When Dave Schultz at Hamline University calls it quits on a “DFL-Lite campaign like Tom Horner…

It looked all so promising only two weeks ago. Momentum and buzz suggested Tom Horner was gaining ground and he had a real chance to be governor. Polls showed strong gains, he was ahead of where Jesse Ventura was in 1998 at this time, and rumor had it he was racking in piles of money. Horner, a former public relations person, also knew how to package his statements for the media. It all looked so good.

…then you know it’s time to stick a fork in it.

Schultz, unlike me, thought that Horner may have had a shot at it – but then, he does twig to the real key fact; Horner is not Jesse Ventura:

Here is the horn(er) of the dilemma. Horner needs media attention to get his message out. He can only do that with money. He can only raise money if he lets people know he is running and what his message is, however he needs money to do that. Horner is trapped in a cycle and he may not be able to get out of it.
But not being Jesse and not having money is only part of the problem. MN’s flirtation with third party politics runs in cycles. Third party candidates do well when the state is economically doing very well or very badly and there is high disenchantment with the major parties. Think Floyd Olson (Farmer-Labor Party elected during prohibition) and Ventura during the flush times of the 90s.

It’s neither bad enough that people are that desperate, nor good enough that people are that frivolous.

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?

• [fill in the blank] wants to slash infrastructure: Any conservative that favors dialing back state union construction jobs would get hit with this one.
• [fill in the blank] is for profits over people: Ihe DFL’s special little world, businesses are self-sustaining predators whose interests  – profit – are always opposed to people.
• [fill in the blank] is anti-gay: Because conservatism itself, goes the left’s conventional wisdom, is anti-gay.
• [fill in the blank] will freeze the poor!: The DFL paints anyone who seeks sanity – even a little – in Health and Human Service spending as Ebenezer Scrooge, pre-ghosts.
• [fill in the blank] wants to slash education: Cutting the  projected increase is a cut, by the way; if the union wants 2 billion more, and you give them a billion more, they’ll cry “you’re cutting us by a billion!”
• [fill in the blank] is against womyn: Because abortion is the sine qua non of being a woman.  To the DFL.
• [fill in the blank] hasn’t given us all the details of his campaign yet: Because it’d be stupid to do when campaigning against someone with three times as much money as you’ve got, of course, but no matter.

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”.

James O’Keefe is officially yesterday’s favorite conservative pseudo-pundit, after cooking up a stunt too stupid even for Michael Moore.

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”

Or the debt to end all debts.

If November 11th is Armistice Day, then will September 26th now be known as Debenture Bonds Day?

92 years after the WWI officially ended — Germany made her last payment of $94 million in reparations “to private individuals, pension funds and corporations holding debenture bonds as agreed under the Treaty of Versailles.”

If nothing else the move proves peace is temporary while interest payments are forever.

Again – I eschew conspiracy theories.  I really, truly do.

But let’s look at some possibly (?) unconnected factoids:

Who’s The Outlier? The Rasmussen Poll has been broadly accurate, nationwide, for the past couple of years.  This past year or so, it’s been chronicling a rise in GOP sentiment nationwide.  It’s been especially interesting watching it chart Barack Obama’s fall from polling grace; on a given week, Rasmussen may show Obama a point or two lower than every other poll; lefties chant “It’s the Foxmussen poll!”; a week or two later, Gallup/Quinnipiac/Marist settle in at the numbers Rasmussen had, while Rasmussen shows another point drop.  Lather, rinse, repeat.

Pattern Of Behavior: The Star Tribune editorial board is liberal.  That usually, but not exclusively, means “DFL”; there’s a running rumor that the Strib editorial board is talking about endorsing Tom Horner (a fiendishly clever plan, really; ;they can brag they “endorsed a Republican”, while actually supporting someone whose policies are moderate-DFL).  Above all, they do not want Tom Emmer as governor.

Institutional Imperative: The Hubert H. Humphrey Institute is a part of the U of Minnesota.  It’s a building on the campus that is as clogged with left-of-center academics and pseudoacademics and past-their-shelf-life DFL politicians as any building in the state this side of Saint Paul City Hall.  It’s a safe bet they don’t want Tom Emmer as governor – especially given that “higher education” is the only area where Emmer’s budget makes substantial, actual cuts in the state budget.

Follow The Budget Cut: Tom Emmer has spoken about the commensense case for withdrawing state subsidies from Minnesota Public Radio.

