A-Klo, Dayton and the terrible, rotten, no-good Legislature

This is me, two weeks ago:

Posts about Amy Klobuchar polls are not really that fun to write. Every one is exactly the same, Amy is at around 55% and when you're at 55% it doesn't really matter what your challengers are doing.

And hey, look at that, this poll shows her at 55%. Against everyone. Again. For the third time. Call me shocked.

And ten weeks before that:

I might as well just write up a template for all these A-Klo poll posts, because they've all been the same so far. Amy Klobuchar is polling well over 50% against her announced opponents and is polling at 50% against the MN GOP's A-team, who can't even crack 40% against her.

And today:

SurveyUSA (2/3, 11/8 in parenthesis):

Amy Klobuchar (D-inc) 56 (55)
Dan Severson (R) 29 (23)
Undecided 15 (22)

Amy Klobuchar (D-inc) 59 (56)
Joe Arwood (R) 28 (22)
Undecided 14 (22)
(MoE: ±4.3%)

The real notable thing about this poll is that some of the undecideds have come off the fence and almost all of them went into the Republican candidates column, both Severson and Arwood are up 6 points since the last SUSA poll.

While that may seem like a bit of a worrying trend, it's not. It's was simply undecided Republicans, deciding to go with the Republican, which was going to happen anyway.

Three Minnesota Constitutional Amendment Polls

Back on February 3rd SurveyUSA, polling for KSTP, released a poll and I completely missed it for six days. So now, like a magazine that's been in the bathroom for a week, the corners bent and it's content exhausted, I'll finally bring it out for inspection.

The folks at SUSA asked about one constitutional amendment that's already on the ballot and two that seem like they're destined for that same fate.

SurveyUSA (2/3, 11/8 in parenthesis, 5/25 in brackets):

"An amendment to the Minnesota Constitution on the ballot defines marriage as between one man and one woman, will you vote..."

For	47	(46)	[51]
Against	39	(40)	[40]
Not vote	10	(10)	[8]
Not sure	4	(4)	[2]

(MoE: ±4.3%)

This issue has essentially stabilized over the last six months, with amendment supporters holding a small but consistent ~4 point advantage in the average of polls. SurveyUSA though is the only pollster who has given respondants the option of not voting for the amendment and they find 10% who utilize this option.

Those not votes, by people who cast a ballot, will count the same as no votes so it's tempting to simply lump them together and say that the amendment is actually losing slightly 49-47.

A-Klo cruising

In addition to testing the anti-family amendment and the Vikings stadium SurveyUSA also tested the 2012 Senate race and to absolutely no one's surprise Amy Klobuchar has wide leads over her announced opposition, Dan/Doc Severson and first term city councilman Joe Arwood.

SurveyUSA (11/8, no trendlines):

Amy Klobuchar (D-inc) 49
Tim Pawlenty (R) 37
Undecided 14

Amy Klobuchar (D-inc) 50
Norm Coleman (R) 37
Undecided 14

Amy Klobuchar (D-inc) 55
Dan Severson (R) 23
Undecided 22

Amy Klobuchar (D-inc) 56
Joe Arwood (R) 22
Undecided 22
(MoE: ±4.3%)

I might as well just write up a template for all these A-Klo poll posts, because they've all been the same so far. Amy Klobuchar is polling well over 50% against her announced opponents and is polling at 50% against the MN GOP's A-team, who can't even crack 40% against her.

You can see why she does so well by looking at the cross-tabs, she loses at most 7% of Democrats, while taking 17% of Republicans against the known names and 28% against the unknowns. And there is simply nothing in any of these numbers that indicate any vulnerability for the GOP to exploit.

The only real question I have about this race is weather A-Klo can actually do better than the 58% she got in 2006.

Another poll shows the anti-family amendment winning

On Tuesday I posted about the Minnesota Poll and it's findings vis-a-vie the anti-family amendment, which were discouraging to say the least. Right on the heels of that comes a SurveyUSA poll showing basically the same result, Minnesota voters favoring the amendment by a handful of points.

SurveyUSA (11/8, 5/25 in parenthesis, 3/31 in brackets):

"If an amendment to the Minnesota Constitution were on the ballot, that defines marriage as between one man and one woman, would you vote..."

For	46	(51)	[62]
Against	40	(40)	[33]
Not vote	10	(8)
Not sure	4	(2)	[5]

(MoE: ±4.3%)

This somewhat mirror's the Strib's 48-43 result in favor of the amendment. The big difference though is that SurveyUSA gave people the "not vote" option, of which 10% availed themselves.

