Seventeen months ago yesterday, in the midst of negotiations about the budget, the GOP-led Legislature sent Governor Dayton a proposed budget.  It offered some concessions on revenue, and asked for some ground on social issues.

First thing the next morning, June 30 – 17 months ago today – the DFL came out with a counter-offer.

Labeled the “Dayton-Bakk-Thissen Compromise Budget Proposal”, it demanded $1.4 billion in new revenues.  It was a further negotiation, just like the Legislature’s letter the day before.

And – this is important – it had all three DFL leaders on board.  Governor Dayton, Senate minority leader Bakk and House minority leader Thissen all signed off on this proposal.

We’ll refer to this as “The Morning Letter” from now on.

And as the government coursed toward the midnight shutdown, that apparently was where things stayed.

The rest of this article uses this Scribd file, originally from Dayton’s chief of staff Bob Hume, as its source.

All Offers

It’s been popping up around the Twin Cities media off and on ever since the shutdown.

The Morning Letter

Now, much of what went on over the next 6-7 hours is shrouded in mystery; it took place in off-the-record conversations and phone calls and communications that aren’t available to the general public if they’re recorded at all.

Noon: Dayton’s Offer

But the upshot of those conversations – whatever they were – was that at 3PM on the 30th of June, the Governor – alone, without Thissen or Bakk – released a proposal that dropped all tax increases.

There were three significant things about this letter, which we’ll call “Dayton’s Offer”.

One was that Dayton dropped demands for tax increases, in return, Dayton proposed a 50% shift in school funding to the following biennium – the “borrowing from the children” that the DFL and media have worked so hard to pin on the GOP this past year.   It was a major concession by the Governor.  According to sources on Capitol Hill familiar with the negotiations, this was seen by the GOP majority in the Legislature as a key step toward reaching a “lights-on” agreement to prevent the shutdown.

But the other two significant things were actually things missing from the proposal:

1. Bakk and Thissen:  Their names had been on the Morning Letter – but were absent at 3PM.   Sources at the Capitol indicate that that’s because – well, Bakk and Thissen didn’t support it!
2. Any mention of GOP policy proposals:  The Dayton Offer includes no reference to GOP “Social Policy” proposals – because Dayton knew at noon on the 30th that the GOP had taken them off the table.  This is an inference, both by my sources and myself.  It’s also the only logical conclusion.

So as of a little after lunch on 6/30, the Legislature and the Governor – but not Bakk and Thissen – were in basic agreement; no tax hikes, no social policy concessions.

The 3PM Letter

A couple of hours later, at 3PM, the GOP sent a counter-offer.  It involved two tweaks to Dayton’s proposal:

• Cutting the size of the education shift (at the recommendation of Dayton’s Education Commissioner)
• Making up the difference with tobacco bonding

This letter – we’ll call it “The 3PM Letter” – involved accepting the concessions in The Dayton Offer with a few on the GOP’s part.  Otherwise, the two offers were just about identical.

As of 3PM, then, it looked as if the Governor and the Legislature were in agreement, and the shutdown could be averted.

The 4:06PM Letter

Dayton responded about an hour later, at 4:06PM.  Dayton accepted the changes to the education shift – it was his administration’s idea, after all – but tossed the tobacco bonding proposal and renewed the demand for new taxes…

…that he himself had taken off the table earlier in the afternoon!

The GOP’s response expressed dismay at the sudden – I believe the term of art in the Age of Obama is “unexpected” – flip-flop on Dayton’s part – and proposed a “lights-on” bill.

So To Recap…

Just to make sure we’re clear, here:

1. The DFL – Dayton, Bakk and Thissen – demanded $1.4B.
2. Negotiation ensued under the “cone of silence”.
3. Dayton offered to drop the tax demands, and by omission showed that the GOP had dropped their social policy demands.
4. The GOP accepted this proposal, with a few fine tweaks, including one from Dayton’s own administration.
5. Dayton spun on his heels and rejected that offer – ignored it, really – and countered with a flip-flop on taxes.

The “cone of silence” remained in effect for the next five or six hours.  Nobody exactly knows what transpired on the way to Dayton’s big speech at 10PM.

Dayton’s Presser at 10PM

Just in time for the 10PM news, Dayton called a press conference.  Here’s the transcript.

It’s full of prevarications, and one outright lie:

• “Therefore, a $1.4 billion gap remains between our last respective offers.”  But the GOP’s proposal on the 29th offered to compromise with the DFL on revenue.  The conservative base – myself included – would have howled at this, but the GOP was clearly looking to keep the government open.
• “Republicans have offered only to forego their $200 million tax cut and add that amount of spending. While welcomed, $200 million is only a small step toward resolving a $5 billion deficit.”  The 3PM Letter shows that the GOP was willing to go along with some sort of revenue hikes.
• “Today, Representative Thissen, Senator Bakk, and I made two proposals which contained revenues to be raised by increasing taxes only on people who make more than $1 million per year. The Department of Revenue reports that there are only 7,700 of them, less than 0.3% of all Minnesota tax filers.”   Well, no.  Dayton made two offers; Bakk and Thissen only participated in the first one.