It’s not like they don’t get plenty of money.  MPR’s studios are to regular commercial stations (or even less well-heeled public stations) as “CTU” from 24 was to a regular police station.  When I was at KSTP, someone doing my job (or maybe a little less) at MPR made 50% more than I did; I’m not sure if MPR’s salaries have skyrocketed, but I do know that the salaries in commercial radio have not.  And MPR’s  reach goes waaaay beyond Minnesota with stations in Michigan and…um, Sun Valley Idaho?  Why, yes; there’s a longstanding rumor in local broadcast circles that the Sun Valley station was built with the aid of a generous contribution from one Dayton family that didn’t want to miss “Praire Home Companion” while out on the slopes.

MPR staff will respond “but our subsidy isn’t that big!”  So if the subsidy isn’t that big, and your organization is diong so very, very well, perhaps it is something they could give up For A Better Minnesota? Anyway – MPR faces a choice; a governor with sympathies toward allowing MPR to go its own way, or one that is, let’s just say, a top contributor.

(And yes, I repeat – I do believe MPR News does an acceptable job of seeking balance and detachment.  Not perfect – nobody is – but they take a better shot at it than the Strib.  That said, Tom Scheck, why hasn’t anyone gone over Mark Dayton’s budget with a fine-tooth comb?)

———-

I’m not saying that any of these factors mean that the Strib, the Humphrey Institute or MPR would commission polls that, a month before the election, would present skewed numbers to build up voter turnout for the party that was most likely to support them.

I”m just saying that if they did, I’m not sure how the poll results would be any different.

The new MPR/Humphrey Poll shows Dayton at 38, Emmer at 27 and Horner at 16.

Fishy?  Oh, yeah; Brauer writes at MinnPost:

One of the wacky things about the 750-voter, landline-only, five-day survey is how much partisan ID shifted in just a month. August’s poll was 46 percent GOP, 41 percent Democrat — the only major survey with a Republican plurality. This one is 48 percent Dem, 38 percent GOP.

Humphrey Institute Prof. Larry Jacobs ascribes this to renewed DFL enthusiasm.

At the risk of being accused of Pauline Kael syndrome – what DFL enthusiasm?

At the risk of being called a cynic, I’d say Jacobs has a bit of a chicken-and-egg issue here.  The poll is here – again, this is an accused cynic talking – to boost that enthusiasm.

However, the dramatic shift will inflame the doubters, particularly GOP partisans, whose rightest wing generally regards the HHH poll as the junior member of a Strib-led pro-DFL Gruesome Twosome.

Well, that’s cutting it a bit finely.  We can be more broad than that.  The HHH, the Strib and MPR are all pr0-DFL – or at least pro-big-government – institutions.  Whether by accident or design, their polling operations reflect their institutions’ biases and, at this point of the election.

This demands a little more discussion of how the poll determines likely voters, a topic I broached the other day.

Why yes.  Yes, it does.

UPDATE:  Look – the logical side of my brain says “these numbers, and those in the MNPoll, do not, no way, no how, pass the stench test”.

The not-so-logical, inductive side of my brain is the part filling in the rest.  Which isn’t to say I don’t think there’s something to it.

UPDATE 2: Welcome Politics in Minnesota reader!

It’s been two months now that the Twin Cities and national left has been flexing its proverbial muscles over Target’s donation to MNForward.

It got to the point over the summer where the Twin Cities left and media (pardon the redundancy) thought they’d made a huuuuuge dent on Target’s market capitalization.

Indeed even today you can read leftybloggers chortling “Omigod, I have to go to Target!  I feel teh icky! LOLCATZ”, and hear about Big Gay staging protests at Targets all over the country, and even throwing “Flashmobs”, which seems to be something the kids today call “big groups of noisy douchebags”, at Target stores.

Because Target – one of the most socially liberal, with-it, pr0-gay companies in American business, dared to donate to a politician who’d support the interests of Minnesota businesses.  Because they hate gays, we’re supposed to believe.

Target must be really hurting.  Right?

Not so much:

Blue is Target.  Red is the Dow.

Target was already at a low due to bad consumer confidence numbers at that point (the week before July 23 or so).

So  how did Target’s performance stack up next to companies that, ahem, don’t “hate gays?”  Companies like Dollar Tree (darker blue), Family Dollar (Green), Costco (yellow) and Target (the lighter blue)?

Costco apparently hates gays even more!  And board at WalMart were apparently riding in the Pride Parade on a gigantic motorized sex aid wearing leather S and M wear!