If people actually voted this way next November the amendment would fail. This is because for an amendment to the Minnesota constitution to pass it needs to receive 50% + 1 of the entire electorate. Meaning not voting on the measure is as good as voting no.

The other thing you can see is that actual support for the amendment has eroded quite a bit since SurveyUSA's first poll of the issue at the end of March, going from 62% support, to 51% to 46% now. Opposition to the amendment hasn't risen at the same level as support has fallen, meaning that many people who at first supported the amendment have moved into the "Not vote" and "Not sure" categories.

Like in the Minnesota poll though, there are a substantial number of Democrats, 26% in this case, who are in favor of the amendment while only 58% are opposed. This will simply not do if we want to beat this thing.

About that State Fair poll

Yesterday, The Big E went over the results of the State Fair poll on the Anti-Family Amendment as it pertains to the task ahead.

Today, I will use the same poll to point out the uncertain nature of the outcome of that task and why organizing will be the key to winning.

First, though, the results of the poll, conducted by the Minnesota House of Representatives, one more time.

"Should the state constitution be amended to define marriage as "only a union of one man and one woman?" This question will be on the November 2012 ballot."

Yes 29.8%
No 66.5%
Undecided 3.7%

What you see is that unlike with normal polls, this poll has no margin of error (but it has insignificant digits!). That's because it's actually not a poll at all, it's a straw poll.

There are two key differentiating factors between the State Fair poll and a poll from, say, Gallup; the nature of the sample and weighting.

At the State Fair anybody can just walk up and take the poll. In a traditional survey every effort is made to get as random a sample as possible. And by random I mean everyone who makes up the sample frame should theoretically have as equal a chance of being a respondent as anyone else.

Additionally, even though you go to every effort to get as random a sample as possible, the final result is often a little different from the actual demographics of the sample frame. To alleviate this, pollsters will weight their samples based on immutable characteristics like age, gender and race. The State Fair poll doesn't do any of these things.

So, the State Fair (straw) poll violates two of the most fundamental aspects of traditional public opinion polling, but just because it's a completely unscientific survey doesn't mean we can't do a little bit of analysis right?

KSTP poll: It's all in the question

That pretty much sums up my feelings about this poll. Only I might add a WTF, or something similar, but I'm a bit more uncouth than Aaron is.

KSTP, as they are wont to do, asked a couple different questions about the budget, but none of them really got to the point; who's budget do you favor the Governor's or the GOP Legislature's.

Not only that, they asked completely different questions from the survey that they did at the end of May, only one month ago, meaning we can't even really compare the two surveys.

SurveyUSA (6/20, no trendlines):

Going forward, should Minnesota's government increase spending? Decrease spending? Or continue to spend about the same amount as it has been?

Increase 8
Decrease 60
About The Same 27
Not Sure 5
(MoE: ±4.1%)

SurveyUSA polls the Marriage Discrimination Amendment

SurveyUSA had their polling robots calling Minnesotan's on the 23rd and 24th, the robots came back with these results.

KSTP (SurveyUSA) (5/25, 3/31 in parenthesis):

"If an amendment to the Minnesota Constitution were on the ballot, that defines marriage as between one man and one woman, would you vote..."

For the amendment 51 (62)
Against the amendment 40 (33)
Not vote on the measure 8
Not sure 2 (5)
(MoE: ±4.3%)

While the topline numbers are not great, the trendlines are. In just a couple months the For side has gone from a +29 spread to a +11 spread, an incredible 18 point drop. Additionally, if you add the "Not vote on the measure" group to the Against group (since not voting on the amendment is just as good as a no) it gets narrowed down to a 3 point advantage.

So even though the top line numbers of this poll look ugly, I would make that case that it's actually good news. The problem for supporters of the amendment is that people will vote on it a year and a half from now and the thing that helps our side the most is time.

To illustrate that point here's the breakdown by age (For/Against):

65+ 66/27
50-64 52/40
35-49 51/37
18-34 42/50

The more old people who stop voting and the more young people who grow into voting age the more support our side has. It's that simple.

SurveyUSA polls the Governor's race again

SurveyUSA (11/10, 10/28 in parentheses):

Mark Dayton (D): 45 (39)
Tom Emmer (R): 44 (38)
Tom Horner (I): 9 (13)
Undecided: 1 (6)
(MoE: ±3%)

KSTP decided that it would be fun to resurvey the Minnesota Governor's race, you know, now that we know the outcome and everything.