The Administration started out demanding tax hikes; the GOP expressed a willingness to compromise.  The Administration then flip-flopped and went back to their first set of demands, ignoring the GOP concessions (for purposes of presenting the media a narrative), with Dayton contradicting himself in the process.

And Here’s Where The Media Tush-Smooching Comes In

The Governor contradicted himself and rejected a proposal that was one minor tweak removed from his own, Bakk-And-Thissen-less offer (“Dayton’s Offer”), leading directly to the government shutdown.

And yet today, 17 months later, the DFL’s PACs and pressure groups refer to it as “the Republican shutdown”.  It’s a Big Lie.  But nobody’s countering it.

I’ve often wondered; what if our society had an institution, maybe even an industry, with printing presses and transmitters, staffed with people whose job and training involves checking up on things that government officials say – and maybe even holding them accountable for the things they say and do?  Heck, even allow this institution to see itself as an aescetic elite who “comfort the comfortable and afflict the afflicted”, in exchange for, you know, actually comforting and afflicting.

We could use this in Minnesota.

Remember where we started yesterday – with Esme Murphy giving Mark Dayton her usual deep-tongue-kiss on her Sunday Morning Show:

Notwithstanding the contradictions in Dayton’s own proposals that are part of the public record timeline of the negotiations on June 29-30, Dayton runs with the “Social Issues” canard.

The Strib also served, then as now, as Dayton’s de facto stenographer in their “coverage” of the chain of events.

The Star-Tribune also bought Dayton’s line – that the “requested concessions” brought on the shutdown – completely uncritically, without noting the evolution, and then abrupt de-evolution, on Dayton’s position.  The Strib mentioned not a word about the “flip-flop”.

Tomorrow – appropriately, Halloween – the way the shutdown went down, and conclusions about “journalism” and Governor Dayton.

Over the weekend, the Strib announced…

…that Minnesota is pretty dang close.

As the presidential race tightens across the country, a new Star Tribune Minnesota Poll has found that it is narrowing here as well, with President Obama holding a 3-point lead and Republican Mitt Romney making gains in the state.

The poll shows Obama with support from 47 percent of likely voters and Romney earning backing from 44 percent — a lead within the poll’s margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.

The piece – by Rachel Stassen-Berger – notes that this is a real tightening from the poll last month:

Last month, Obama had an 8-percentage point advantage in the Minnesota Poll. Romney has apparently cut into the Democrat’s advantage among women since then and picked up support from Minnesotans who were previously undecided or said they would vote for a third-party candidate.

Independents, on the other hand, are leaning more toward Obama. Barely a third supported him last month, but that number has grown to 43 percent. Romney’s support among independents remains virtually unchanged, with 13 percent of that group remaining undecided.

That very well may be the change over the past month.

But here’s the other:  the partisan sample changed.  It changed a lot:

The poll comes as more Minnesotans identify as Republicans, which could add to Romney’s support. A month ago, the poll’s sample was 41 percent Democrat, 28 percent Republican and 31 percent independent or other. In this survey, 38 percent of respondents identified themselves as Democrat, 33 percent Republican and 29 percent independent or other. Minnesota does not have voter registration by party, and party self-identification fluctuates as events sway voters’ opinions.

Voter opinions certainly can cause the change.  Lots of that seemed to happen.

And officials from Mason-Dixon – which has taken over the MInnesota Poll since the Strib’s comically inept performance in the 2010 race – are pretty adamant that last month’s poll was D+13 not out of pro-DFL perfidy, but because, well, that’s how many Democrats they found as a percentage of the population.

Does it make sense that it dropped 8% in a month?

Good question.  One I’d love to ask the good folks from Mason Dixon.  After the election, naturally.

But for now?  D+5 is more or less in line with the state’s turnout in 2010.

My big question:  will the Strib run their traditional “Sunday Before The Election” poll? I’ll try to find out.

P.S.:  Our friend and regular commenter Kermit pops up in the article!:

Republican Kermit Hauge disagrees.

“Barack Obama has been an absolute disaster as president,” said Hauge, 54. He cited the unemployment rate, rising use of food stamps and Obama’s positions on taxes and health care among his reasons for supporting Romney. The clerical worker from New Hope said he didn’t start out a Romney fan but will now vote for him as a better alternative.

From your mouth to God’s ears, Kerm.

I mean, seriously.

Nate Silver at the NYTimes has been widely respected for his ability as a statistician.

His reputation, though, seems to stem largely from his facility at what amount to rhetorical parlor tricks (he once earned a bit of a living counting cards at poker, and he made a name for himself with baseball stats), and his calling of the vast majority of the 2008 election slate correctly (with the help of an epochal wave election and lots of access to Obama campaign internal polling), leading to his hiring at the NYTimes in time for the 2010 race.

Silver’s method at the NYTimes involves…:

• Taking regional polls – from polling services as well as media polls – and…
• “weighting” them according to some special sauce known only to Nate Silver, Registered Statistical Genius.

