The 2012 Battle for ... Minnesota?

GregQ forwarded an interesting poll to me Monday, but I didn’t get a chance to write about it until now. SurveyUSA has President Obama up six points on Romney — in Minnesota. Worse, Obama is four points under 50%. I must reiterate that this is in Minnesota. That’s with a 4.3% margin of error, so Obama doesn’t seem to be in too much danger of losing MN.

Or does he?

Ed Morrissey dug a little deeper and noticed a little something else:

The likely voter breakout may undersample Republicans just a bit. The D/R/I on the sample is 38/32/28, with a D+6. In the big Democratic wave of 2008, when Obama won Minnesota by double digits, the exit polls showed a D+4 advantage, 40/36/25. (There are no exit polls for MN from 2010.) Democrats may well be slightly less inclined to turn out in 2012, but I’d guess that Republicans are more charged up in Minnesota than they were in 2008, and that the 32% is too low.

And — boom! — Romney is back within fighting distance.

That’s not where the bad news ends for Obama, however. SurveyUSA also asked MN voters about a ballot measure to amend the state constitution to define marriage as between one man and one woman. The results aren’t promising for the Left (or for libertarians like myself):

Even youth voters are at best split evenly on the issue. And the older a voter gets, the more likely they are to support the amendment. This puts the Democrats in a real quandary. Get enough voters to the polls to give Obama the state, and risk losing on gay marriage. The infighting might prove quite vicious, as Democrat candidates bail on the measure.

A similar amendment to require voters to present valid photo ID breaks more than two-to-one in favor — including almost half of Democrats and a whopping 65% of independents. Again, this is an issue Democrats have demagogued on the national level, against the apparent wishes of MN voters.

It seems MN might finally be joining the ranks of regular votin’ midwestern states, and shunning its Progressive heritage. Of course, longtime VodkaPundit readers have known this for a while now. Here’s my initial 2012 battleground Electoral College map from August of last year.

Early on I identified MN as potentially up-for-grabs:

There’s a wave of disgust and despair in the industrial Great Lakes and Midwest. I believe this wave hurts both parties, making the region the battleground for 2012.

And if I may say this about something I wrote myself: Indeed.

Since then, I’ve painted MN blue in almost every Wargaming scenario, because there hadn’t been any polls out of there. And when it doubt, you paint MN blue.

But now it’s Team Obama that must be having the doubts.

Delicious.

UPDATE: Mr. Lion writes in the comments, “It gets better: Obama is airing attack ads in suburban southern New York. Never seen that happen in my lifetime.”

Now there’s a data point for you.