Or perhaps it’s simpler than that; perhaps Big Gay and the left aren’t nearly as powerful as they think, and Target is doing juuuuust fine, with or without protests.

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.

It was twenty years ago today that I most likely noticed that it’d been five years since I’d decided to move to the Twin Cities.

Did I remember that booze-fueled night in September of 1985?  My drunken promise to a table of college friends at a homecoming party that I was leaving North Dakota in two weeks?  The madcap seventeen days that followed?

To tell you the truth, I don’t remember. I had other things on my mind at the time.  I was still working – still  – at the sleazy DJ service.  Still spinning records in crappy bars six nights a week.  Still looking for work in talk radio.  Or news.  Or sports.  Or as a DJ, for that matter.  And getting absolutely nowhere.  To the point that the search had more or less tailed off to nothing.

Oh, yeah – and I was getting married in about two weeks.

———-

I started writing this series five years ago.

I took a drive the other day through South Minneapolis – past the house I used to share with the five women, around Lake Harriett where I used to run every evening, past my first apartment down on 37th and Minnehaha.  It’s kind of amazing how changes sneak up on you; the row of dumpy little stores, the Snyder Drug and the greasy old gas station on 46th and Nicollet have been replaced by a gleaming new strip mall.  The old firehouse is now a Bruegger’s.  The dumpy little grocery store is now some sort of “art space”.   The neighborhood bar on 44th and Nicollet is…something else.

The striking part, to me, is how very, very much longer those five years seemed to take, the first time around.

I could think of all the Bruce Springsteen songs I’ve covered in one band or musical lashup or another – “Born To Run”, “Born In The USA”, “Atlantic City”, “Cadillac Ranch”, “Darkness on the Edge of Town”, “The River”,  “Thunder Road”…

…or the songs I just noodled demos of way back when I still had time and energy to noodle demos – “Love On The Wrong Side Of Town”, “This Hard Land”, “Janey Don’t You Lose Heart”…

…or even just the Bruce songs I’ve dreamed of covering if I ever got another really good band together – “Incident On 57th Street”, “Kitty’s Back”, “Rosalita,  “Jungleland”, “Backstreets”, “I Wanna Be With You”,  “Racing In The Streets”, “Something In The Night”, “Jackson Cage”, “None But The Brave”, “If I Should Fall Behind”, “My Beautiful Reward”…

…and on none of those lists does the latest Bruce song to undergo a rash over covers – “I’m Going’ Down“, easily my least favorite single from Born In The USA – appear.

But it seems to have the current cover mojo.

Kids today.

The Independence Party has had, since the departure of Jesse “the Mind” Ventura, a serious challenge; proving its own relevance.

The Twin Cities chattering class desperately wants the IP to be relevant; the party is compposed of, and largely appeals to, wonky people who are fascinated by the mechanics of govenment, people who love to play with the levers and knobs of the machinery of government.

Which made Jesse Ventura’s election extra-ironic.

Anyway – by way of showing their relevance, the IP has been claiming they’ll raise $2.5 million for this gubernatorial race; just a couple of Renoirs for Mark Dayton, but serious money otherwise, especially for a third party.

Now, as of July 19 the Horner campaign had raised $200,000.  He also got $350,000 in (soooo well-spent public subsidies).  That leaves him just shy of two million dollars to raise during the race.

Do the math:  Horner will need to raise just over $19K.  Over $130K a week.

The campaign’s been claiming over $120K a week.  We’re a little over a month away from the next campaign finance report.

I’m gonna guess the don’t hit it.

Just saying.

I used to be a technical writer, working in software, science and engineering.

And this piece from the Guardian made me howl with laughter.

Your mileage may vary.

Remember last week?  When former Emmer campaign chair Mark Buesgens was arrested for suspected DUI?

The biggest offense that had the local leftybloggers howling, naturally, wasn’t the alleged DUI; it was that although Buesgens had left (or “Emmer claimed he’d left”, according to the local leftyblogs) the Emmer campaign, it could not have been, said they, based on a copy of a fax to the Campaign Finance Board dated the day of Buesgens’ arrest.

We discussed this last week; to the Leftybloggers, perhaps weaned Jesse Ventura’s version of logic,  absence of any evidence of their claim whatsoever means there’s a coverup.  I debunked that, of course; the campaign and the party confirmed Buesgens had left the campaign and joined the party a solid week early.

“Well”, some leftyblogger sputtered, “do we want someone that bad at paperwork running the government?”

My jaw dropped.  Governors have people – well-paid union people in many cases, who are supremely competent at their jobs – to do paperwork.