Now, I wrote about Silver’s method two years ago, when he spent much of the race predicting Mark Dayton would win by six points (with an eight-point margin of error).  As I pointed out, Silver’s “methodology” involved giving a fairly absurd amount of weight to  polls like the long-discredited Star Tribune “Minnesota” Poll and the since-discontinued Hubert H. Humphrey Institute poll (for whose demise I sincerely hope I deserve some credit, having spent a good part of the fall of 2010 showing what a piece of pro-DFL propaganda it has always been).  During the middle of th 2010 race, Silver gave the absurdly inaccurate-in-the-DFL’s-favor (especially in close elections) HHH and Minnesota Polls immense weight, while undervaluing the generally-accurate Rasmussen polls and, to a lesser extent, Survey USA.

I said Silver’s methodology was “garbage in, garbage out” – he uses bad data, and gets bad results.  I was being charitable, of course; his methodology, untransparent and proprietary as it is, processes bad data into worse conclusions.

That was in 2010.

Today?  NRO’s Josh Jordan reaches the same conclusion:

While many in the media (and Silver himself) openly mock the idea of Republicans’ “unskewing polls” (and I am not a fan of unskewedpolls.com by any means), Silver’s weighting method is just a more subtle way of doing just that. I outlined yesterday why Ohio is closer than the polls seem to indicate by looking at the full results of the polls as opposed to only the topline head-to-head numbers. Romney is up by well over eight points among independents in an average of current Ohio polls, the overall sample of those same polls is more Democratic than the 2008 electorate was, and Obama’s two best recent polls are among the oldest.

But look at some of the weights applied to the individual polls in Silver’s model. The most current Public Policy Polling survey, released Saturday, has Obama up only one point, 49–48. That poll is given a weighting under Silver’s model of .95201. The PPP poll taken last weekend had Obama up five, 51–46. This poll is a week older but has a weighting of 1.15569.

So it wasn’t just Minnesota!

And remember – PPP polls, while leaning a little left, are not generally flagrantly inaccurate in the sense that the Strib is and the HHH was.

And it’s not a fluke…:

The NBC/Marist Ohio poll conducted twelve days ago has a higher weighting attached to it (1.31395) than eight of the nine polls taken since. The poll from twelve days ago also, coincidentally enough, is Obama’s best recent poll in Ohio, because of a Democratic party-identification advantage of eleven points. By contrast, the Rasmussen poll from eight days later, which has a larger sample size, more recent field dates, but has an even party-identification split between Democrats and Republicans, has a weighting of .88826, lower than any other poll taken in the last nine days.

Jordan reaches a conclusion that even I didn’t:

This is the type of analysis that walks a very thin line between forecasting and cheerleading. When you weight a poll based on what you think of the pollster and the results and not based on what is actually inside the poll (party sampling, changes in favorability, job approval, etc), it can make for forecasts that mirror what you hope will happen rather than what’s most likely to happen.

Well, you can – if your goal isn’t so much to measure the nation’s zeitgeist (and report on it) but affect the election.

Which has, of course, been my contention all along.

They don’t call it a horse-race for nothing.

As a rule in polling, outliers tend to get ignored.  Or you can choose to believe that Bush won Hawaii in 2004, Alf Landon won a 1936 landslide, or that Clinton v. Dole was a nail-biter.

But it becomes harder to ignore an outlier when it’s A) close to the election and B) one of the oldest and most respected polling outfits in the nation.  Thus as the media enters Campaign 2012’s home stretch, the narrative of a nip-and-tuck contest looks decidedly jeopardized by Gallup showing Mitt Romney with a 7% lead – and such an outcome apparently has to be challenged:

With a record of correctly predicting all but three of the 19 presidential races stretching back to 1936, Gallup is one of the most prestigious names in the business and its outlier status has other polling experts scratching their heads.

“They’re just so out of kilter at the moment,” said Simon Jackman, a Stanford University political science professor and author of a book on polling. “Either they’re doing something really wacky or the other 18 pollsters out there are colluding, or something.”

The caveats to Gallup’s polling (as with any pollster) are well-versed.  But to find an answer as to why Gallup posts a major Romney lead while the Real Clear Politics average of pollsters shows essentially a tie has nothing to do with credibility or collusion.  It has everything to do with turnout.

Take the recent IBD/TIPP poll as Gallup’s doppleganger with Obama leading by 5.7%.  Democrats are outsample Republicans by 7%.  The UConn Courant showing Obama up 3%?  The sample shows Democrats with an 8-point advantage.  Gallup plays their cards close to the vest, not showing the partisan affiliation of their likely voter model.  But their registered voter breakdown still shows a Romney lead, albeit of a modest 3% and is likely based on their party affiliation polls showing Democrats up 4 points.

Gallup says it determines its “likely voters” by asking whether they have voted in the past, if they know where their polling place is located, and other similar questions. The formula has been tweaked this year to take into account the increasing prevalence of early voting.

Gallup’s Newport pointed out that the firm’s likely-voter formula has more accurately predicted the election results than its wider poll of all registered voters going back to the 1990s and, in fact, the likely voter prediction tended to slightly favor Democratic candidates.

