While Pauline Kael, the doyenne of American film critics, passed away years ago, her syndrome is alive and well here in Minnesota.

Yesterday’s MPR/Humphrey Institute poll, which showed Mark Dayton and Tom Emmer in a dead heat, drew a chorus of “bad methodology!” from the local leftysphere; none of their friends, after all, voted for Emmer!

Jeff Rosenberg at MNPublius says the methodology just can’t be right, because it didn’t poll enough latté-guzzling hipsters:

The poll was based on a “landline, random-digit dial survey.”

Landline? Are you kidding me? I wonder how many younger voters were missed. Not having a landline, I could never have been contacted for this poll.

Perhaps.  The first time I heard this excuse was 2004, when an earlier generation of leftybloggers – Chuck Olson, if memory serves – swore that the polls were undercounting John Kerry supporters because “…I don’t know anyone with a landline, all my friends use cell phones”, too.  I don’t know how much weight to put on this; most people still do have landlines; the younger crowd that may not have ’em is also less likely to vote than the general population.  And MPR says they thought of this: “The survey data has also been weighted to accomodate for factors such as the number of telephone lines, cell phone usage, gender, age, race and ethnicity to approximate the demographic characteristics of the state’s population according to the Census”.  Did MPR and the HHHI do a good job of compensating?  Time will tell.  As an Emmer supporter, I certainly hope so.

Rosenberg:

Maybe that helps to account for the poll’s likely-voter model:

Republican: 46%

Democrat: 41%

Independent: 13%

You’ll have to excuse me if I don’t buy that. The oversampling of Republicans is yet another reason to suspect that this poll overstates the extent to which the race has actually narrowed.

Only if you have become accustomed to a diet of “Star/Tribune Minnesota Polls”, which tend to poll “registered voters”, who are less likely to vote.

The MPR/HHHI poll is likely voters.  Republicans are energized this year; the Tea Party is turning out conservatives in a way Minnesota and the rest of the nation hasn’t seen since 1994.  I’ve seen not a few Dems complain that the DFL usually tops the GOP in voter ID in Minnesota.  This is a fact – among registered voters and random respondents.  Among likely voters – people who will go to the polls come hell or high water?  That number varies widely.

How widely?  Let’s go back to 2006.  The GOP was reeling and groggy; the DFL was on a roll.  And in October of ’06 the state broke down at 48% DFL, 37% GOP,  13% Independence Ventura Party, and 2% everyone else.

We know how that turned out; Pawlenty held on by the skin of his teeth. The GOP lost all the other Constitutional offices, and lost control of the Senate.  Gil Gutknecht got sent packing; Michele Bachmann won by only 8% against a weak candidate in a solid red district that’ll send her back to DC with a two-digit majority this year.

Now – were there 11% more Democrats than GOPers throughout the entire population of Minnesota?  Of course not.  But among those that were planning on going out to vote, there was a pretty serious DFL majority.

The leftyblogosphere seems to think it’s unthinkable that the tables have turned.

Mr. D covered it as well, on his blog and on the MinnPost:

You can look at this a number of ways. Here are a few things I’d suggest:

• Dayton and his minions (and I would include Matt Entenza in that collection) have spent millions of dollars demonizing Tom Emmer all summer long, with very little response from the Emmer camp. If the best they are able to do is get a tie, that doesn’t bode well for Dayton.

That’s the part that’s gotta be keeping DFL strategists up all night; after running the most expensive sleaze campaign in Minnesota history, they’re way inside the margin of error.

• There’s no point in pretending that Emmer’s campaign hasn’t had a few hiccups up to this point. The tip credit flap was an unforced error and he’s been slow to respond to some of the calumnies that have been heaped upon him thus far. While it’s good to see him starting to respond now, his passivity has been puzzling and often maddening. It’s not what we saw in the primary.

I figured that this was about “keeping the powder dry” until the final kick, the last six weeks before the election where the undecideds’ decisions really get made.  I figured Emmer was saving his big plan for cutting spending and re-engineering state government until it’d do him some good; I have solid reason to believe I’m right.

Emmer’s been absolutely scrupulous about running a clean campaign; when Ed and I interviewed him this past Saturday, he insisted he doesnt’ refer to Mark Dayton and the DFL as “the opposition”.  That’s idealism for you.  It’s also swimming against the tide of sleaze that “Alliance for a Better Minnesota” has unleashed.  Will it work?

We’ll see.

