A “GOP Newsline” email sent Wednesday carried the subject line “Avoid the DFL Donut Booth.” The reason, as the email puts it: “This mini-donut stand does not inform patrons that their money is going towards the DFL party, so be careful.” Attached to the email was a movie file of a KSTP report about how the stand is run by a DFL political action committee, a fact that wasn’t apparent to mini-donut afficionados. The Ramsey County group that runs the booth gave $40,000 to support DFL candidates in 2007 and $45,000 in 2006, the station reported. According to John Treadwell, treasurer of the PAC, several other Fair booths are likewise run by organizations whose names don’t appear on signage, although to his knowledge Grandstand is the only political one.

The KSTP report is a year old — as the date on the GOP’s video, as well as the YouTube video below show — but the 2009 State Fair map shows Grandstand Donuts will again be selling from their location on the southwest end of the plaza outside the Grandstand.

KSTP’s video:

The entire GOP email, sent by party chair Tony Sutton and deputy chair Michael Brodkorb:

Defunct paper sued:

Hoppin replaces Stassen-Berger: With Pioneer Press political reporter Rachel Stassen-Berger heading over to the Star Tribune, the St. Paul paper announces that her replacement will be reporter Jason Hoppin. A good move, but as editor Thom Fladung noted in his memo, Hoppin’s old beat — covering Minnesota’s capitol city – won’t be refilled.

Bridge shuttered: The Bridge, a community newspaper covering Mississippi River neighborhoods in the core of Minneapolis, stopped publishing its print edition a month ago, and now its website — rebranded as Bridgeland News — seems to be following suit. In a July 13 editors note, Dan Nordley wrote that, despite getting 1,000 email subscribers, the publication fell short in its fundraising efforts to switch to online-only newsgathering. The site — last updated on Aug. 6 — will get occasional new content, but, he writes, “the site will be like the Stone Arch Bridge—more of a nostalgic place than a structure that’s still used for commercial traffic.”

Health care debate goes online: Local social media types, fed up with mayhem wrought at public forums on health care by anti-Obama activists, are hoping for a calmer discussion of the issues online. Blogger and online media consultant Paul Saarinen has started a video conversation on “What bothers you about the health care debate?” Video commenters so far include Mediation blogger Taylor Carik and Matt Thompson, online journalist and former deputy web editor at the Star Tribune. All are welcome to participate.

Hubbard sues Ramsey County: In June, Hubbard Broadcasting — owner of KSTP, KAAL and others — filed a data practices request to see all uncounted ballots in the protracted Norm Coleman/Al Franken Senate contest. Now, after Coleman conceded defeat and with Al Franken serving his fifth week as Minnesota’s second senator, the company has filed suit against Ramsey County to get their hands on unopened absentee ballots. This week they did the same in St. Louis County.

Then-Anoka County Elections Manager Rachel Smith during the recount. Photo: MnIndy

Five Minnesota television stations are asking to see all the uncounted absentee ballots in the Norm Coleman-Al Franken contest for U.S. Senate. Four do news, while the fifth shows re-runs (with a new news show weeks off); all are owned by Coleman backer Stanley Hubbard. 

About 10,000 ballots were rejected and not counted for one reason or another during the statewide hand recount and election contest trial.

The stations’ request (pdf) also covers data about ballots that either side ejected from the recount under controversial rules from the Minnesota Supreme Court, and envelopes that show why ballots they contained were rejected.  

The request, filed under the Minnesota Government Data Practices Act (MGDPA) by Hubbard Broadcasting TV stations KSTP, KSTC, WDIO, KSAX and KAAL, comes as an order is expected at any time in Coleman’s appeal to the state Supreme Court of his election-contest defeat. 

It also comes only days after rightwing blogger Michael Brodkorb filed similar requests with several cities and counties. Brodkorb is soon to drop his blogging to assume the position of deputy chairman with the Republican Party of Minnesota.

It’s unclear what one of the stations, KSTC-TV (”Channel 45″), would do with the data requested: The station mainly shows syndicated entertainment and seems to have nothing to do with news or public affairs. UPDATE: KSTC starts a 9 p.m. newscast on July 13. 

