(WDCpix)

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.

The poll, conducted on Tuesday and Wednesday, found that 52 percent of Minnesotans have an unfavorable view of Coleman with just 34 percent reporting a favorable view. The poll asked whether Coleman’s handling of the Senate recount would impact their support for his future attempts at office. Fifty-four percent of respondents said they were now less likely to support him; only 26 percent said it made them more likely to vote for him.

The poll also put Coleman head-to-head with several Democrats in the governor’s race. R.T. Rybak fared the best, beating Coleman 43 percent to 37 percent. Mark Dayton also bested Coleman in the poll with 41 percent to Coleman’s 39 percent.

House Speaker Margaret Anderson Kelliher didn’t do well in the poll. Coleman beats Kelliher in a match-up at 42 percent to 34 percent.

Kelliher’s approval was at only 24 percent with 33 percent disapproving. Rybak had the best favorable numbers with 37 percent to 24 percent. Dayton was found to be slightly unfavorable with 36 percent approving and 37 percent disapproving.

Another Gallup poll, out this morning, shows that 41 percent of those surveyed think low-income Americans are paying their fair share of taxes. That figure is up from last year, when 32 percent of respondents thought poor people were paying the right amount. Thirty-nine percent of those surveyed think lower-income Americans are paying too much in taxes: last year, 51 percent of Americans felt that way.

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 still has too many connections to Islam.’”

Summary post about the survey is here, a more detailed analysis here.

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 as cluster sampling techniques. Exit polls are not conducted at all precincts, but only at some fraction thereof. Although these precincts are selected at random and are supposed to be reflective of their states as a whole, this introduces another opportunity for error to occur (say, for instance, that a particular precinct has been canvassed especially heavily by one of the campaigns). This makes the margins for error somewhere between 50-90% higher than they would be for comparable telephone surveys.

2. Exit polls have consistently overstated the Democratic share of the vote. Many of you will recall this happening in 2004, when leaked exit polls suggested that John Kerry would have a much better day than he actually had. But this phenomenon was hardly unique to 2004. In 2000, for instance, exit polls had Al Gore winning states like Alabama and Georgia (!). If you go back and watch The War Room, you’ll find George Stephanopolous and James Carville gloating over exit polls showing Bill Clinton winning states like Indiana and Texas, which of course he did not win.

3. Exit polls were particularly bad in this year’s primaries. They overstated Barack Obama’s performance by an average of about 7 points.

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.

The Barna poll found that McCain garnered the support of 63 percent of evangelical voters compared to 85 percent that Bush received in 2004. Sen. Barack Obama has slowly built his support among the socially conservative group from 9 percent in May to 23 percent in October.

Among born-again Christians in general (not including evangelicals), Obama bested McCain by a 45 percent to 43 percent margin. McCain’s 43 percent pales in comparison to Bush’s 62 percent among born-again Christians in 2004.

And Obama holds a large lead among people of faith in general: 60 percent support the Democratic candidate while less than half, 49 percent, support McCain.

Even though 10 percent of born-again Christians are undecided, even if McCain swept them, he would still fail to attract the kind of support Bush enjoyed in 2004.

And a sweep like that would be unlikely. Obama has been targeting Christian voters since the beginning of primary season, and it appears those outreach efforts are paying off. In addition, the Matthew 25 Network is hitting Christian talk radio with a series of ads explaining Obama’s faith to Christian voters, using Obama’s own statements to woo the important voting bloc.

(Photo by Aaron Landry/flickr)

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.

Let’s pause to remember how completely implausible this seemed a few months ago. Throughout the spring and early summer, it was impossible to find a pundit or political pro in Minnesota who gave Franken any chance of winning this race. It wasn’t that Sen. Norm Coleman seemed particularly formidable; as the longtime ally of a president who garnered some of his lowest approval ratings in Coleman’s own state, the incumbent seemed ripe for picking off. But precarious as Coleman’s position may have been, the Franken campaign seemed infinitely weaker. The Coleman campaign spent weeks playing rope-a-dope with Franken over his tax payment snafu and a piece of sex satire he wrote for Playboy.

