The latest MPR/Humphrey Institute poll shows Dayton leading the DFL field:

A new Minnesota Public Radio News/Humphrey Institute poll shows former Sen. Mark Dayton with a comfortable lead over the other two candidates competing in the DFL gubernatorial primary.

This is good news for Tom Emmer; Dayton is a national laughingstock with negatives just south of Anastasio Somoza.  If he wins the primary, I’m seriously looking forward to November.

The DFL primary race isn’t all that close at the moment:

The poll of 701 Minnesota adults, which was taken May 13-May 16, shows Dayton is the favorite among likely DFL primary voters by a 10-point margin: 38 percent to 28 percent over House Speaker Margaret Anderson Kelliher.

Dayton, Kelliher and former state Rep. Matt Entenza are competing for the DFL spot on the general election ballot. Entenza received just 6 percent of support in the poll. Whoever wins the August DFL primary will face Emmer in the November election.

Perhaps this is further proof that the DFL endorsement is the kiss of death?

Kelliher received the DFL party endorsement last month. Dayton did not seek it and DFL Party leaders punished him for that by barring him from the state convention. Still, Dayton is getting more support from Democrats.

It wouldn’t be a major-media story about Minnesota politics without a long series of quotes from Larry Jacobs:

“This poll is a real slap in the face to the Democratic Party,” said University of Minnesota political science professor Larry Jacobs, who oversaw the poll.

Jacobs, who heads the Humphrey Institute’s Center for the Study of Politics and Governance, says it’s not just that Dayton has a big lead over Kelliher among likely DFL primary voters. The poll shows Dayton is considerably more popular than Kelliher with women in the party…Kelliher has campaigned aggressively on the notion that she could become Minnesota’s first woman governor.

“DFLers, are you ready to make some history? Are you ready to make history together?” she said the party’s convention in Duluth.

This being a Humphrey Institute poll, you can expect passive-aggressive context-free sniping at the GOP:

When it comes to the general election, the poll shows only Dayton would win against Republican Tom Emmer. But Dayton would win by just 4 percentage points, well within the poll’s margin of error of 5.8 percentage points.

The poll shows Emmer beating Kelliher or Entenza, but, again, not by enough to be statistically significant.

The MPR story doesn’t indicate if the poll was of registered or likely voters – which is a fairly key bit of context to omit, in that it allows the inescapable Jacobs to have his way with context:

While Emmer has no primary battle on the Republican side, the poll indicates he faces a challenge in uniting the GOP behind him.

A third of the Republicans who responded to the poll said they were either undecided, supporting a Democrat or backing the Independence Party-endorsed candidate Tom Horner.

Jacobs says for the sole Republican candidate to have only two-thirds of party members backing him is extraordinary, and not good news for Emmer.

“Emmer, perhaps because he’s too conservative, is struggling at the outset to rally and unite Republicans,” Jacobs said. “Now, there’s a lot of time to campaign and Emmer, unlike other Republicans who’ve run for governor, is really a new name for many Minnesota voters, so we’ll have to see how that develops. But at this point, the [result] is a red flag.”

Emmer faced a similar hurdle winning the endorsement.  And let’s never forget that he’s alreadty facing the Twin Cities’ media’s usual slur of anyone running to the right of Arne Carlson, the “Too Extreme” meme that the media is doing its duty to help spread (along with a fair chunk of the media’s concerted effort to paint Tom Horner as Republican enough to soak up votes).  Horner eats up 10% in the poll, although the IP is always overepresented in these polls (or has been since 1998, anyway).

But outside the 35% of Minnesotans who will never ever ever vote for a Republican of any sort, there are three dynamics at work:

First:  When people meet Tom Emmer, they stand a good chance of becoming converted.

Second:  When people meet Mark Dayton, they stand a fair chance of falling asleep.

Third:  The media will be doing its best (and the DFL’s bidding) to keep voters from doing either 1 or 2.

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Wednesday, May 19th, 2010 at 12:10 pm and is filed under Campaign '10, Media, Minnesota Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.