But is the fact that the Emmer Campaign faxed the change in the name of its chairman to the Campaign Finance Board, to amend the CFB website, a week after the actual change even an offense on even the most niggling administrative level?

I called the Campaign Finance Board.  A very friendly representative (whose permission to speak on the record I was not able to get, so I”ll leave him unnamed for now) left me a voicemail message saying that the general rule is ten days, although “we occasionally allow some flexibility on that”.

Ten days.

The CFB staffer even left me a Minnesota statute that includes that statutory deadline – 10A.025 Subdivision 4 (emphasis added):

Subd. 4.Changes and corrections. Material changes in information previously submitted and corrections to a report or statement must be reported in writing to the board within ten days following the date of the event prompting the change or the date upon which the person filing became aware of the inaccuracy. The change or correction must identify the form and the paragraph containing the information to be changed or corrected

So let’s sum up here; Emmer’s campaign faxed the update to the CFB three days inside the deadline. The motivations – Buesgens’ arrest – are irrelevant.  The Emmer campaign followed the law in every respect.

The DFL/leftyblogs’ whispering campaign is – let’s call a spade a spade – a calculated lie intended to mislead voters not familiar with the law.

The City of Mound is the kind of place we in places like Saint Paul and Minneapolis  dream about; a town with a conservative city council that has done a great job of controlling spending, weaning itself from “Local Government Aid”, and balancing its budget by being fiscally responsible.

And Sue Jeffers is the kind of person we need more of in Twin Cities conservatism; a fire-breathing conservative activist who doesn’t just talk principle, she acts on it; she may have been the greatest force behind Tom Emmer’s nomination that you never heard of.  While she does do a show on a station that competes with mine (she’s on 100.3, I’m on AM1280) and which Ed and I crush in our time slot (ahem), she’s a friend of mine and one of the sharpest forks in the Minnesota conservative drawer.

But I gotta call her on this one.

Mound city councilman Dave Osmek – who is Republican enough to have been the chief teller at the 2010 MN GOP convention, and conservative enough to talk with Ed and I about the work he helped do to balance the Mound city budget and wean the city off of Local Government Aid – emailed me:

A couple weeks ago, Sue Jeffers’ producer Stan, who lives in Mound, noticed a black Lexus with a City of Mound sign on it. They spent 5-10 minutes bashing Mound (see show podcast from 9/11, hour 2, about 3/4 through the hour).

(Sue’s a good friend, but I’ll let Clear Channel’s promotions department pay me to link to their website, thankewverymuch)

Without calling or checking out the story, the proceeded to blast the Council (4 for 4 conservative Republicans). Jeffers said…they could buy 2 Ford Taursuses for that price…”typical government”…

At face value, it does in fact sound like some pretty wasteful government spending.

There’s more to it, of course:

Except the truth is, the vehicle in question is a private vehicle that we pay milage on for a dock inspector that works seasonally. Instead of buying a $20,000 Taurus, we pay him a couple hundred bucks a season and bought him a magnet for use when on-duty for the side of the car.

So in other words, rather than buying a Lexus, or two Tauri or even a single Taurus, the city of Mound essentially rents a car for about one percent the cost of a Taurus.

Osmek tells me that the story has the conservative Mound city council…

…trying to tamp down this fire, during an election season. Needless to say…I ain’t happy.  I don’t have a problem when people challenge me or tell me when I’m wrong.  But when someone says something this patently false, its incredibly frustrating because lies are far more provacative than the truth.  Like the old saying goes, a Lie can travel across the globe before the Truth gets outta bed.

Naturally.  It’s why it’s such staple of the Alinski-ite campaigning the DFL’s been doing this cycle; inflammation is more useful to them than information.

Making a big noise for responsibility and accountability in government is a good thing.  I strongly encourage it.

But let’s make sure we focus on the real enemies – mainly, those who actually are wasting money!

There’s a new Northern Alliance Facebook page.  Go and “like” or “Friend” or whatever you do with this newfangled social media stuff.

Podcasts from the weekend shows are up!

On the show on Saturday, I talked about how the Dayton “2.0” budget – his second shot at the budget, after his first attempt came up three freaking billion dollars short – was still one freaking billion dollars short.

Someone called off the air asking for proof; I’d gotten into an interview, so couldn’t answer it right away.

But the answer, as a matter of fact, is on the Dayton “Mulligan budget” website, down at the very bottom.

