The Horner Effect, Part 2

While history suggests that the Independence Party candidate in Minnesota tends to have success at the expense of the DFL candidate, there is reason think this year might be different. Part of that has to do with Tom Horner and part of that has to do with other factors, like the relative positions of the candidates on the liberal/conservative spectrum.

This is the second part of a three part series on what effect we can expect Tom Horner to have on the Minnesota Gubernatorial election. In this installment I'm going to look at how the 2010 election is different from past Minnesota elections. Part one of the series was a look at those past Minnesota elections and part three will take a look at what the polling shows is actually happening.

With that then, here is Part 2...

The Horner Effect, Part 1

While Minnesota has a rich history of third party successes, the recent era began in 1998 with the election of Jesse Ventura as Governor. Since then there have been two additional statewide elections in which the Independence Party candidate received a significant share of the vote, Tim Penny in the 2002 Governors race and Dean Barkley in the 2008 Senate race. This year certainly looks like it will be another as Tom Horner is over 16% in the current GPI.

This is the first part of a three part series on what effect we can expect Tom Horner to have on the Minnesota Gubernatorial election. In this installment I'm going to look at past statewide elections and the effect the Independence Party candidate had. Part two will attempt to show why 2010 is different than these past elections and part three will take a look at what the current polling shows is happening.

With that then, here is Part 1...

GPI update; Ras now says no to leaners

Rasmussen (10/6, likely voters, 9/22 in parentheses):

Mark Dayton (D): 40 (34)
Tom Emmer (R): 38 (36)
Tom Horner (I): 15 (18)
Undecided: 5 (2)
(MoE: ±4%)

A few things change with this update of the GPI, the first of which is something truly radical, standardizing the way I format new poll results. I put a lot of thought into what the most effective way to do it would be and after careful deliberation I decided to crib Swing State Project's poll formatting style, so if it looks familiar you know who to blame.

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.

GPI update; what happened to a tight race?

MPR/Humphrey released a new poll of the governor's race today and it's good news for the blue team. Not only do they show Mark Dayton with an 11 point edge, 38-27, the internals paint an even better picture.

• Minnesota voters have awoken from their summer slumber. More than 8 out of 10 Minnesotans are interested in the November elections, a substantial increase that is being propelled by the energizing of formerly turned-off Democrats.

•Horner is crippling Emmer's campaign, soaking up one-fifth of Republican voters while taking only half as much from Dayton.

• Dayton is tapping voter frustration and appears better positioned among voters who have not yet declared their support for a candidate.

Minnesota Senate Race Ratings

Last week I posted ratings for the Minnesota House races, this week it's the Senate's turn.

Quick Overview



The Senate is also up for grabs, if the Republicans run the table in the Toss-ups they would take control, but the DFL only needs to win three of them to remain in control, assuming they hold the rest of their seats. The overall picture for the Democrats is better in the senate than it is in the house if only marginally so.

GPI update; mo' polls mo' problems

The StarTribune released a poll of the governor's race on Sunday with very different results from the last three polls to come out on the race, but with almost exactly the same results as their previous, pre-primary poll. So what's going on here?

First I'll update the GPI and then we can get into the poll itself.



With the inclusion of the Rasmussen poll last week Tom Emmer had gotten as close as he's been in a while, with this update he's lost ground. Looking back at all the polls of this cycle you see a definate pattern, Mark Dayton is polling anywhere from around 41-35, Tom Emmer is polling around 36-30 and Tom Horner is polling around 18-10. The only recent poll that has shown a number outside these ranges was Rasmussen showing Tom Emmer at 42 last week.

It might be that the Rasmussen poll was an outlier or it could have something to do with their pushing of leaners, but even before pushing leaners they were showing Emmer ahead 36-34, which was Emmer's first lead in a poll since a May Rasmussen poll. More likely than not it's just a case of Rasmussen being Rasmussen and showing a GOP advantage.

GPI update; the new normal

Let's just get to it:





That's three polls in a row showing essentially a tied race, regardless of whatever issues some of us may have with some of these polls, an even evenly split electorate seems to be the new normal of the Minnesota Governors race.

While I usually agree with Joe, I don't have a problem with Rasmussen pushing leaners in this poll. As this old fivethrityeight post points out, most pollsters will push leaners to some degree or another and publish the with leaners and without leaners results, usually using the with leaners for their top lines. In the end most leaners will end up voting their lean anyways, so I don't see the problem with this method.

What's interesting about these numbers though is what happens to Tom Horner's numbers when leaners are pushed, he goes from 18% to 9%. This is indicative of what is likely to happen to much of his support if he can't pull into actual competitiveness, but for half of his support to evaporate means it's mostly soft support right now.

If the dynamics remain as they are the key to this whole thing will be who can GOTV.

