Follow-up: Strib Minnesota Poll editor on the Ciresi factor

Yesterday I wrote that the Strib’s Minnesota Poll on the US Senate race was the first survey by any organization to include Mike Ciresi in its questionnaire since Ciresi dropped out of the race on March 10. This afternoon I spoke with the editor of the paper’s Politically Connected section, Dennis McGrath, who oversees the efforts of the paper’s polling firm. I asked him two questions: Why Ciresi? And why no crosstabs breaking down the responses by demographic groups?

The transcript starts here and continues below the jump.

Minnesota Monitor: This seems to be the first poll by any organization that has included Mike Ciresi in its survey since he dropped out of the race on March 10. Why did you choose to include him?

Dennis McGrath: As you indicated in what you’ve already written [at Minnesota Monitor] (here), there has been a lot of buzz in DFL circles about looking for a new candidate since Franken’s tax problems emerged. There have been a lot of names thrown about, including Ciresi’s, and it’s been very clear that Ciresi himself is not shutting the door on that possibility, but rather is almost inviting encouragement to get back into the race. Given all this buzz, we thought it would be interesting to see what Ciresi’s numbers were against Coleman, because of the possibility that he might indeed get back into the race — either before the convention, which seems not too likely, or during the primary. There had been a lot of buzz before he dropped out that he was reconsidering his pledge to not run in the primary if he didn’t get the party endorsement. 

I’ve seen some of the comments on what you wrote, like why not post on Jesse [Ventura] or people like that? None of them have been in the race yet. Ciresi clearly was. He was a declared candidate, and there’s at least the very real possibility that…

Continued: Click “Read More”he might get back into the race. So to establish some baseline polling at this stage, we thought would be very interesting.

MM: I was curious about the absence of any crosstab information. Why wasn’t that offered?

McGrath: We typically don’t post all of our crosstabs. Number one, there’s a lot of it for all these different questions. We simply haven’t done that yet. I don’t know whether we will on this poll or not. Last time we had some technical issues. This time, just getting the poll up in the tight turnaround time between when we come back out of the field and when we publish the stories — there’s just a lot of work that’s needed to do that. To prepare all the crosstabs in a way that would be accessible online just takes a lot of work on our part here. We simply haven’t had time to do that. So we haven’t discussed whether to put all of these online. I don’t know whether we will. Right now we’re just trying to roll out these poll stories in a timely fashion before things change too much — like with the possibility that Hillary could have dropped out before we got the story in.

MM: Do the budgetary pressures at the paper play a role in determining how far you go with a project like that? As you said, it’s a lot of work to prepare and present information like poll crosstabs. It costs money. Is it something it’s difficult to envisage when budgets are being cut there left and right?

McGrath: No, I wouldn’t attribute this to the cost-savings we’ve had to do recently. As I already mentioned, putting all the crosstabs online is something we haven’t done before more as a matter of policy. Obviously we have a different polling firm now, and I suppose there’s more of an ability to put some of this stuff online than we have in the past. But it’s not a matter of, do we have to spend money? It’s more finding the staff time and resources to do that. And that’s always been the case, even before we had the recent rounds of budgetary cuts. This isn’t a cost issue as much as a matter of priorities, and figuring out what we have to do here.