The idea of a single pollster being simply a part of a larger trendline is accurate, even if most media outlets tend to overlook that fact to trumpet their own poll to the exclusion of competitors and thus create news rather than report it.  Yet even if we exclude Gallup’s results, the trendlines have to be concerning for Obama’s camp.  Despite wielding turnout margins better than what propelled him into office four years ago, many polls show Barack Obama at best narrowly ahead – and more commonly tied or behind.

Gallup might be overstating Romney’s support, although the pollster’s worst estimations of support were in the 5-6 point range and happened in 1936 and 1948.  In the modern era, if anything Gallup has consistently overestimated Democratic support at the polls, giving Obama 2% more, Kerry 0.7% more and Clinton 2.8% and 5.7% more in his campaigns.  Which may mean that despite a 7% lead causing headaches among the media, Mitt Romney may…hold for dramatic effect…lead by more.

Email from yesterday:

“Given the last two moderators, I think that fairness demands that the third debate be moderated by John Stossel.”

I was going to say Ted Nugent.

Joe Doakes writes:

Pioneer Press On-Line forwarded article from NationalJournal “fact-checking” the debate, that included this bit:

Romney on assault weapons ban:

Responding to a question about assault weapons, Romney said, “We, of course, don’t want automatic weapons, which is already illegal in this country.” Actually, the federal ban on assault weapons — first enacted in 1994 under former President Clinton — expired in September 2004, during the George W. Bush administration.

Um, kids, Clinton’s assault weapons ban did not affect fully-automatic weapons, which is what Romney was specifically talking about. He knows the difference that you evidently do not. The “fact-check” sounds like it was written by one of our old friends.

Joe Doakes

Como Park

Yep.

Attention, media “fact checkers”; we covered this the other day.  Read it and learn something.

“The biggest surprise of the night was when Meatloaf bailed the President out on his Libya answer”

— Gary Miller, from Facebook

I’m the first to admit that confirmation bias hits everyone.  Myself included.

But for the life of me, I’m not sure how anyone, ever, could say Barack Obama even came close in the debate last night…

…except among a base that needed a spiff to keep them from driving into bridge abutments aroiund the country, and maybe to give the low-information voters that are the Democrats’ only real growth market a fresh charge on their chanting points.  By those standards – “victory” means your supporters get a morale boost, and idiots get a fresh dose of “Planned Parenthood” – then yes, the president’s performance was adequate.

Of course, like Ringo Starr, he only did it with a little help from his friends:

Romney had the President on the ropes, stammering and babbling over his Adminstration’s performance in re Benghazi – and Crowley in effect came off the bench to tackle Mitt.

As predicted.

The best thing about the debate after sleeping on it?  The Libya issue is going to be front and center in the headlines for the next five days, until the foreign policy debate.  And this time The One won’t have Candy Crowley to save him.

I coudln’t get to this one last week; the ChiTrib endorses…

…a conservative Republican for Congress.  Even the ChiTrib thinks Jan Schakowsky (IL-9CD) is “too partisan”

We have in the past gone hot and cold on Democratic Rep. Jan Schakowsky of the 9th District. She’s always up for a good debate and it’s a pleasure to spar with her. But she’s also one of the most partisan, liberal members of the House.

When the Democrats finished drawing the new congressional maps, Republican Tim Wolfe awoke to find himself living in the 9th. The district is considered safely blue. Wolfe lives in Arlington Heights, a pocket of red voters who were tossed into the 9th by mapmakers to protect the Democratic tilt of other districts. Wolfe decided he had to run against Schakowsky. “You know what Jan is going to offer,” he says. “More government, more taxes, more debt, more government intrusion. … She stands for the exact opposite of what I stand for in most cases.”

Am I the only one wondering if Schakowski owes one of the publishers a chit of some kind?

The US Center for Narrative Control is battling a deadly outbreak of Scrutonium.

Iowahawk reports from the front lines.

The left and media (PTR) was skipping and gamboling about like happy little meerkats yesterday; a new PPP poll showed – as PPP polls tend to do – nothing but good news for Minnesota Democrats.

In an automated phone survey of 937 likely MInnesota voters, they found…:

PPP’s newest poll on Minnesota’s amendment to ban gay marriage finds it running slightly behind, with 46% of voters planning to support it and 49% opposed.

That represents a 4 point shift compared to a month ago when it led for passage 48-47.

The poll claims that the major movement has been among indies and women.

“The marriage amendment in Minnesota continues to look like a toss up,” said Dean Debnam, President of Public Policy Polling. “Voters are very closely divided on the

issue.”

Well, we more or less knew that.

Then, they addressed the other Constitutional Amendment:

When we polled on it in June it was leading for passage by a 58/34 margin. By September that had tightened to a 56/39 advantage. And now it’s leading only 51/43. Democrats are now even more opposed to the voter ID amendment (23/71) than they are to the one on

marriage. And although independents continue to support it their 52/41 favor for it is down a good deal from 62/33 a month ago. This fight may end up a lot closer than people

initially expected.

