for a Better Minnesota”. At that time, ABM’s funding came from a bunch of unions, and a group called “Win Minnesota”, which was largely funded by…the Dayton family; as of last June, the list was…:
Win Minnesota also funded a group which at the time had no name, but which shared an address with Win Minnesota, which has since been named “The 2010 Fund”. 2010 of last June had about $850K in the bank, including money from:
I’m looking for the updated numbers from all of these funds.
So who does Common Cause go after?
Who would you think? (emphasis added):
Common Cause Minnesota has uncovered a scheme by the Minnesota’s Future political committee and the Republican Governors Association (RGA) to avoid Minnesota’s original source disclosure law by funneling a $428,000 contribution from the RGA to Minnesota’s Future through a shell company. The company, Minnesota Future, LLC was created just days before it received the contribution from the RGA and immediately transferred the funds to the Minnesota’s Future political committee.
Today, three separate complaints were filed with the Minnesota Campaign Finance Disclosure Board against Minnesota’s Future, Minnesota Future, LLC, and the RGA. The complaints allege that the three groups together violated multiple state statutes ranging from circumvention of campaign finance laws, failing to register as a political committee, and failing to report receipts and expenditures. The three entities could face $5.1 million in civil penalties and criminal prosecution.
“This was a brazen attempt to circumvent Minnesota’s disclosure law,” said Mike Dean, Executive Director of Common Cause Minnesota. “The public has a right to know what special interests are behind political ads, especially during a hotly contested election.”
So the public has a “right to know” the money behind “Minnesota’s Future” from the Republican Governors Association…
…but the multiple millions of dollars from the Dayton Family, the unions, and the Democratic Governors Assocication which financed the most vile smear campaign in the history of Minnesota politics (under the cover of a phony grass-roots organization funded by the Dayton family!) isn’t something “the public” needs to know about?
I’ve invited a representative of Common Cause to come on the Northern Alliance tomorrow to discuss what would be brazen hypocrisy from a genuinely “non-partisan” organization.
Any bets?
Let’s be clear on this right up front; Tom Emmer’s gonna win this thing. I still say three points.
Nothing I write below should be read in such a way as to imply I really think anything else. It’s just not true.
Some of my DFL acquaintances occasionally jibe “If you’d only picked Seifert, you wouldn’t be having the problems you’re having now”.
I’m a polite guy. I usually change the subject.
I need to.
Let’s backtrack in our minds for a bit. Say that Marty Seifert had carried his early lead in the GOP endorsement process through to the convention, and gotten the nomination.
Think for a moment: what parts of the DFL’s campaign against Tom Emmer aren’t perfectly transferable to Marty Seifert? Or Dave Haan? Or Pat Anderson, or Paul Kolls, or Sue Jeffers or Tim Palwenty or even Tom Horner, for that matter?
What has the DFL campaign been for the past five months?
There is nothing in the DFL campaign book that’s been used against Tom Emmer this past five months that couldn’t have just swapped in Seifert’s name and and unflattering photo.
The only differences? Oh, the personal attacks would be different; Tom Emmer had his careless driving convictions, but if Marty Seifert ever so much as jaywalked, you can bet Alliance for a Better Minnesota would have run a million dollars worth of ads; “Marty Seifert thinks Laws are for Other People”.
MNDFL chair Brian Melendez sent this out to the faithful yesterday:
The more Minnesotans hear from Tom Horner, the clearer it becomes that he is just another Republican insider, and his only plan is to continue Governor Pawlenty’s failed policies.
Insider? A guy who hasn’t darkened the doorstep of a GOP caucus since Arne Carlson was in office?
By that standard, Mitch Berg is “just another Libertarian Party insider”.
As far as that bit about “continu[ing] Governor Pawlenty’s failed (sic) policies”? Let’s take a brief march back through time:
2002
CANDIDATE PAWLENTY: “No new taxes!
2004
GOVERNOR PAWLENTY: Nope. No new taxes!
2006
GOVERNOR PAWLENTY: Ixnay on the Axestay!
2008
GOVERNOR PAWLENTY: You shall not pass…taxes!
2010
TOM HORNER: We need over two billion in new taxes!
I’d think even Brian Melendez could detect the pattern, here.
Tom Horner wants to raise sales taxes on almost everything we buy, which will hit middle-class families twice as hard as others. And while Minnesota’s middle-class families are struggling, Tom Horner’s priority is to cut taxes for big businesses.
As opposed to Mark Dayton – who’ll raise taxes on everyone, directly or indirectly – and Tom Emmer, who …won’t!
With less than five weeks left until the election, we wanted to make sure all Minnesota’s voters know exactly what Tom Horner stands for.
Who is Tom Horner? Just another Republican.
Read: “Internal polling shows he’s taking a lot more Democrat than GOP votes”
Yesterday, I dubbed the Strib/”Minnesota” Poll “The DFL Morale Booster”. Not for the first time, of course.
David Brauer writing at the MinnPost responded, more or less:
So with the new Star Tribune poll out showing DFLer Mark Dayton with a 9-point lead over Republican Tom Emmer, it’s the right’s turn to howl over alleged bias.