Hubbard Broadcasting owner Stanley Hubbard is a major contributor to the Republican Party and its candidates, including Coleman. He used the airwaves for which he holds a license to editorialize in favor of law enforcement agencies’ conduct during the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, to which he also gave money. And indications are he lent his 125-foot yacht for a “Coleman for Senate Donor Appreciation Cruise.”

KAAL-TV offered this explanation of the request’s purpose:

We believe this information will help state officials, the news media, and the public determine how election officials came to their decisions and whether future changes in state election laws need to made.

That statement, and the timing of the request — months after partisan and media MGDPA requests in the thick of the recount’s ballot hunt — suggests a post-mortem effort akin to a news media review after the aborted recount of Florida votes in the 2000 presidential election.

The request assures local officials to whom it is addressed that the stations would not be able to identify voters by their separate examinations of ballots and envelopes. (One exception to that, not mentioned in the letter: ballots rejected because they contain identifying marks by the voter.)

(Wikimedia commons)

A SurveyUSA/KSTP poll released this week shows a high level of support in Minnesota for the recognition of same-sex couples. Sixty-four percent of respondents said the state should offer same-sex marriage or civil unions. Only 34 percent said same-sex couples should have no legal relationship rights.

Specifically, 29 percent favored same-sex marriage and 35 percent supported civil unions. Democrats were more likely to support same-sex marriage (45 percent) while independents favored civil unions (42 percent). Republicans favored no rights (57 percent).

In addition, Minnesotans said they oppose a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage, with only 44 percent supporting it and 52 percent in opposition.

Bills that would legalize same-sex marriage as well as civil unions were offered at the Minnesota Capitol this session, but died in committee.

The survey of 500 residents also gauged support for a $1 billion tax bill that was passed by the DFL-controlled legislature last week, but vetoed by Republican Gov. Tim Pawlenty.  Roughly half (48 percent) of respondents expressed support for an override of the Governor’s veto, while 44 percent opposed an override.

In SurveyUSA’s most recent poll looking at Pawlenty’s popularity, 46 percent expressed approval of the job he is doing, while 50 percent indicated disapproval.

• Ex-KSTP-er seeks GOP chair:

• Minnesota’s best political blogs: The Fix, Chris Cillizza’s Washington Post blog, published its annual best-state-based political blogs list, and Minnesota gets some heavy representation: Eight sites — more than any other state — made the cut, including The UpTake, Centrisity, Minnesota Democrats Exposed and True North. (While MnIndy and MinnPost got several nominations, I’m guessing we’ve both transcended the “blog” category?)

• Aaron Landry tweets a milestone: According to Compete.com, a site that tracks web traffic, MinnPost has surpassed City Pages in monthly unique traffic. (Caveat: In following MnIndy’s traffic on Compete, it seems the site accurately represents traffic trends, but underestimates traffic numbers.)

• Roger Ebert v. Squeaky O’Reilly: Bill O’Reilly’s “Hall of Shame” is out, and on the list of “Media Outlets that Traffic in Defamation” are the New Yorker, the St. Petersburg Times and the Chicago Sun-Times, among others. In a letter to O’Reilly yesterday, film critic Roger Ebert posits that the Fox News talker’s ire has to do with the Sun-Times cutting Billo’s column, an act that drew far fewer complaints than when the paper stopped running Ernie Bushmiller’s comic strip about Nancy and Sluggo, according to Ebert’s editor. Ebert, who prefers conservative writer Charles Krauthammer to O’Reilly’s “knee-jerk frothings,” ends with a tale:

Bill, I am concerned that you have been losing touch with reality recently. Did you really say you are more powerful than any politician?

That reminds me of the famous story about Squeaky the Chicago Mouse. It seems that Squeaky was floating on his back along the Chicago River one day. Approaching the Michigan Avenue lift bridge, he called out: Raise the bridge! I have an erection!

The poll of 500 respondents, conducted Wednesday, found 49 percent wanted a combination of tax increases and budget cuts, while only 41 percent wanted just budget cuts and 4 percent only tax increases. Interestingly, 48 percent of Republicans approved of the combined strategy.

A majority, 53 percent, said that the wealthy should shoulder the burden, and only 12 percent thought there should be lower taxes on the wealthy.

Poll respondents overwhelmingly rejected a sales tax on food and clothing (81 percent) and also rejected public funding for a Vikings stadium (75 percent).

Updated number-crunching after the jump.