Or it may not.

We’ll come back to that one.

They also put the DFL up substantially on a “generic legislative ballot”, which would be big news if voters voted for a generic legislature.  They don’t, of course.

As always, the devil is in the turnout model:

Here it is, buried deep in a set of crosstabs:

That’s D+9.  Not as far out as the D+13 we got from the Strib a while back, but it still higher than 2008.

That’s especially interesting compared to this other bit of crosstabbery:

So Democrats outnumber Republicans 38/29, but conservatives outnumber Dems 37/34?

At any rate – the polling services continue to put out (if you look hard enough for them) polls with turnout models that, when you ask them, they are are legitimately what they’re encountering out there…

…but do not in any way pass the sniff test.

And the media?

Well, they just shovel it on out there.  It’s just the topline number that really matters.  Right?

The Pioneer Press has opted not to give endorsements this year.

I suspect – and this is just a, er, shot in the dark on my part, pure speculation – that there are one or two reasons for this:

• The Pioneer Press has figured out that press endorsements are just another form of bandwagoneering unbecoming a “journalistic” entity.   While the Pioneer Press’ endorsement record is a lot more bipartisan than the Strib’s, a record (generally, across the media, not just at the Pioneer Press) of mostly-DFL endorsements provides prime ammunition for the charge that the press is biased to the left.
• They were facing the prospect of having to not endorse Betty McCollum.  The long-time DFL Congresswoman has been such an incredible non-entity, and has developed into such a rancorously partisan figure in Congress, that a significant part of the editorial board decided not to endorse.  After a fierce battle with the rest of the board, and facing backlash from a pro-DFL staff, the paper decided to just avoid the whole mess.

Again, the above is purely speculation.  It’s only if I were to joke about or mock the ideas above that they would be ensured of being proven correct. [1]

Rather than endorsing 2nd CD representative John Kline, they opt merely to write about how completely he’s dominated the district, but how redistricting might make Mike Obermueller’s DFL bid a little more tenable than whoever it was that ran last time.

(more…)

Obama guts the Clinton-era “Work for Welfare” requirements.

Romney calls Obama on it.

Clinton lies about it from the podium at the DNC.

And America’s “fact-check” industry lines up behind Obama, no matter how they need to forcibly bugger “fact” to do it:

PolitiFact did link to [welfare expert and former Clinton staffer Robert Rector, who was one of the co-authors of Clinton’s original bipartisan welfare reform law]’s blog post—but only to dismiss him. “Robert Rector, a welfare expert with the conservative Heritage Foundation, said it could ultimately allow ‘state bureaucrats’ to count activities that aren’t really work. We should point out that those concerns are at odds with the policy’s stated goal of encouraging employment.” In other words, PolitiFact said his concerns should be dismissed for no other reason than they are at odds with the Obama administration’s spin. PolitiFact didn’t even address the fact that Rector—who’s quoted in Romney’s ad—was the source of the charge the Obama administration is gutting welfare reform or that he helped write the welfare reform law. (They did reference an article Rector wrote for National Review Online and concluded that he made “a noteworthy point” when he argued that the Obama administration doesn’t have the legal authority to waive the work requirements.)

Rather than engage in any critical discussion about the issue, PolitiFact regurgitated the HHS memo for the sole purpose of making the waivers sound benign.

And yet again, reality imitates my hyperbolic fiction; Berg’s Fourteenth Law (“The more strenuously a media organization identifies itself as “fact-checkers”, the more completely their “fact checking” will actually be checking statement for congruency with liberal conventional wisdom”) has come vividly to life.

I said “vividly”:

Let’s take that last example of accommodating workers with disabilities—please. It’s a classic bit of bureaucratic misdirection intended to make exemptions that undercut welfare work requirements sound reasonable. “There’s no one on TANF that’s disabled. If you’re disabled, you’re on another program called Supplemental Security Income,” Rector tells THE WEEKLY STANDARD. “In TANF, you should be able to work—but what the left likes to do is to create a nebulous category of TANF recipients who are disabled with these very cloudy, fuzzy definitions, and then the state can chunk essentially an unlimited part of its [welfare] population into an exempt category. That has twofold consequences—now the state doesn’t have to do anything [to steer the exempted recipients into the workforce], but it can still maintain it has a high participation rate [in workfare programs]. If you have a 30 percent participation rate, and you exempt half the caseload, all of a sudden you can make it look like your participation rate went up.”

Read the whole thing.

And if you’re in the mainstream media, imagine how much less revulsion the general public would feel for you if you actually checked facts, rather than ran to the local Democrat spin doctor for further instructions.

This blog doesn’t really have a mission, per se.  For ten and a half years now, it’s been more or less my stream of consciousness, mostly but by no means all political.

But if I had to pick a mission, it’d most likely be “convince people to verify the media on everything.  I shrink from saying “distrust the media” in as many words, but I’m somewhere close to that.