To wit:

TOTAL SPENDING CUTS: $1.213 Billion

TOTAL REVENUE INCREASES & SPENDING CUTS: $4.876 Billion

FORECAST DEFICIT : $5.766 Billion

So do the math; the difference is $890 Million Dollars.

That’s after raising taxes on “the rich” (families making over $150K a year); that’s after a tax hike twelve times the size of the $400 million hike that the DFL-dominated legislature managed to pass by one vote (Tarryl Clark’s!) during a session at the height of Obamamania.

If the media weren’t so busy checking up on Tom Emmer’s landscapers and exactly what percentage of cities he said received Local Government Aid, the people might actually know something about this and…

…oh, wait.  Never mind.

Some background:  Local Government Aid was started in the late sixties/early seventies to help poorer cities in outstate Minnesota afford some of the newer infrastructure – schools, roads, police, water treatment, etc – that they couldn’t have on their own tax bases.

The local leftyblogbuildup has been carping about this piece in Polinaut, which “fact-checked” one of Tom Emmer’s off-handed statements in a recent debate:

“I don’t know how many of your viewers understand that only about half the cities in this state get any local government aid and frankly only a handful get the lion’s share,” he said during a debate Sept. 17, 2010.

Now, Emmer is a hip-shooter; on many bedrock conservative issues, the infinitesimal details are less important than the high level vision.

But the left – and Minnesota Public Radio’s “Poligraph” – took umbrage; some 85% of Minnesota cities get some form of LGA, and, MPR’s Catherine Richert pointed out, many smaller cities get more money per capita than the “Big Three”, Minneapolis, Saint Paul and Duluth.  Richert concluded:

Emmer’s claim is fraught with inaccuracies. He’s wrong that only half of Minnesota communities are getting aid. It’s far more than that. And while Minneapolis and St. Paul come out on top in terms of dollars of aid, it’s the smallest cities in the state that are getting the most aid per person – precisely the aim of the local government aid program.

This claim is false.

Well, no.  It’s not.

I mean, yes – some smaller cities get very, very high per-capita Local Aid numbers.  The highest per-capita numbers in the state are, in fact, from some of our smallest towns (and Hibbing).

But who really gets LGA in Minnesota?  Using the exact same figures MPR used in their story, let’s go through MPR’s “fact-check”.

Emmer’s campaign said it could not back-up his claim that only half the cities in the state get aid. In fact, most do. This year, 85 percent of communities – or 727 out of 854 communities — will get local government aid after unallotment cuts, according to data supplied by the Minnesota State Legislature House Research Department, which tracks these payments annually.

But if you count the populations of cities and towns that get zero LGA (about 1.7 million) and the people who don’t live in incorporated cities, it adds up to about half the people in Minnesota.

Should Emmer have distinguished between people and cities?

Enh.  Maybe, maybe not.  We’ll come back to that.

Emmer’s second point, that a handful of commun ities get the most money, is more complicated. This year, the state will give out $426,535,440 in local government aid. Nearly half of that – about $200 million – goes to 14 cities, including Duluth, Minneapolis, St. Cloud, St. Paul, and Winona.

That much is true, but it doesn’t really tell the whole story.

The top 14 cities in terms of Local Government Aid – Minneapolis, Saint Paul, Duluth, Saint Cloud, Winona, Hibbing, Austin, Moorhead, Mankato, Rochester, Faribault, Albert Lea, New Ulm and Virginia – do indeed soak up over half of the state’s entire LGA budget.

More interestingly, the top thirty cities  in population – from Minneapolis (population 390131) down through Brooklyn Center (30330) get a grand total of about 172 million dollars from LGA.

But twenty of the top thirty cities – Bloomington, Brooklyn Park, Plymouth, Eagan, Eden Prairie, Burnsville, Maple Grove, Woodbury, Blaine, Lakeville, Minnetonka, Apple Valley, Edina, Saint Louis Park, Maplewood, Roseville, Cottage Grove, Shakopee, Inver Grove Heights and Andover – receive absolutely no local government aid.

Every one of them is a metro-area suburb.  Most, if not all, of them are successful cities with more-or-less thriving business communities.   Each of them has between 30,000 and 85,000 people; 1.05 million people altogether, a fifth of the entire population of Minnesota.

We’ll come back to that too.

However, Emmer’s statement glosses over some important context. Local Government Aid was created to help towns with limited tax bases provide services to its residents. Funding is doled out based on a city’s fiscal needs and its ability to pay for them, as well as other factors, including population.