(In the meantime, he’s got us bloggers and talk show people for the rough stuff…)

• The current economic conditions in Minnesota aren’t as dire as they are in, say, Nevada, which has allowed Dayton to run the sort of campaign that would have been laughed off elsewhere. That could change, though. One thing worth remembering is that many voters will start seeing the first fruits of Obamacare in October, when they get the bad news about their insurance premiums going up. That won’t help the standard-bearer of the party that is responsible for these increases.

And that – the emerging reality of the Demcrats’ tax debacle, and the true price tag of Dayton’s insane plan – along with Emmer’s actual plan, when it impacts (and we are in the home stretch), is going to be a huge game-changer.  Properly presented to Minnesota, it should leave Dayton stumbling around like a cow that’s been stunned.

Finally, Joe Bodell from Minnesota “Progressive” Project:

If it takes an 8-point oversample in Tom Emmer’s favor to get him up to a tie, I feel pretty great about Mark Dayton’s chances in a real electorate in which younger, cell-phone-only voters show up.

Except Bodell is comparing apples (likely voters) with axles (out-of-date registered voter ID numbers).  Does the poll oversample GOP voters?  Perhaps, but Bodell wouldn’t be able to quantify it with the numbers he’s using.

But aside from the weird methodology, check out the published crosstabs:

1. Independent voters:

Undecided: 38%

Horner: 26%

Dayton: 23%

Emmer: 13%

There’s a lot of room for movement there, but there is virtually no way Emmer picks up significant enough ground among independent voters to make a dent in the overall results. Keep in mind that this is a mid-term election, and the non-partisan vote is generally going to be a lot lower than it is in presidential years, so given a normal partisan breakdown…

That’s all textbook conventional wisdom.  But many, many independents that stayed home in 2002 or 2006 are looking at their tax bills and health insurance today, and making plans for November 2.  Which group of ’em is more likely to show up?

2. The gender gap: MPR’s writeup indicates that there’s no significant gender gap — that women are currently favoring Mark Dayton by a similar margin to men favoring Tom Emmer. However, what they fail to mention directly is that the sample includes 52% women (about normal for Minnesota) which is yet another built-in advantage for Dayton. Again, given a more reasonable partisan sample, this will go straight through to the final results of this election.

Let me shorten that: “Given that MPR took a legitimate sampling of women, and a sampling error I can’t really quantify, I’m crossing my fingers”.

3. Age gap? MPR doesn’t appear to have published the support breakdowns by age, only the sample sizes — which look weird in and of themselves, since it’s a decent bet the senior vote will be bigger than this poll indicates.

I’m lost; did MPR not publish the breakdowns, or did they just publish senior numbers?

Look – this is going to be a tough race for Emmer.  There’s never been any doubt about it.  He’s fighting a 3:1 financial disadvantage, and a big, powerful political machine with 100% name recognition in a blue state.  He’s fighting against the most scabrous, truth-free smear campaign in Minnesota political history.  He’s the underdog.

All he’s got is a tailwind of revulsion with Obama, a very weak (and possibly potemkin) opponent, a soon-t0-come plan, and his own skills as a campaigner.

Even seems fair, so far.

It’s just an MPR poll.

But we’re just about two months from the election – so we’re getting to the point that a well-done poll is getting to be worth something.

The poll – which focuses on likely voters, whom conventional wisdom says tend to break for the GOP – shows that the money Dayton’s spent on his soft-money smear campaign so far is just keeping things close in a year that’s going to be terrible for Dems, even in Minnesota.

It also shows that Emmer is losing some of the “base”.  Part of that is that the “base” is so ill-defined; I’m not sure how MPR identified “Republicans”; there’s a big difference between someone whose total identification is having voted for McCain in 2008 versus someone who went to the precinct caucuses.  The former is much more likely to defect, I’m going to guess.  More to the point, a fair chunk of respondents showed some degree of “Pawlenty fatigue” – while they may have voted Republican, these are not the kind of voters who are motivated by principles and policy specifics; they vote on the sort of surface-y things that the “Alliance for a Better Minnesota” campaign has focused on.

And yet for all of Dayton’s family’s millions in the race, it’s deadlocked, in a poll that has trended slightly Dayton so far.

Expect a Star Tribune/Minnesota poll shortly that shows an implausibly-large Dayton lead from a poll that oversamples DFLers by five percent.  The Minnesota Poll largely serves as a morale-building tool for the DFL; they may need one after this MPR poll.