And it’s just a little gratifying to see the American people are starting to get that message, at least in re this year’s presidential polling:

 A plurality of Americans and more than seven in 10 Republicans say pollsters are intentionally skewing results to benefit President Obama, according to a new poll released Tuesday.

Some 42 percent of voters surveyed by Daily Kos and SEIU believe pollsters were manipulating their sample sizes to benefit the incumbent president, while 40 percent do not. An additional 18 percent said they were not sure. That’s evidence that Republican claims that Democrats and minority voters are being oversampled in national polls could be resonating — and potentially undermining the momentum of the president’s early lead.

I’m not saying there aren’t journalists, and even organizations, that try to do a good, detached (not “objective” – that’s a myth), fair and clear job of reporting the news.

I am saying that at the highest levels in this extremely hierarchical industry, the publishers and editors and executive producers for the major newspapers, broadcasts, cablecasts and public media, the adage “power corrupts” is as true as anywhere else.  There is power in the mainstream media – and for many in the higher ranks of the business, the urge to use that power to make sure American politics redounds to their advantage has got to be irresistible.

And I’m suggesting that this year’s polls, and the ever-more-leftward revealed bent of the media’s “fact check” industry, is evidence that they’re resisting the urge less and less.

And, maybe, people are starting to realize this.

There’s been some interesting follow-up from last week’s series on the Minnesota Poll.

More tomorrow.  Hopefully.

Like most conservatives, there are few things in the world I like less than standing around, marching or chanting.  Oh, I do like being out in the fresh air with a group of good people that have goals similar to mine in mind – but leaving aside the fact that it seems so group-think-y, hippy-ish and downright liberal, it’s pretty much inevitable that there’ll be something better to do, somewhere in the world, than that.

But I, myself, am getting a little exercised about the Star/Tribune’s ongoing propaganda exercise (AKA “the Minnesota Poll”).  And I’m more than a little tempted to grab an afternoon next week and see if we can’t get some people more or less like us out in front of 425 Portland to try to let them know that not everyone out there is a querulous low-information lemming.

Just saying.

Tempted.

Very, very tempted.

Who’s a better actor; Scarlett Johannson or Donald Rumsfeld?

Now, if you’re a sophisticated polling operation like the Star/Tribune “Minnesota Poll” – a Mason-Dixon joint – it’s an easy question; Ms. Johannson will likely outpoll the former Secretary of Defense.

Of course, you may respond “but measuring a Secretary of Defense in terms of acting skill is meaningless!”

And if you say that, then you’re already too smart to buy the latest Minnesota poll.

———-

The final Star/Tribune Minnesota poll of this long, nauseating week was released this morning – and it has two conclusions:

After two years of budget battles, vetoes and the longest state shutdown in Minnesota history, DFL Gov. Mark Dayton is winning the popularity battle with the GOP-controlled Legislature, a Star Tribune Minnesota Poll has found.

A slim majority of 53 percent of likely voters say they approve of Dayton’s job performance, while 31 percent disapprove. Another 16 percent say they are undecided.

For the majority leaders of the Legislature, the poll found 51 percent disapprove of the job they are doing. Another 21 percent approve and 24 percent are undecided.

This poll really needs two responses.

Damnation With Faint Praise

The poll notes that Governor Dayton scored a 53 percent approval rating.

Now, on its face, that’s not a good number.  Under 50%, says conventional wisdom, is trouble – and Dayton is a governor that’s done virtually nothing in two years but make odd, slurred pronouncements before scuttling away into his office under the cover of a fawning media.

But as always, you have to look below “the face”.  Of course, the poll has the same absurd, worse-than-Watergate-level turnout model – Democrats 41, Republicans 28 – as all the other polls this week.

However, for some reason the Strib doesn’t favor us with the full range of crosstabs; while reporter Jim Ragsdale notes the Governor’s geographic strengths and weaknesses, at no point in the article is the approval of Republicans or Democrats explained.

Is this an accident?  Or would showing it reveal something about the poll the Strib doesn’t want us to see?

Because if we assume Democrats are over-polled by 3%, and that they were the vast majority of the “approve” numbers, then Dayton’s approval drops down to right around 50% – and the “disapprove” numbers jump into the high thirties if we assume most Republicans disapprove of Dayton’s job.

Of course, it’s all guesswork until the Strib releases those crosstabs.

Damnation By Packing Peanuts

Of course, the numbers on the legislature are just plain nonsense

For the majority leaders of the Legislature, certain trouble spots stand out: Only 24 percent of voters in the metro suburbs outside of Hennepin and Ramsey — which include strong GOP areas — approve of their leadership, while more than half disapprove. In southwestern Minnesota, 57 percent disapprove. They had slightly stronger showings in Rochester, where 30 percent approve, and in the northwest corner of the state at 33 percent.

This is just a stupid thing to measure.

Grading a legislature, as an entire body, all together, is like asking what a football fan thinks of the NFC Central Division.  You will get a dog’s breakfast of opinions, or no opinion – because the division is not the focus (except for bracketing playoffs).