Political analyst David Schultz talked about the Franken campaign’s paralysis numerous times in the Schultz Report audiocast here at MnIndy. Back in March, Schultz noted that

“[T]he Franken campaign is resting on several assumptions that may not pan out. One is their belief that … the Republicans and Coleman have already thrown out all the trash [about Franken] — they’ve already thrown all the bad stuff against our candidate already, and we’ve weathered them, so we don’t have to worry about that. Second, they say that Franken has tremendous support from labor unions and they’re going to help deliver us on election day. Third, they seem to believe there won’t be any problem in terms of capturing suburban soccer-mom votes, which are really critical for success.

“They’ve said, well, those issues just aren’t going to be important about our candidate. I just don’t think that’s realistic.”

In April, U of M political scientist Larry Jacobs added this salvo: “They don’t have a professional seasoned campaign manager and the result is they’re making rookie mistakes. They should have scrubbed Franken, they should have known this beforehand and they should be doing a lot of other fairly plain vanilla, sort of professional activities to set up the campaign…. What’s going on in the Franken campaign is unnerving. Anyone who is a professional, watching this race, it is alarming. This is just not the way a top-flight, top national race ought to be run.”

Since then, two developments have reshaped the race and Franken’s part in it. In May, the campaign finally brought on a real campaign manager in Stephanie Schriock, who had managed challenger Jon Tester’s winning bid for US Senate in Montana in 2006. The Franken operation stopped being entirely reactive. It built a sturdy, coherent media/advertising presence. But as you can see in this snapshot from Pollster.com, none of this boosted Franken’s standing in the polls; it mainly served to stop the hemorrhaging and stabilize a race that was threatening to turn into a Coleman rout — a considerable accomplishment even if it’s invisible in the poll track.

Second, Dean Barkley entered the race on the filing deadline of July 15 after a coy-to-the-end Jesse Ventura declined to jump in. At the time, there was once again near-absolute agreement among professional observers that this would finish off Franken in short order because Barkley would split the anti-Coleman vote and drive Franken’s numbers even lower.

It looked like a reasonable bet. But pretty much the opposite has occurred: Franken has held steady in the polls, typically scoring in the 38-43 range, while Norm Coleman has dropped from the low 50s to around 40 (and even lower in some recent surveys).

No one professes to understand this except Dean Barkley. In mid-September, he told MPR’s Mark Zdechlik that polls indicating he was drawing about equally from Franken and Coleman’s bases were wrong:  “Based upon my experience at the State Fair, I had two or three to one people who came up who said they were going to support me because of my fiscal position,” said Barkley. “Those are Coleman supporters. I was surprised at that ratio, and you know I was there for all 12 straight days, and I talked to thousands of people, so my sampling was bigger than yours.”

If it’s true that Barkley is hurting Coleman much more than Franken — and that’s practically the only way I can see to interpret the trend in the top-line survey numbers — then there is a sense in which Barkley is actually splitting the anti-Franken vote. That is to say, he’s nabbing the people who did not much like Coleman but found migrating to Franken even more unpalatable.

“That sounds reasonable,” says veteran DFL strategist and communications specialist John Wodele, who this year is working on the suddenly front-and-center campaign of Michele Bachmann challenger Elwyn Tinklenberg. But, Wodele cautions, “There’s no way of knowing exactly what’s going on there without seeing those polls each campaign has been doing. They know what’s happening, and they’ll be targeting their messages accordingly in the last 10 days or so of this campaign, trying to win away some of those Barkley voters.

“That race is really hard to figure,” Wodele continues. “People don’t really know that much about Dean Barkley. They have this vague notion of him as an associate of Jesse Ventura’s. If there’s more information through earned media about Barkley in the last 10 days — and depending on whether it’s positive or negative — that could really affect whether those Barkley voters stay with him.

“Both [Coleman and Franken's] campaigns are going to be going after those independent Barkley voters. They have an idea what they have to say to get them from Dean to them. There’ll probably be some movement there before Election Day.”