Favorable and unfavorable opinions of Al Franken and Norm Coleman

in the Kos poll, 49 percent say they have a favorable opinion of Franken — 4 percent more than those with an unfavorable opinion. A favorable opinion of Norm Coleman is harder to find, being shared by only 41 percent of respondents. But what’s really stunning is Coleman’s negative number: 58 percent say they have unfavorable opinion of him.

Those results are markedly different from the other poll, in which both men’s approval percentages were below 40 percent but neither had unfavorable opinion rates above 45 percent. Variations in polling may explain some of the difference: the KSTP poll allows both “Neutral” and “No Opinion” responses, while Kos only allows “No Opinion.”  In the KSTP poll the two answer categories comprise a full 19 percent of the Coleman responses, but in the Kos poll only 1 percent have no opinion of Coleman.

Polls differ in respondents’ party affiliations

But the most significant difference between the two polls is in the distribution by party affiliation subgroups within their sample populations. In conducting the survey for the left-leaning Daily Kos, Research 2000 included far fewer (27 percent) voters who called themselves politically independent or “other,” and more who identify as Republican (33 percent) or Democrat (40 percent). SurveyUSA, whose polls generally and for KSTP-TV specifically have sometimes been accused of skewing right politically, included only 25 percent Republican and 33 percent Democratic voters — with a whopping 39 percent “independent.”

Perceived fairness of recount process

Sampling differences appear to play out in a question that both polls asked: Was the recount process fair, and if not, to which candidate was it unfair? The Research 2000-Daily Kos results show 63 percent think the recount was fair to both candidates, with only 17 percent finding the process “mostly unfair” to Coleman and 12 percent, unfair to Franken. In SurveyUSA’s poll, 31 percent saw the recount as unfair to Coleman, 3 percent unfair to Franken, and 56 percent fair to both.

Things really got squirrelly within the subgroups of each poll. The more heavily weighted SurveyUSA “independent” subgroup was twice as likely (28 percent) to see unfairness toward Coleman as their Recount 2000-Kos counterparts (14 percent). The dominant Democrats in the Recount 2000-Kos poll managed to find unfairness toward Franken in greater numbers (18 percent, compared to 5 percent in SurveyUSA’s). And SurveyUSA’s relatively scant pool of Republicans was far more inclined (68 percent) to see injury to the Republican candidate than those in equivalent subgroup of the Kos poll (32 percent). In fact, a majority of Kos’ Republicans (54 percent) saw the recount as fair to both candidates, a view shared by only 23 percent in SurveyUSA’s Republican pool.

Coleman court challenge

Both polls measured support for Coleman’s contesting of the recount results in court. The Daily Kos poll found 47 percent opposed and 34 percent in favor, with 19 percent not sure. SurveyUSA had 42 percent in favor and 49 percent opposed — a figure interpreted in news reports as meaning half of Minnesotans want Coleman to concede. SurveyUSA did ask flat out whether Coleman should concede, as the first of three supplied answers (all unlikely) to the question “What do you think should happen next?” Forty-four percent thought Coleman should quit; the other options were “Do the re-count again” (8 percent) and “Hold another Senate election altogether” (31 percent).

Who won, and who would you vote for today?

“Who do you think won the U.S. Senate race, Al Franken or Norm Coleman?” The response to that Research 2000-Kos question is: Franken, 46 percent; Coleman, 41 percent; and “Not Sure,” 13 percent.

It’s intriguing to compare that with the results on another Kos question: “If you could vote again for U.S. Senate would you vote for Al Franken the Democrat, Norm Coleman the Republican, or Dean Barkley, an Independent?” (Barkley should actually be termed not as “an Independent” but as “the candidate of the Independence Party” — a third party with major-party status in Minnesota.) Overall, 43 percent would vote for Franken, 40 percent for Coleman, and 15 percent for Barkley. An element of softness in Democratic voter support for Franken widely observed on Election Day is still perceptible: 83 percent of Democrats polled think Franken won, but only 77 percent would vote for him today.

It’s also intriguing to compare the Kos poll’s election re-run with another SurveyUSA-KSTP poll taken Dec. 7, which also asked, if the election were held again today, “who would you vote for?” The results then were much closer to the Election Day results: Coleman, 41 percent; Franken, 40 percent; Barkley 15 percent.