One startling figure is that the GOP-controlled Legislature only broke even among Republican voters: 31 percent approve, 32 percent disapprove and 37 percent are undecided. Undecided numbers are higher throughout the Legislature’s poll, suggesting many voters do not have a clear opinion on the topic.

Well, dug.

I disapproved of the Legislature’s job!   The GOP caucuses gave away too much money in 2011 and caved on the stadium last year without getting anything useful in return!  I give them a “D”.

Does that mean I’m going to support Mark Dayton?  Not if you held a gun to my head (not to give the SEIU any ideas).

It’s a meaningless number.

So Why Run A Poll With A Meaningless Number?

That one’s easy; it gives the Strib a nice tidy number – 53-21 approval ratings! – to toss in front of people who don’t pay much attention to what the numbers actually mean.  These voters – the “Low-Information Voters”, people who retain headlines from the Mainstream Media and believe things that appear in the Strib – are the target for this sort of polling, or as it’s known in the world of logic, a “non-sequitur”.  The Strib is comparing apples and axles, just like comparing Donald Rumsfeld with Scarlett Johannsen.

While the individual numbers might be valid (they’re not – remember, the turnout model is absurd), at least in terms of math used to generate the numbers we see – but even if both numbers were in fact dead-nut accurate, what the Strib has done is created a phony horserace.

And why would the Strib splash a phony, non-sequitur comparison on its front page when it only serves to show Mark Dayton with a decisive (if phony) lead…

…oh, wait.

Never mind.

More Monday.

On Tuesday, I wrote a letter to the Star/Tribune’s politics editor, Patricia Lopez.  Here it was:

Ms. Lopez,

I’m Mitch Berg. I’m a talk show host at AM1280) and a blogger at “Shot In The Dark” (www.shotinthedark.info). I was referred to you by Rachel Stassen-Berger.

I’ve been reading and writing about the Strib’s coverage of the Minnesota Poll.

Question: How does the Strib justify a DFL 41 / GOP 28 (D+13) split? Even after Watergate – the worst election for Republicans in the last 50 years – the split in Minnesota was D+12.

Thank you for your time and consideration.

(etc etc)

There’s been no response.

Nor did I expect one; the media’s petty nobility rarely troubles itself with the noisome fretting of the peasants.

UPDATE:  I did in fact hear back from Ms. Lopez.  More tomorrow.  Or Monday.  We’ll see.

It’s my contention that the Star/Tribune “Minnesota” poll is, and has been for two and a half decades, less a “public opinion” poll and more an instrument of DFL propaganda.  I’ve supported that contention with a raft of circumstantial evidence; proof that the Minnesota Poll underestimates GOP turnout – especially in races that are perceived to be close; it showed Mark Dayton with an absurdly huge lead over Tom Emmer, and Al Franken with a four point lead over Norm Coleman, while guessing the Klobuchar/Kennedy race fairly accurately.

It’s my contention that this is to leverage the “Bandwagon Effect” – to discourage Republicans and conservatives from going to the poll.

But this year’s race presents a dilemma for the editors who – I’m being half-hyperbolic here [1] – plan the results of these polls.  On the one hand, you have the Voter ID initiative which is likely to win in a blowout.  To skew that poll enough to encourage Democrats and opponents of the amendment, the Strib would need to skew the poll to an absurd extent.  As in, assume conditions that are the same as in 1976, after Watergate.

On the other hand, you have a Senate race between Amy Klobuchar and Kurt BIlls that is widely perceived to be a pretty safe race for the incumbent.   Skewing the sample too far to the left would make the results look completely implausible.

The answer, if you’re the Strib?  You see it in this weeks’ Minnesota Polls; this is their old buddy Jim Klobuchar’s daughter we’re talking about here!  Of course they’ll do what it takes to make her re-election as epic as possible – why, everyone on Editor’s Row remembers Amy when she was just this tall, dagnabbit!

Beyond that – and more germane to the propaganda organ – they know that the voters the DFL needs are the “low-information” voters. The ones that rarely get past the headline, much less the lead – forget about looking at partisan breakdowns.  The ones that still believe the Strib is anything but DFL shills, or don’t care either way.

The Strib is showing a 57-28 lead for Klobuchar, with 15 percent either undecided or voting for someone else.  As we’ve been showing every day this week, this is based on a sample that includes 41% Democrat/28% GOP turnout.

Now, if we assume it’s more like 38/34 – which is more in line with Rasmussen’s figures, which have been traditionally vastly more accurate – and multiply the changes by the support each candidate gets within their party…

…well, that’s bad for Bills, if you believe the Strib.  While 90-odd percent of Dems say they’ll vote for A-Klo, the Strib claims only 2/3 of Republicans will vote for BIlls.  While the nomination battle was a bruising one in the GOP, and left a lot of bad blood, Republicans are much more suck-it-up-and-support-our-guy than that.  This strikes me as dubious – the “stink test” is crying “BS!” – but I’ve got no hard evidence to the contrary just yet.  Absent that, let’s run with the Strib’s numbers.

So if we subtract 3% from the Democrat split, multiplied by 90%, we get a net loss of 2.7% for Klobuchar, taking her down to 54.3%.