What they found was confirmation of what happened and although we have actual ballots to tell us Mark Dayton won, the ballots don't tell us about some of the underlying numbers that this poll sheds a little light on.

New CD8 poll confirms tight race

SurveyUSA (10/28, likely voters, no trend lines):

Rep. Jim Oberstar (D): 47
Chip Cravaack (R): 46
George Burton (CP): 3
Undecided: 4
(MoE: ±3.9%)

We finally get a public poll of congressional district eight and it confirms the internal poll that the Chip Cravaack campaign released a few weeks ago. It's clear that this race is tight and the internals of this poll have to be troubling for Jim Oberstar.

The partisan composition of the poll is 41% Dem, 28% GOP and 28% Indy, Cravaack is keeping it close by winning independents 56-32, which doesn't bode well for Oberstar's chances of winning the remaining undecided vote.

One caveat, of course, is what I talked about earlier today in regards the the SUSA poll of the Governor's race, automated polls this year have skewed in the GOPs direction by an average of two points, according to Nate Silver. Survey USA in particular has skewed right by four points on average.

Regardless of that, Jim Oberstar is in a close race, something he's not used to and he will need to make sure that democratic voters in CD8 turnout for him on election day. And it appears that is exactly what he is doing.

GPI update; SurveyUSA goes cellphone style, GPI stabilizes

SurveyUSA (10/28, likely voters, 10/14 in parentheses):

Mark Dayton (D): 39 (42)
Tom Emmer (R): 38 (37)
Tom Horner (I): 13 (14)
Undecided: 6 (4)
(MoE: ±4%)

This is the first poll in a while thats shown Mark Dayton below 40% and while his numbers have slipped since the last SUSA poll, that could just be float within the margin of error rather than a decline.

New CD1 poll; Tim Walz at 50%

SurveyUSA (10/27, likely voters, 10/15 in parentheses):

Rep. Tim Walz (D): 50 (47)
Randy Demmer (R): 41 (42)
Steven Wilson (I): 4 (4)
Undecided: 4 (5)
(MoE: ±4.1%)

This could just be float within the margin of error, rather than a Tim Walz surge, but either way there just aren't enough undecided voters left for Randy Demmer to pull off the upset. These are exactly the kinds of seats that Democrats need to win if they want to hang onto control of the house, but the rest of the Midwest might not be so friendly.

GPI update; SurveyUSA is back in the field

SurveyUSA (10/14, likely voters, 9/15 in parentheses):

Mark Dayton (D): 42 (38)
Tom Emmer (R): 37 (36)
Tom Horner (I): 14 (18)
Undecided: 4 (4)
(MoE: ±3.7%)

This is confirmation of where the current average has the race, although there are a few things about the poll itself worth pointing out.

Who's polling The Minnesota Governors race

Only four pollsters; Rasmussen, SurveyUSA, Princeton Survey Research Associates (PSRA) and Humphrey Institute, have polled the Minnesota Governors race this year and with under a month left before the election it's unlikely that many more will jump in. In 2006 these same four pollsters (StarTribune had in-house polling in 2006, now they contract with PSRA) were joined by Mason-Dixon, St. Cloud St. and Polimetrix, so it's possible that one of them or someone else entirely will drop a poll on us but for now we're just going to look at who's been polling it so far.

A few notes on terms and formatting first.

PIE is Pollster Induced Error, a metric developed by Nate Silver, it's a measure of how much error, above average, a pollster contributes based on an analysis of past polls.

Past election results are listed as follows:
Race Polled: Last polling result (Actual results) Margin Difference
The margin difference is the polling margin minus the actual margin.

The Pollsters Dilema

--or--

What's up with SurveyUSA's 18-34 polling and other observations

This post is the result of a back and forth I had with Aaron Klemz at The Cucking Stool in the comments of his post about the age gap in the most recent SurveyUSA poll of the Minnesota Governor's race. This was my initial comment:

This has been a trend for SurveyUSA all year and not just in Minnesota. I find these numbers hard to believe and suspect they have more to do with a flaw SurveyUSA's methodology when it comes to young voters. Perhaps it's an issue with cell phones perhaps it's the fact that they are an automated pollster, who knows.

The more I've thought about this the more I think it's an issue deserving of discussion outside of a comment thread.