Have you noticed something?<\/p>\n
No “Minnesota Poll” yet this cycle. \u00a0Ditto the Humprey Institute.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Now, I’ve been writing about the HHH and Strib\u00a0<\/em>“Minnesota” polls<\/a> for quite some time. \u00a0I noted that since 1988, the Strib Minnesota Poll has consistently shorted Republicans by a consistently greater margin than Democrats<\/a> in their pre-election polls – and that the discrepancy is even greater in elections that end up being closest<\/a>. \u00a0I noted that the HHH poll is even worse<\/a> – but that in polls where the DFLer appears to be in no danger, their polls end up being more accurate.<\/p>\n It is my contention that the Strib and the Humphrey Institute are allied – at least at the executive level – with the DFL, and use their polls to further the DFL’s ends; everyone involved is certainly aware of the “Bandwagon Effect<\/a>” – the phenomenon by which voters who believe their candidates have no chance of victory will stay home.<\/p>\n So we’ve seen no “Minnesota” poll so far this cycle; Amy Klobuchar – perhaps the greatest beneficiary of media bias in the history of Minnesota politics, as the daughter of a former\u00a0Strib\u00a0columnist – seems to be in no great danger, so the polls say, from Kurt Bills (not to say I won’t do everything I can, personally, to fix that). \u00a0I’ll bet dimes to dollars the\u00a0Strib\u00a0<\/em>polls wind up pretty darn close to the election totals, in fact!<\/p>\n ———-<\/p>\n But the “Bandwagon” effect is going nationwide; Minnesota in 2008 and 2010 showed that it can keep\u00a0juuuuuuuuust\u00a0<\/em>enough people home, if it’s relentless enough, to tip a close election.<\/p>\n And so you see the mainstream media already declaring the election over<\/a>, based entirely on polling that is entirely based on the Democrats getting turnout they didn’t even get in 2008.<\/a><\/p>\n It is, in fact, the flip side of the “Low Information Voter” strategy they’ve run on their own side – convincing the ill-informed, the querulous and the not-bright that there’s a “war on women” and Obama “stands with the 99%” and “the economy was Bush’s fault but it’s almost back, any day now”; trying to convince people, especially independents, who might be sick to death of Obama and possibly thinking of voting GOP that it’s all hopeless and they should stay home.<\/p>\n Think about it. \u00a0Why else would they run polls that are transparently false? \u00a0That rely on assumptions that probably didn’t even occur during the post-Watergate election in 1976, much less 2008, much less today?<\/p>\n Because only the high-information voters either dig into the partisan breakdowns<\/strong> (or read the bloggers who do), and the record in Minnesota shows there are just enough incurious, too-busy, ill-informed, and just plain un-bright people to sway the matter if it’s close enough.<\/p>\n The media at all levels – bald-faced cheerleaders like the LATimes and the\u00a0Strib\u00a0<\/em>and the supposedly-ethical ones like NPR alike – are going to be beating the “it’s over” drum constantly ’til the election.<\/p>\n The well-informed people know it’s baked wind.<\/p>\n But it’s not aimed at them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Have you noticed something? No “Minnesota Poll” yet this cycle. \u00a0Ditto 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, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56,4,125],"tags":[262,208],"class_list":["post-30547","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-campaign-12","category-media","category-the-great-poll-scam","tag-minnesota-poll","tag-a-klo"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30547","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=30547"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30547\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30588,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30547\/revisions\/30588"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=30547"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=30547"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=30547"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}