Adding 6 to Bills – times the 66% support in the party, naturally – leads to a four point rise, to 32.

54-32 still isn’t close.  But it’s not the 2:1 humiliation…

…that, I contend, the Strib wants Republicans to believe is coming, on top of all the other “bad news” they’ve brought us this week.

So what does all this mean?

More tomorrow.

(more…)

The came via email yesterday:

In Greece, rioters are throwing Molotov cocktails at police. The cops who are not on fire are responding with tear gas.

Force continuum fail.

CNN calls setting cops on fire “minor scuffles,” and the rioters/attempted murderers “protesters” and “demonstrators.”

Journalism fail.

A “student” throwing a molotov cocktail at a cop halfway around the world is a “protester”.

Someone throwing one at, say, CNN headquarters is, I suspect, a “terrorist”.

The Star Tribune “Minnesota Poll” has declared Minnesota tied on the Obamacare issue:

About 46 percent of the state’s likely voters say they support keeping the Affordable Care Act, whose main tenets were largely upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court this summer, while 47 percent believe the law should go.

As always when dealing with any polls – especially polls with records of dishonesty as long as the Strib’s -http://www.startribune.com/local/171271561.html.  The Strib’s, in case you’ve forgotten,  is 41% Democrat, 28% Republican – which, as I showed yesterday, is more Democrat-leaning than the 1976 post-Watergate, post-Nixon-pardon election, the post-war nadir of GOP fortunes.

As a bipartisan sampling – liberal Hamline poli-sci professor Dave Schultz and I – both agree,  the sample is more like 38% DFL, 34% GOP.   Since 80% of DFLers (according to the Minnesota Poll) support the amendment, that means you deduct 80% of 3 points – 2.4 – from the “support” column.  Likewise, 90% of the six additional points of Republicans – 5.4% – support repeal.

With those assumptions – a more realistic turnout model and those levels of support – the “repeal” case is really more like 52-44.

It looks like the MInnesota Poll is building up to the Senate Race.

As I wait for the latest “Minnesota Poll” to release its results for the Senate race, I’ve been turning the poll’s D+13 (their sample of respondents was 41% Democrat and 28% Republican) number around in my head.

After all, as the Strib tells us, “Brad Coker, managing director of Mason-Dixon Polling & Research, which conducted the poll for the Star Tribune, said those numbers are consistent with what he has seen over the years”.

But as we noted yesterday, the 2008 election – an epic Democrat win – was D+6 or so.  The 2010 election had turnout of D+2, roughly, and turned out to be a GOP rout nationwide and in the MN Legislature.

So what about the worst election in the past 50 years for the GOP – the post-Watergate presidential election of 1976?    Where the GOP got shredded in DC and in Saint Paul, sending the MNGOP running to their “Independent Republican” label?

I can’t find the partisan split – but does it seem unreasonable that in a year when Jimmy Carter beat Gerald Fold by 12 points in Minnesota that the partisan split was, maybe in the neighborhood of D+12?

In other words, maybe somewhere around the D+13 number the Strib would have you believe today?

As we look at the abusive travesty that is the Minnesota Poll – in this case, the ludicrously skewed, 3:2 pro-DFL partisan breakdown in this weekend’s polling on the two Constitutional Amendments – let’s take a trip back through history.

Frank Newport, the president of the broadly-respected Gallup Polls, savaged the Minnesota Poll in the immediate aftermath of the 2010 midterm and gubernatorial elections.

Let’s make sure we’re clear on this.  Pollsters attacking pollsters in public is a little like magicians publicly heckling other magicians.

Is there any evidence the Strib has polished up their methodology?

No.  Indeed, the two polls released over the weekend on the Marriage and Voter ID amendments show quite the opposite – or that some copy editor took a poll of Ramsey County voters and mislabeled it a poll of Minnesotans.

The Strib “Minnesota Poll” is doing what it’s paid to do:  create a pro-DFL bandwagon effect, and suppress GOP voter turnout.  It’s calling Minnesota at Obama with 48% and Romney with 40%.

But the poll uses the same absurd D41/R28 breakdown that the Marriage and Voter ID polls.  This polling would have you believe that while in 2008, with a messianic media darling running against an unpopular two-term candidate (McCain was irrevant) and the war the DFL had a six point advantage in partisan turnout (D39 R33), this year, mirabile dictu, we have a 13 point Democrat advantage in this state?

If you use turnout numbers from somewhere in between 2008 and 2010 – say, D36 R34 – and multiply the changes by the percent of each party that the poll itself says plan on voting for their candidate (93% of Democrats plan to vote for Obama, vs 96% of Republicans), then you wind up lopping off roughly .3% of Obama’s numbers, and adding a whopping 5.8% to Romney’s.

That makes the real split 47.7% Obama, 45.8% Romney.  

Question – especially for you libs in the audience:  In what way is a widely (one might say “lavishly”) publicized poll using a partisan split that this state hasn’t seen since Watergate to be interepreted as anything other than an elaborate voter-suppression scam?