This brings us to the part of the story that doesn’t get contained in a spreadsheet – much.  LGA isn’t just a bit of help to parts of the state that can’t afford the better things in governmental life on their own.  It’s not even merely a program forcing the parts of this state that don’t work to subsidize spending on the parts of the state that either can’t afford them, or spend more than they want to account for to their own voters.  It’s a political football.

But let’s go back to the numbers.

So on one hand, it makes sense that large cities, like St. Paul or Minneapolis, would be getting a lot of money.

But dollar amounts don’t reveal much. To really understand how the state is spending the cash, it makes more sense to look at aid per capita. By this measure, some of the state’s smallest towns are getting the most money per person. For instance, Leonidas, population 57, got $35,240 this year, which breaks down to about $618 per person. By comparison, Minneapolis, population 390,000, got $63,986,731 in local government aid – or about $164 per person.

So far, so good.  Minneapolis gets $164 a person; Saint Paul, closer to $175.  Duluth, a whopping $322 per person.

If you take the Big Three cities together, the average Local Government Aid comes to almost $186 per person.

If you take those “Top Fourteen” cities with a fifth of Minnesota’s population that the MPR report talked about up above the fourteen cities that soak up half the LGA, the average is about the same; $187 per person, ranging from a low of $49 in Rochester to an incredible $495 and change for each of Hibbing’s 16,000-odd residents.

Indeed, some of Minnesota’s smallest cities do get the most money per capita; tiny Leonidas, population 57, got a grand total of $35,000; that’ll buy you two-third of one of RT Rybak’s drinking fountains in Minneapolis.

So let’s compare and contrast the average populations of cities outside the “Top Fourteen” – Minneapolis, Saint Paul, Duluth and the eleven other cities listed above that soak up half the budget – that actually get above the average of the Top Fourteen in LGA receipts (I took every city that got over $188 per capita) with those that don’t.  They account for a total of 397 cities – a little less than half of Minnesota’s cities – with a combined population of almost exactly 540,000 people.  They soak up $157,319,854 – a total of $290.79 per capita.  And their average population is 1363.

We are talking small towns, here.

Compare that to the 383 cities that get less than $186 per capita – the average for the Big Fourteen recipients and the Big Three population centers.  They total 2,621,451 people – about half the population of the state – and get $55,550,284, or a little over a ninth of the total LGA budget.  They have an average population of 6844 – almost five times the size of the cities that get above-average aid.

So the pattern so far is this:

• The big fourteen LGA recipients, and the three largest cities in population, all get $186 per capita in LGA.
• The smaller towns and cities that get more than that average are quite small indeed.
• The larger towns and cities that get below that average are considerably larger.

But what about the large number of cities that get no aid?  The MPR report points out that some cities get no money whatsoever from LGA.

Those 127 cities total 1,770,912 people – about a third of the state’s population – and have an average population just shy of 14,000.

So here’s how LGA breaks out:

• the 14 biggest recipients, and 300-odd cities averaging just over a thousand people eat up almost $370 million in LGA ($141 million to the Twin Cities and Duluth); that is 87 percent of all LGA.
• The remaining just-shy-of-half of Minnesota towns and cities – those in the middle of the pack, averaging around 6,000 people – get what’s left.
• 15% of Minnesota towns and cities holding about a third of the people get no LGA.  Zip.  Nada.  Zilch.

Had enough yet?

Tough.  There’s more.

I split out the cities that make up the Twin Cities metro area – 101 total cities and towns (I may have missed a few, but they’re useful for comparison purposes).

Of the 101 total cities in the Metro, from huge Minneapolis to tiny Coates (population 177), averaging 28,500-odd people receiving a total of $158664,026 of LGA, averaging $57.20 per capita.

But only 28 cities in the Metro area actually get Local Government Aid.  So if you leave out Minneapolis and Saint Paul, with their 678,186 total people and roughly $170/person allotment, you get a total of 99 cities with 2,010,299 people, averaging a minuscule $8.31 per capita.

Conclusion

Local Government Aid gives immensely disproportionate aid to Minneapolis, Saint Paul and Duluth, as well as the smaller towns that the program was originally intended to aid.  It takes money from the parts of the state that are prospering – the Metro suburbs.

There is, in between the lavishly funded Twin Cities and Duluth and the smaller communities where a small contribution translates into a huge per-capita expenditure, a large donut hole of Minnesota communities, largely prosperous, heavily outer-tier Metro or from the southern part of the state, between 5,000 and the mid-five figures that get nothing – but most definitely pay in.