Minnesota House Race Ratings

Due to the dearth in information about the competitiveness of the Minnesota state legislative races I decided doing race ratings for the house and senate would be a good idea. If you don't know what I'm talking about when I say race ratings, I mean something along the lines of this. While Cook and some of the others who do this sort of thing on a national level usually use four tiers of rankings, I'm only going to use three; Safe, Tilt and Toss-up.

A Safe rating implies a very high confidence level, approaching 95%, so unless it's an upset of Weltian proportions, the chances of another outcome are not good. A Tilt rating is still likely to go in that direction, but there may be a red flag or two that is cause for hedging. A Toss-up means just that, it's a wide open race.

Quick Overview

First off, let's quickly go over the bottom line numbers before getting into the minutia of how the ratings were made and the actual ratings.



If these ratings are close than control of the house is in play this election, but all Democrats need to do is win a third the toss-ups to retain control and since most of the toss-ups are currently held by Democrats it's likely that they will. And if 32 seems like a lot of toss-ups, it's less then 25% of the total seats. I'll do an update to these when we're closer to the election that will likely push some of the Toss-ups out to Tilt status.

SILVER; US House

Last week I posted the complete SILVER listings for the US Senate, now for the US House. First a graph of the House Republicanss, just like when I did this for the Senate, the DW-Nominate scores are plotted on the x-axis and PVI on the y-axis.

GPI update; SurveyUSA's Dem Downer Tour

SurveyUSA has shown some particularly bad numbers for Democrats this cycle and while their latest poll on the Minnesota governors race isn't bad news, it certainly isn't good. Here are the toplines:



There has been some significant movement towards Tom Emmer from the last SurveyUSA poll, both of which have been polls of likely voters, while Tom Horner has doubled his polling number. As I mentioned previously SurveyUSA has been Rasmussenesque in their election polling this year, often showing the Democratic candidate doing far worse then other pollsters, but they had been bucking that trend in Minnesota, until now that is.

Waiting for Tom Emmer's budget, A Samuel Becket play in many acts

Tom Emmer has now released parts 1 and 2 of his budget plan, and yet we still wait for Tom Emmer's budget plan.

(peers into shoe)

Part 1, the "jobs" part, consists of tax cuts that will magically pay for themselves. Part 2, the "kids" part, consists of kicking the can down the road, Pawlenty style, for another four years and a complete education reform that will, also magically, not cost any money.

What will Part 3 be? Will it be the end, or does Tom have yet more acts to follow it? Like Vladimir and Estragon we will have to wait, however impatiently, for our Godot to arrive.

(peers into hat)

What shall we do to pass the time? Let me think.

(places hat on head)

(thinks)

I've got it! Let's play a game. What will Part 3 of Tom Emmer's magical budget plan be? Will it be a unicorn for all little girls and a hockey stick for all little boys? Will it be fairy dust that when sprinkled on problems magically makes them go away? Will it be something else, something not so magical, like the elimination of LGA?

Play along in the comments for your chance to win nothing!

SILVER; US Senate

As promised here are the SILVER rankings for the entire U.S. Senate, but before we get to that, a few graphs.



That's a scatter plot of Senate Republicans, the X axis represents the DW-Nominate score and the Y axis is the PVI score. You'll notice that the scatter plot is basically random and that is reflected in the r-squared number, there isn't much of any correlation between Senate Republicans voting tendencies and the partisan nature of the states they represent.

Here's the Senate Democrats scatterplot:



What you see is a somewhat tighter, somewhat more linear distribution, with an r-squared value approaching 50. The Senate Democrats DW-Nominate and PVI scores are more correlated than the Senate Republicans.

When you put the two graphs together and you can actually see the partisan split.



What you can also see by looking at the SILVER rankings for the entire Senate GOP below, and as Nate pointed out last week, the Tea Party has actually been pretty smart in the incumbents they've taken out, as Bennett and Murkowski are among the least valuable GOP Senators according to this metric.

The GOP's missed votes

While looking at missed votes for my earlier post on Tom Emmers missed votes there was something else I noticed, Tom Emmer wasn't the only Minnesota House GOPer who missed a lot of votes. The member that missed the second most votes was a Republican, Slayton Rep. Doug Magnus. Third most was also a from the GOP, Jim Abeler. Fourth most, you guessed it, Republican Paul Kohls. Fifth was Paul Thissen, the first Democrat on the list.

It gets worse though. The DFL has 87 members in the house the GOP has 47, the DFL missed a total of 1,194 votes, the GOP missed 1,370. The DFL has 85% more members in the house and yet the GOP still missed 15% more votes. Even excluding Mr. Emmer and his gargantuan 147 missed votes the GOP still missed more votes than the DFL. To further an analogy, if Tom Emmer is the Babe Ruth of missed votes, the house GOP are the New York Yankees.

I suppose when you're as deep in the minority as the Minnesota GOP is in the house you can get kind of discouraged about voting, but really, is there any excuse for this kind of systematic failure to show up and do your job?