I dunno that I was “howling”, per se, but if one can’t use hyperbole in the last month of a campaign, when can one? I’ll let it slide, while pointing out that I, and conservatives in general, have legitimate questions about the Minnesota Poll.
Brauer quotes a bit of yesterday’s post:
In the spirit of Dems accusing Rasmussen Reports of being a Republican house organ, Mitch Berg at the True North blog dubs the Strib results “The DFL morale-booster”:
I’ll remind you that if the Minnesota poll were accurate, we’d be referring to Governor Humphrey (the poll showed Moe with a strong lead over Coleman, with Ventura well out of the running), Senator Mondale (who had a five point lead in the MN Poll on the eve of the ’02 election), Governor Moe (to whom the MNPoll gave a slim lead, while significantly overpolling IP candidate Tim Penny in ’02), Governor Hatch (yep, slated to win in ’06)…
And he digs into some history, pointing out correctly that the Strib Poll changed pollsters in 2007, ditching Rob Daves, who presided over years of polling in which the Strib’s house poll was a laughingstock among those who paid attention.
And Brauer brings up a couple of valid points – points I never really disputed in my original piece. Polls aren’t generally intended to be “predictions”. And…
…missing the final margin doesn’t necessarily mean a pollster is wrong. Sentiment can swing in the voting booth, after polling ends. (This is why pollsters refer to their results as a “snapshot in time.”) Also, any poll has margin of sampling error. The trick is to see patterns — the so-called “house effect” toward a particular party, and whether results are consistent outliers.
Correct.
And as I noted in my post, the Strib during the Daves years was an extremely consistent outlier
Let’s begin with Daves’ last cycle, the 2006 election.
Mitch rakishly references “Gov. Hatch.” Here are the three major pollsters’ final November results, via Real Clear Politics’ roundups:
Brauer correctly notes that the Minnesota Poll put Hatch three points above Pawlenty; Rasmussen had him by two, and Survey USA called it a tie; none of the major polls showed Pawlenty winning. Pawlenty,k of course, won by one. Brauer also notes that Daves correctly predicted A-Klo’s blowout againt Mark Kennedy.
He then goes through the 2008 results, which was both the first cycle without Daves, and the first with Princeton Research doing the math.
…the Strib picked two winners, SUSA two (we’ll give ’em the TPaw tie) and Rasmussen only the AKlo blowout.
Even allowing for GOP mewling that Franken stole the 2008 election, it seems clear that the three polls have circled the final result roughly equally. I’d also note that, at least from 2006 on, if you’re comparing the final polls to the eventual outcome, SUSA’s house effect is as Republican as the Strib’s is Democratic.
2008 – and to some extent 2006 – are not the best years to analyze, really; except for the Pawlenty/Hatch and Franken/Coleman races, neither were especially suspenseful years, although the Minnesota Poll came out with a four or five point error in the DFL’s favor in both races. In short – and to be admittedly cynical – the DFL didn’t need a morale boost in either of those cycles. They won just about everything that mattered!
Brauer is correct that SUSA erred by the same margin in Coleman’s favor; I’d argue that at least some conventional wisdom would have backed that at the time, if not by five points. But I doubt you can say with a straight face that Survey USA has a generation-long history of GOP bias averaging seven points per Presidential, Gubernatorial and Senate race.
Of course, Daves is out, and the Strib has Princeton, an ostensibly unbiased third party, doing the poll. And that’s where we get into the real meat of this MNPoll; how has the methodogy changed, and will it affect the MNPoll’s accuracy?
Whenever the Rasmussen and Humphrey Polls show the gubernatorial race well within the margin of error, the regional leftyblog buildup chants in unison “they only poll landlines”. The MNPoll ostensibly addresses that:
As I’ve noted in several columns this month, the Strib’s 2010 polling now include cellphone-only voters, a potentially significant methological difference with Rasmussen, SUSA, and the Humphrey Institute/MPR poll.
Perhaps – if you presume that people who don’t have land lines are primarily younger and DFL-leaning, that the Humphrety and Rasmussen’s efforts to correct for this phenomenon aren’t valid (both note in their breakouts that they attempted to weight for this)and that younger/DFL voters are especially more likely to vote in this cycle.
Brauer concludes:
A potentially bigger difference: how each pollster screens for likely general-election voters. I’m surveying the major pollsters on their “likely voter screens” and will let you know after I hear back from everyone.
That is, of course, a key question. I’ll watch for Brauer’s followup.
Equally important, at least as re the MNPoll, is how they broke out the numbers they did include in the poll: their sample of “likely voters” included 35% DFL, 28% Republican, 28% “Independent” (but not necessarily “Independence”), and 9% “other parties” or undecided.
Is the party ID gap, in this year of the Tea Party, with the most motivated conservative base in a generation, really still 25% in favor of the DFL in Minnesota?
Are “independents” really going to break predominantly for Dayton, in this anti-big-government year? In the Metro, perhaps – but statewide?
I’m no mathematician. But this just doesn’t pass the stink test.
UPDATE 2: Welcome Politics in Minnesota reader!
UPDATE 3: Power Line notes that the Princeton Research Study Group is behind Newsweek’s polls – which came in dead last for accuracy in 2008.
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