And Minnesota Public Radio stopped looking for conclusions when they found something they could use to bag on Tom Emmer.

Last week, DFL bloggers thought they’d caught Tom Emmer “lying”.

The putative “lie”, of course, was that the Emmer Campaign didn’t notify the Campaign Finance Board that Mark Buesgens had left the campaign until a week later, after Buesgens had been accused of Driving While Intoxicated, and the campaign figured “well, no time like the present”.

This, of course, being how most average people handle niggling paperwork.

“Nooooo!”, shrieked the leftybloggers, “failure to change the name, all evidence aside, is proof of a coverup!”

I’d like to think this sort of joyless, nagging, phony punctiliousness is a new, irritating trend of the wonkish left.  Unfortunately, it’s a very old, irritating trend of the wonkish left.

I’ve dug back through history and found several examples of this pathology in action.

———-

April 1912:

LOCATION:  The deck of SS Titanic.

FIRST OFFICER LIGHTOLLER: “OK, everyone form an orderly line for the boats…”

STEVEN MICAH TIMMERMAN (A wobbly and lefty pamphleteer):  “Wait!  Do all those lifeboats have the Coast-Guard-mandated number of certified lifejackets?

LIGHTOLLER: “What?  Look, people have to get into the lifeboats, or we’ll have fifteen hundred dead!”

TIMMERMAN:  “I will have the liability lawyers on your ass so fast you’ll be screaming “uncle”…

LIGHTOLLER: “What the hell do you want us to do?”

TIMMERMAN:  “Look, if you want to send all “the rich” off into these unsafe lifeboats, go for it – but I’m going to send the working class off to search for enough life jackets to fit the letter of the law!  You will not kill the poor with your substandard lifeboats!”

(and scene).

———-

December 7, 1941:

LOCATION:  Opana Radar Station, the northern tip of Oahu, Hawaii.

PRIVATE JONES: “Sir, I have a large radar contact coming in from the north. The report is on your desk”

MAJOR ERIC MICAH PULSEY: Oh, my goddess, Private Jones; what is this?  “We have at this time no idea what a group of planes would be coming from the north for”  What the hell is that?

JONES: Sir?

PULSEY: Ending a sentence with a preposition, Jones?  Go and retype this report.  What the hell are you, some ignorant red-stater?

———-

December 31, 1999:

SCENE: The US-Canadian border crossing at Vancouver.

BORDER PATROLPERSON DAVID MICAH MINDELBERG: “Sir, what are you doing with this huge truck full of fertilizer and diesel fuel?”

ABU HADJ AL-JIHADI:  “Er…I am not coming to build a bomb to desroy a Millenium celebration…”

MINDELBERG: “Well, duh.  The millenium doesn’t begin until 2001!  What kind of stupid wingnut do you think I am?

AL-JIHADI: Heh heh.

MINDELBERG: Don’t insult my intelligence.  Drive on, and don’t be an idiot.

(AL-JIHADI drives on)

MINDELBERG: Sheesh.  Stupid wingnuts.

Flunkies attack a blogger/cameraman at an appearance by Oregon Democratic candidate for governor John Kitzhaber:

There is apparently an avalanche of violence by Democrats against Republicans.

(I mean, everyone’s declaring avalanches these days…)

(Via Rob)

Betty McCollum – Nancy Pelosi’s lapdog:

Hey, Nancy Pelosi’s a consensus-builder!

With the news that Tom Emmer has pulled to a tiny, inside-the-margin-of-error lead in the latest Rasmussen poll, I’ve joked that it’s about time for a Star/Tribune “Minnesota Poll” showing Mark Dayton leading by an improbably huge margin.

And sure enough, here it is.  It shows Dayton leading Emmer 39-30, with Horner eating up 18 points.

The key, as with all Minnesota Polls, is in the sampling; the methodology seems to be “poll Democrats until we get the result that’ll make Democrats feel better and want to come to the polls”.  And if you look at the “methodology” page (and the Strib has got to be assuming you won’t), it’s right there:

The self-identified party affiliation of the random sample is: 35 percent Democrat, 28 percent Republican and 28 percent independent. The remaining 9 percent said they were members of another party, no party or declined to answer.

So the Strib claims to believe, in this electoral season, that there will be five Democrat voters for every four GOP voters, and (apparently) that independents will break the same way they did two years ago.

