Polls

A new poll released Thursday by Public Policy Polling (pdf) asked Minnesotans their opinion about former-Sen. Norm Coleman’s chances should he run for governor. The poll found Democrats R.T. Rybak and Mark Dayton out-polling Coleman and that the battle over the recount hurt Coleman’s standing with the public.

A new Gallup Poll, released two days before today’s tax day “Tea Party” protests, finds that 48% of Americans say the amount of federal income taxes they pay is “about right” — “one of the most positive assessments Gallup has measured since 1956,” according to the polling firm. Those saying taxes are “too high” [...]

The Beliefnet forum, one of the largest religion-related discussion sites on the web, has conducted a post-election survey to gauge the values and motivations of believers who voted for Barack Obama or John McCain.
Here’s the eye-catcher: “Half of McCain voters believe Obama is or was Muslim, with 31.7% saying ‘He used to be Muslim and [...]

Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight.com published a great piece this morning about why you shouldn’t waste your time trying to google up exit poll leaks: They’re always wrong.
Some of the reasons (there are 10 in all):
1. Exit polls have a much larger intrinsic margin for error than regular polls. This is because of what are known [...]

Results released by the Christian polling outfit, Barna Group, shows that Sen. John McCain has failed to hold on to a critical part of the Republican base: born-again evangelical Christians. Even with Gov. Sarah Palin on the ticket, support from the key constituency has floundered compared to Bush’s numbers in 2004.

Meanwhile, independent groups are hitting the airwaves on Christian talk radio with ads featuring Sen. Barack Obama talking about his faith and prominent “pro-lifers” explaining — and supporting — Obama’s position on abortion.

In politics as in the intensive care unit, a flat line is usually a sign that something bad is happening. At the moment, however, I’m looking at the essentially flat — actually slightly declining — arc of Al Franken’s polling performance in the Minnesota US Senate race, and that line describes a very different story: the transformation of Franken from also-ran to frontrunner without ever budging more than a couple of points in poll standings.

How did this happen?

For the third time this week, a new poll has the presidential race in North Dakota neck-and-neck, prompting RealClearPolitics and Pollster.com to move the state into the tossup category.

A fresh North Dakota poll released Thursday shows Barack Obama leading John McCain by 3 points, 44 percent to 41 percent, within the poll’s 4.4 percent margin of error. A poll released Monday by The Forum newspaper had Obama and McCain in a statistical dead heat, Obama at 45 percent and McCain at 43 percent.
North [...]

What the recent Star Tribune and KSTP polls lack in coherence when placed together, they make up in symmetry: In both races measured, SUSA and PSRA are exactly 19 points apart in their margin spreads (McCain +1/Obama +18, Coleman +10/ Franken +9).

So what gives?

Fox 9 News anchor Marni Hughes asked the question Sunday night: What role will race play in the November election? Her answer came via an AP Yahoo poll released over the weekend that focused on Democratic voters’ racial attitudes. Fox 9 ran with that angle, downplaying what the poll said about non-Dems’ even more widely-held views. But the pollsters share blame for shortfalls of their own.