Margin of error

The Research 2000-Daily Kos poll surveyed 600 voters, with a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points. The SurveyUSA-KSTP poll surveyed 500 voters, with a margin of error of plus or minus 4.5 percentage points. The margin of error increases at the level of subgroups such as party identification.

Does any of this matter?

Minnesota’s Senate election remains unresolved. So are the polls taken since Nov. 4 really election polls? The crosstabs by gender, age and party affiliation and the questions the polls ask combine to conjure up the feeling of a late-campaign pulse-reading of the electorate, a tantalizing forecast of the coming result. Except, of course, those polled have already voted in this race and aren’t likely to vote again. The shifting opinions among the subgroups can matter only as much as they affect the outlooks of three judges, yet to be named, who will decide Coleman’s court challenge. And perhaps 98 or 99 U.S. senators who have the last word on who is seated and who as politicians are used to putting stock in polls.

It’s true that 49 percent of respondents said they disagree with Coleman’s decision to challenge the recount results. But when asked directly what they thought should happen next, only 44 percent said Coleman should concede. And that’s significantly better (for Coleman) than the 55 percent who told the same pollsters a month ago that the loser should not file a legal challenge in court if he thought the process was unfair. (UPDATE: The Daily Kos released a similar poll the day after this one.)

If you read about the Minnesota recount in a book, you’d think it was fiction. Here are some more nuggets from a reading of the SurveyUSA poll results, organized by (mock) book titles.

Men Are from Franken, Women Are from Coleman

KSTP and others emphasize that smaller percentages of Minnesotans in the new poll approve of Franken and Coleman (37 and 38 percent, respectively) than voted for either man on Election Day (42 percent each). But hidden within the new results is a growing gender gap — not that it matters, electorally speaking. Men disapproving of Franken’s handling of the recount comprised 52 percent of the sample pool a month ago; now only 42 percent of guys disapprove of Franken generally. But women approving of Franken in the recount has fallen from 45 percent in December to a shockingly low 30 percent generally favorable today.

Meanwhile, Coleman’s esteem sank in the eyes of both sexes. Women approving of Coleman’s handling of the recount was 48 percent on Dec. 4, with only 38 percent generally approving of him on Jan. 7. Men dropped even more dramatically, from 54 percent to 37 percent.

Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Recount

The only statistically significant “0 percent” that appears on the pollster’s cross-tabs is for the number of Republicans who said they feel the recount was unfair to Franken. (Interesting: There was no “unfair to both candidates” option in either poll taken after the election.)

How to Get Richie Without Even Trying

Secretary of State Mark Ritchie’s approval rating remains high, falling only from 61 percent a month ago to 56 percent today. His negatives snuck up a bit more, however, with the proportion of voters polled who disapprove of the job he’s done on the recount rising from 26 percent to 34 percent.

KSTP’s report on the survey:

The new poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 4.5 percent, or in the case of the question about Ritchie, 4.4 percent.

This is the second e-mail about this poll release situation and I have no idea what it’s about.  We release poll results to the campaigns only if they ask for them.  And then only with the understanding they are not to shared with anyone else in anyway (news releases, etc) until after we air them.  As for the last poll, I had one phone message from the Paulsen campaign Sunday morning after they heard on “At Issue” that we would have results Sunday night.  I called them back about five hours later and left them a message to call back for the results.  They never called. I’m not certain if they got them from someone else, but generally I coordinate all polling and release of the information.

I also asked Hauser about whether it was true, as David Dillon’s campaign manager told me today, that complaints about the Independence Party candidate being left off Survey USA’s candidate preference question in the firm’s first poll last week led to a do-over survey in its second 3rd District poll, which was released yesterday. Hauser:

Yes, that is true.  SurveyUSA had earlier done a poll in that race for ”Roll Call” out of Washington, D.C. back in September.  “Roll Call” only had them survey Madia and Paulsen, not understanding the importance and tradition of third-party candidates in Minnesota.  We later commissione[d] our own poll (as a separate SurveyUSA client) and included Dillon.  When we ordered our final poll in the race, SurveyUSA mistakenly duplicated the original “Roll Call” poll question that only included two names, rather than ours, which included all three.  When I pointed this out they agreed to do it again free of charge.  The first poll [done last week] had Paulsen up by one, the second (with Dillon included) had Paulsen up by 5.