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 Research 2000 poll released Friday had Barack Obama and John McCain in a dead heat at 45 percent. The poll sampled 9 percent more Republicans than Democrats and found independents swinging to Obama by 7 percent.

On Monday, The Forum newspaper released a poll showing a statistical tie with Obama at 45 percent and McCain at 43 percent. On Thursday, the North Dakota United Transportation Union released a poll showing a statistical tie with Obama at 44 percent and McCain at 41 percent.

North Dakota was a tied race early this summer until McCain’s pick of Sarah Palin as his running mate skewed the polls decidedly toward McCain. With three polls now showing a tied race, North Dakota has become a battleground and erased the gains McCain made with his vice presidential pick. North Dakota has not gone for a Democrat since Lyndon Johnson’s landslide win against Barry Goldwater in 1964.

North Dakota was a tied race early this summer until McCain’s pick of Sarah Palin as his running mate skewed the polls decidedly toward McCain. With two polls now showing a tied race, the Palin bump may be fading in the historically Republican-voting state, which has not gone for a Democrat since Lyndon Johnson’s landslide win against Barry Goldwater in 1964.

Al Franken, Norm Coleman: Who's in first?

As if to underscore what an erratic year it’s been in political polling, the latest Minnesota numbers in the presidential and US Senate races come sporting a gap like none I can remember in any past contest here. Last week SurveyUSA and KSTP released numbers indicating a dead heat between John McCain (47 percent) and Barack Obama (46) and a 10-point lead for Norm Coleman (43 percent) in his race with Al Franken (33) and Dean Barkley (19). Over the weekend, the Star Tribune/Princeton Survey Research Associates poll produced an almost diametrically opposed portrait of those races: Obama 55-37 over McCain, Franken (43) up by 9 over Coleman (34) and 25 over Barkley (18).  SUSA/KSTP was conducted on 9/30 and 10/1; PSRA/Strib on those two days plus 10/2.

What the two surveys 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). Typically when polls disagree by a substantial margin, a spat ensues over which one is the outlier. But when polls are this far apart, there’s a common-sense presumption in favor of thinking they’re both outliers.

But it’s hard to be much more specific, because neither poll offers full questionnaires or demographic cross-tabs. It’s tempting to think that the SUSA/KSTP numbers reflect an oversampling of Christian conservatives (in other words, outstate Minnesota). It’s a large and generally underrated population in Minnesota, after all, and precisely where the McCain campaign has gained the most traction nationally since adding Sarah Palin to the ticket–and SUSA’s month-to-month numbers show Obama falling by 3 points in Minnesota versus McCain since the last, pre-Palin state survey in September.

SUSA’s own write-up of its poll notes an unprecedented, and unexplained, new element of Minnesota exceptionalism in its results: “Minnesota behaves unlike other states in some respects. Among women, there is movement to McCain, at a time when McCain is losing ground among women elsewhere. Among voters younger than Obama, there [is] movement to McCain, at a time when Obama is consolidating support among young voters elsewhere. Among voters older than McCain, there is movement to Obama, at a time when older voters elsewhere are sticking by McCain.” Can you explain any of this in light of observable recent trends? I can’t.

In similar fashion, the PSRA/Strib numbers seem to augur for an oversampling of Democrats (in other words, the metro area). Key passage: “Forty-two percent of respondents identified themselves as Democrats in the latest poll, up from 34 percent a month ago. In the same period, the percentage of Minnesotans calling themselves Republicans has dropped from 31 percent to 26 percent.” In one month’s time, after these races have spent more than six months in the public eye? Why? This seems as unexplained, and nearly as suspect, as the SUSA numbers saying McCain and the Republicans have actually gained ground in MInnesota in the past month.

Since there is limited detail on both these polls, how do they measure up against the most recent polls by other outfits assessing the same races?

The most recent Minnesota presidential survey aside from these two is a CNN/Time poll conducted from 9/28-30, a couple of days prior: Obama 54, McCain 43.

