Shot in the Dark

Tag: “Minnesota” Poll

  • The Peasants Are Restless

    A Survey USA poll shows Hillary losing to every single GOP candidate. In Minnesota. Longtime friend of the blog Fresch Fisch writes in re poll (about which more later today): I predict the Minnesota Poll will come out in a couple of weeks showing her back on top. True. But she won’t just be back…

  • Confirmation Bias

    The Strib has a new publisher, Mike Klingensmith. David Brauer at the MinnPost checked up on the guy’s financial donations, as well as the new board chair Mike Sweeney’s – which ranged from “moderate Republicans” to “very liberal Democrats” over the course of the past decade and change.  Brauer’s summary:  All in all, bipartisan, big-business-like, skewed toward the D.C. Establishment,…

  • The Emperor’s New Polls – What Are Words For?

    Yesterday, we looked at a piece by Joe Loveland in the Twin Cities leftyblog Wry Wing Politics.  WWP rates my ultimate endorsement for a leftyblog – its author isn’t in line for a harassment restraining order and remedial logic class. That’s all to the good. But he cited a series of media polls about the public’s…

  • The Emperor’s New Polls: “Your Client Is Obviously Guilty!”

    “Wry Wing Politics” is one of the painfully small group of Twin Cities leftybloggers who don’t expressly deserve to be under police surveillance. But that doesn’t mean WWP and its author, Joe Loveland, know how to take apart a complex issue, or dig beneath the hood of a lefty propaganda meme, better than the babbling bobbleheads…

  • Poll Cats

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

  • Chanting Points Memo: Tie Manufacturing Is Way Up!

    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…

  • Chanting Points Memo: That D+13 Split

    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 Great Poll Scam: A Blast From The Past

    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…

  • Chanting Points Memo: Camouflaging The Battleground

    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…

  • Chanting Points Memo: “Minnesota Poll” Has Your Delivery Of Sandbags Right Here

    Yesterday, the Star Tribune “Minnesota Poll” also delivered its mid-cycle tally of support for the Voter ID Amendment. And coming barely a week after the generally-accurate Survey USA poll showing Voter ID passing by a 2:1 margin, the Strib would have you believe…: Slightly more than half of likely voters polled — 52 percent — want the changes…

  • Chanting Points Memo: “Minnesota Poll” Orders Material For A Narrative-Building Spree

    If you take the history of the Minnesota Poll as any indication, yesterday’s numbers on the Marriage Amendment might be encouraging for amendment supporters: The increasingly costly and bitter fight over a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage is a statistical dead heat, according to a new Star Tribune Minnesota Poll. Six weeks before Election…

  • The Bandwagoneers

    Have you noticed something? No “Minnesota Poll” yet this cycle.  Ditto the Humprey Institute. Usually by this point in an election cycle, they’ve run a poll showing the Republican candidate down by some absurd amount that turns out to be many times greater than the eventual margin of victory (or defeat) for the DFLer. Now,…

  • Strib: “This Duck Is A Buffalo”

    I’m going to start a new TV show.  I’m going to call it “Profiles in Leadership”. I’ve got a few episodes all plotted out. Episode 1:  After decades of weak mayors who futzed around with “due process” and “the limits of government”, Boss Tweed finally did more than pay lip service to the office of…

  • Fearless Predictions

    I have a couple of predictions for you. Prediction 1:  Polled To Death – Take this to the bank:  sometime before July 1, the Strib will run another “Minnesota Poll” in re the shutdown. The poll’s headlines will be within one rhetorical standard deviation of  “65% of Minnesotans Favor Compromise On Budget Impasse”. The crosstabs,…

  • The Great Poll Scam, Part XIV: Fool Me Ten Times…

    You’ve heard the old saying – “the definition of insanity is repeating the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.  The joke writes itself.  Nearly every election season, Minnesota’s media runs the results of the Star-Tribune Minnesota Poll and the Humprey Institute/MPR Poll on its front pages; front and center on…

  • The Great Poll Scam Part IX: The Rockstar Who Couldn’t See His Face In The Mirror

    In reading Professor Larry Jacobs’ defense of the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute poll – which always underpolls Republicans in its immediate pre-election survey, by an average of six points, with the tendency even more exaggerated in close races – Jacobs writes (with emphasis added): Appropriately interpreting Minnesota polls as a snapshot is especially important because…

  • The Great Poll Scam, Part VI: The Hay They Make

    We’ve been discussing the MPR/Humphrey Institute and Minnesota polls for the past two weeks.  Indeed, it’s been one of the ongoing “go to” subjects of this blog for almost eight years now. Why? Because while  the polls themselves are risible, they have an effect on elections in Minnesota. Part of it is in terms of…

  • The Great Poll Scam, Part V: Close Shaves

    It’s almost become a cliche, among conservative observers of Minnesota elections.  You’re supporting a Republican.  You know the race is close.  You can feel the race is close. And the final Humprhey and Minnesota polls come out, and the DFLer leads by an utterly absurd margin – like this year’s Humphrey Institute Poll, which showed…

  • The Great Poll Scam, Part IV: Hubert, You Magnificent Bastard, I Read Your Numbers!

    The Hubert H. Humphrey Institute is a combination public-policy study program and think tank at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.  Named for the patriarch of the Democratic Farmer-Labor party – a forties-era amalgamation of traditional Democrats and neo-wobbly Farmer-Labor Union members whose Stalinist elements Humphrey famously purged in the mid-forties – the institution serves…

  • The Great Poll Scam, Part III: Daves, Goliath

    Rob Daves took over the Minnesota Poll in 1987. I have never met Rob Daves.  Either, to the best of my knowledge, has anyone else.  I don’t know that his alt-media bete noir, Scott Johnson, has even met him, despite not a few requests for interviews. I have no idea what Rob Daves thinks, believes,…

  • The Great Poll Scam, Part II: Polling Minnesota

    My interest in the Minnesota Poll as an individual institution started right about the time I started this blog, six or eight years ago. Now bear in mind that I, Mitch Berg, have made skepticism of the media at least a hobby, if not a fringey living, since 1986.  I have believed that the media…

  • The Great Poll Scam: Introduction

    The weekend before the election, I was talking with a friend – a woman who has become a newly-minted conservative in the past two years.  She’d sat out the 2008 election, and had voted for Kerry in ’04, but finally became alarmed about the state of this nation’s future – she’s got kids – and…

  • The DFL Morale Builder, Part II

    The Star Tribune‘s “Minnesota Poll” continues to serve its primary function – manipulating voter turnout. As always with the MNPoll, the marquee numbers are nearly meaningless; Dayton has strengthened his lead to 41 percent, according to the poll, followed by Emmer at 34 percent. Horner, who has struggled to get out of the teens in…

  • Chanting Points Memo: Garbage In, Garbage Out

    Mark Dayton has run one of the single dumbest campaigns in Minnesota history. Dayton himself has been a virtual non-entity, relying on the Twin Cities’ media’s inability and/or unwillingness to question him on  his background, the immense gaps in his budget “plan”, his history of erratic behavior…anything. His surrogates have been another matter entirely; “Alliance…