We’re into election season – and when you’re a conservative blogger, one of the highlights of the season is the “Minnesota Poll”.

The poll has a long history of comic inaccuracy – inevitably in favor of Democrats.

Now, in 2006 they didn’t get a lot of focus, because the elections themselves went to solidly Tic everywhere.  This covered up the fact that the polls seemed to the not-so-casual observer to have spotted a couple of points to every DFL/Tic candidate in recent memory; if the final Minnesota polls before the last several elections had been correct, we’d be talking today about Senators Wynia and Mondale, Governors Humphrey, Moe and Hatch, Representative Luther and Wetterling…

So this next bit from the latest poll is probably good news for John McCain:

Democratic presidential candidates Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton enjoy comfortable leads over Republican John McCain in Minnesota, a state widely expected to be a hard-fought battleground in November.

A new Star Tribune Minnesota Poll found that Obama leads McCain 51 percent to 38 percent among the state’s registered voters. Clinton leads the Arizona senator 49 percent to 40 percent.

Of course the poll’s methodology or raw numbers are nowhere in evidence; the MNPoll has been caught grossly oversampling Democrats for as long as I’ve been following it.

And that’s just important when you’re dealing with politicians whose entire strength is among the “base” – which it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to note isn’t Mac’s game anyway:

Independents, who will almost certainly be crucial to victory in November, may still be largely up for grabs, as none of the three candidates can claim majority support among that group.

It’s another season; it’s another chapter in the book “How Worthless is the MNPoll?”