The Washington post carried this oddly-constructed PDF showing the Minnesota Poll’s statistical history over the past five decades or so.  For MN Polls conducted since Rob Davies took over the Poll (I’ll add emphasis)…:

• The final GOP poll number was on average 5.20 percent points under the actual GOP result in the election. -5.20 percentage points is outside the margin of error in the Minnesota Poll.
• The final DFL poll number was on average 2.06 percent points under the actual DFL result in the election. -2.06 percentage points is inside the margin of error in the Minnesota Poll.
• Since 1998, the Minnesota Poll has underestimated the GOP result in elections by an average of 7.26 percent but underestimated the DFL result by only .054 percent.

I’ll remind you that if the Minnesota poll were accurate, we’d be referring to Governor Humphrey (the poll showed Skip 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)…

…indeed, the only year they’ve been genuinely accurate was ’08.  The year of the great Democrat/DFL blowout.  That’s because, in effect, the Minnesota Poll always predicts DFL blowouts.  They were finally right in ’08.

This poll, like all Minnesota Polls, has only one purpose; to help revive the DFL’s flagging spirits.  Mark Dayton has run a perfunctory, frankly terrible campaign, notable for the nastiness of the “third-party” attack ad campaign largely paid for by Dayton, his ex-wife and family.  His support is slipping in reputable polls.

And that’s why we have the Minnesota Poll.

The serial dishonesty and, let’s be honest, in-the-bag-ness of the Minnesota Poll was the straw the broke the camel’s back when I last unsubscribed to the Strib back in 2004.

If you are a Minnesota conservative who is hoping for a sane governor next year, this is not a reason to jump off the ledge – but it is a reason to remember this is a tough campaign.  Emmer’s doing well, but he still faces a full-court press – the bought-off, in-the-bag media, a ruthless pack of well-heeled institutional hyenas, and the DFL machine.  If you can peel off a few bucks, or spend some time calling or door-knocking, it’s needed.

Bring on the real polling – in November!

UPDATE:  Luke Matthews at True North notes that Princeton Survey Research Associations – which did the polling and analysis – has a “business model” that invites analytical wierdness:

For many clients, PDS provides a cleaned, unweighted dataset. But for the client who does not want to weigh the data themselves, PDS can provide weighting services to take into account known probabilities involving the sampling process or known variations in the non-response among groups.

In other words, these non-response groups [the large percentage of “no-response/different party” respondents – a high nine percent in the MN Poll – Ed] have been manipulated.  By manipulated, I mean, they made it up.  In their vast experience as pollsters, they have discovered that non-response means, this, whatever this may be.  Since they are providers to Pew Research, a group with notoriously liberal findings, we can conclude that non-response to Princeton means they’re probably liberals.

So, to recap.  We have a poll with a huge margin of error for the population size, a presumption of liberal bias when weighing cell phone sampling, a large number of non-independent, non-responsive people, who are presumed liberal by a liberal polling firm who works exclusively with liberal groups.

More as the story warrants.

Reid Johnson is running for Minnesota House District 45B.

Lee Byberg is running for the US House against Collin Peterson in MN CD7 – the northwest side of the state.

Andy Noble is running for Ramsey County Commission.

Today, the Northern Alliance Radio Network brings you the best in Minnesota conservatism from 9AM-3PM.

• Volume I “The First Team” –  Brian and John or some combination thereof kick off from 11-1.
• Volume II “The Headliner” – Ed is out on assignment.  I follow from 1-3PM Central; I’ll be talking about the big news of this past week, plus chatting with Lee Byberg (GOP candidate and potential dark-horse winner for the Congressional seat in CD7),  Reid Johnson (GOP House candidate in 45B), and Andy Noble, candidate for Ramsey County Commission.
• The King Banaian Show! – King is on hiatus until, hopefully, he is “Representative Banaian”!

(All times Central)

So tune in to all six hours of the Northern Alliance Radio Network, the Twin Cities’ media’s sole guardians of sanity. You have so many options:

• AM1280 in the Metro
• streaming at AM1280’s Website,
• On Twitter (the Volume 2 show will use hashtag #narn2)
• UStream video and chat (at HotAir.com or at UStream).
• Podcast at Townhall, usually by Monday
• Good ol’ telephone – 651-289-4488!
• And make sure you fan us on Facebook!

Join us!

(Title: Jet)

If Joel Demos doesn’t win the MN CD5 race – and let’s face it, he’s a dark horse – at least someone should hire him away from his day job to do political ads.

(Or whomever is doing the ads for Demos – and as tightly-budgeted as Demos’ bid is, I can’t imagine he’s got a lot of staff on the case…)