The most recent Senate poll is an internal survey by the Mellman group for the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee–obviously a partisan organization, but one with an interest in getting accurate numbers since their decisions about where to throw campaign money are predicated on the results: Franken 38, Coleman 36.  (Before that, a trio of mid-September polls had given Coleman a lead ranging from 1 to 7 points.)

For what it’s worth, these comparisons to other recent polls suggest the Strib poll is closer to the consensus view of pollsters than KSTP. But in a season where survey-takers everywhere are confounded about what a “likely voter” looks like, and a growing portion of the public–especially under-30s–aren’t even reachable by standard polling practices, we’ll leave it to you to decide how much comfort or distress to find in that fact.

Fox 9 News anchor Marni Hughes asked the question Sunday night: What role will race play in the November election? The answer she provided came from the latest AP Yahoo poll released over the weekend. As she told the tale (reinforced by text on screen), one-third of white Democrats reported harboring some negative attitudes toward African-Americans. That rose to 40 percent, she said, when white Republican and independent voters were added to the mix.

Judging from that presentation, a viewer with 7th-grade math skills could deduce that almost half of the white Republican and independent voters must hold those racist beliefs, since adding them to the pool of white Democrats raised the percentage from 33 to 40 percent.

And that means Fox 9 could instead have presented the same facts this way: Almost half of the country’s white Republican and independent voters hold racist views of black people, but when you add in survey results from white Democratic voters, that percentage drops to 40 percent.

It’s as if Fox 9 set out to prove the point former Minnesota Poll director Rob Daves made in recent comments to the Minnesota Independent: that perceived problems with polls often reside in the reporting, not the polls. News outlets need to hew to what polls really say, and news consumers need to drill, baby, drill down into the actual poll results and methodologies.

In this case, Fox 9 sliced and diced the results in a way that emphasized Democrats’ racist attitudes over Republicans and independent voters’ apparently more widely held attachments to the same views. Yet the pollsters should shoulder some blame as well.

UPDATE: By email, producer Ryan Rablin cited this line in the AP story as the source for Fox 9’s report: “But Obama faces this: 40 percent of all white Americans hold at least a partly negative view toward blacks, and that includes many Democrats and independents.” The AP story goes on: “More than a third of all white Democrats and independents – voters Obama can’t win the White House without – agreed with at least one negative adjective about blacks ….” This seems to be a game of Telephone, with statistics shifting as the story passes from one outlet to the next. 

The survey used an innovative method, contacting respondents first by phone but then asking questions online — where people are more like to open up and give honest responses, the theory goes. And open up they did, with significant numbers signing onto at one, two or more in a string of stereotypes the pollsters offered.

Yet the pollsters’ own presentation seems to fall short of the mark. The AP’s glib conclusion that non-Democrat racism against Sen. Barack Obama isn’t an issue (”Most Republicans wouldn’t vote for any Democrat for president — white, black or brown”) recalls the logic that rich and poor alike are banned from sleeping under bridges.

Setting aside whether AP Yahoo pollsters asked the right questions of the right people, they aren’t providing the right results to anybody. Nowhere does it appear that either outfit saw fit to break down the racist responses by party affiliation. AP’s report doesn’t have a multi-party breakdown, and neither does Yahoo’s “interactive” Web feature (where interactivity amounts to clicking through more graphs, none of which illuminate the racism-by-party-affiliation point). At Yahoo’s news report the racist views of voters by all three political party groupings appear only in a sidebar graph, without hard numbers. Most egregiously of all, the answers don’t show up in the 20-page PDF of poll results where inquisitive minds should be able to find the facts behind the graphs.

I’ve emailed Fox 9 to ask about how they put together their report, and I’ll update this post with any response.

Oddly, at both the Fox 9 Web site (see above) and Politico Web site (see below), the AP’s story about their survey of voters’ racist stereotypes ran with a photo of Sen. Barack Obama and ads for teeth-whitening products — even though “white teeth” and “brilliant smile” weren’t among the attributes of black people the pollsters offered.