Chanting Points Memo: That D+13 Split
By Mitch Berg
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 poll for the Star Tribune, said those numbers are consistent with what he has seen over the years”.
But as we noted yesterday, the 2008 election – an epic Democrat win – was D+6 or so. The 2010 election had turnout of D+2, roughly, and turned out to be a GOP rout nationwide and in the MN Legislature.
So what about the worst election in the past 50 years for the GOP – the post-Watergate presidential election of 1976? Where the GOP got shredded in DC and in Saint Paul, sending the MNGOP running to their “Independent Republican” label?
I can’t find the partisan split – but does it seem unreasonable that in a year when Jimmy Carter beat Gerald Fold by 12 points in Minnesota that the partisan split was, maybe in the neighborhood of D+12?
In other words, maybe somewhere around the D+13 number the Strib would have you believe today?
September 25th, 2012 at 12:26 pm
The objective, for the squishy conservative, is to keep you home on election day and throw up your hands and say ‘what’s the point?’ They see the tsunami coming. This is not polling, this is damage control.
September 25th, 2012 at 2:37 pm
This is funny, after years of doing BS polls these idiots are getting called on it. The DoDE is doing everything they can to cover for them but we are failing, people aren’t as stupid as beltway people think
September 25th, 2012 at 2:53 pm
Rick, OK, but the Strib poll isn’t middle of the pack, either. The only worse ones are, again, MPR/Humphrey and St. Cloud, and like these, their actual variance from reality exceeds the statistical range. In short, they have some seriously messed up methodology.
September 25th, 2012 at 7:08 pm
OK, but suppose you barrage the bolshies with this information… perhaps you’d depress their vote based on the “…it’s a done deal, why should I bother” proposition. I mean, it’s not like they haven’t got better things to do than get up and go to the polls.
September 26th, 2012 at 10:10 am
Bubba: You’re right. Conservatives go to church every Sunday. Liberals go to the polls every election day. Sometimes in multiple districts. At church, no one vouches for us except God. At the polls, liberals have other liberals vouch for them and then get their pack of Marlboro’s and a six pack and head back into the nether world of disenfranchisement.
September 26th, 2012 at 12:01 pm
[…] Strib’s, in case you’ve forgotten, is 41% Democrat, 28% Republican – which, as I showed yesterday, is more Democrat-leaning than the 1976 post-Watergate, post-Nixon-pardon election, the post-war […]
September 27th, 2012 at 12:16 pm
[…] opponents of the amendment, the Strib would need to skew the poll to an absurd extent. As in, assume conditions that are the same as in 1976, after […]