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 gets better: Obama is airing attack ads in suburban southern New York. Never seen that happen in my lifetime.
Is the target audience on that New Jersey voters? Or are they perhaps throwing in the towel on 2012 and playing the long game of “See? We won the popular vote, so the Electoral College is evil.”
Whatever the reason, the fact that they’re spending a pile of money in one of the most expensive TV markets in the country, to try and shore up a region that has been in the Democrat tank for generations speaks for itself. If their internal poll numbers are that soft in NY/NJ, they’re likely to be in pants-crapping hysteria mode.
I’m happy to tell you that we saw an Obama attack ad very recently in the wildly blue Central New York enclave where we live (near an Ivy League campus). It would be nice to think they’re worried even about the people here!
Same in the Boston area. You don’t get much bluer than here.
I dunno, Romney’s won a general election in Massachusetts. It seems prudent for Obama to at least show the flag in a state his opponent has demonstrated he can win.
Obama is dropping Ad money in NE Ohio too. This is a big Dem area – Youngstown, Cleveland, Akron; my metro is 80% DEM. If he is trying to fire up his base – it is not working – 100days to go and rarely a support sign can be seen.
I see a Romney landslide: everyone is out of work, if you have a job you are scared you may lose it at any minute and if you own a business you are treading water.
If Obama wins – many more businesses will fold and unemployment will double.
Heck, a GOP-aligned PAC robo-called at least twice in the NYC suburbs the past two weeks. Normally this would be a waste of money — and it might still be, but it was fascinating to listen to if only for its rarity. Consider it another data point.
I lived in Minnesota as an adult for about 15 years. I remember when Gov. Perpich was “Governor Goofy” — and then we had Gov. Jesse Ventura. Had a friend to tried to explain it as, “It’s winter for a long time here. We need not just a governor — we need one with *entertainment value*, too!” With Barry, Michelle, and Biden — it could look like the ultimate White House shaped clown car to Minnesotans
I live in MN. We have a Repub legislature for the first time in 40 years and would have claimed Governor but for an independent that made it a very tight race. I believe Romney will take MN in November. O’Bambi’s insults to business owners are resinating far and wide in this state, a state with a significant number of small businesses. The Dems in this state are running scared with the Dem AG and the Dem Secretary of State suing to keep our Voter ID Constitutional Amendment off of the ballot to take away our voice. I think that is the last straw with conservative Democrats. The fact that our Legislature had to go Constitutional Amendment for Voter ID, which has overwhelming support across party lines, because the Dem Governor said he would veto a bill sums it up.
I grew up in Hibbing, MN. I got a broken front tooth playing hockey when I was 10 years old. The dentist that capped it was Rudy Perpich, who was running for governor at the time. I remember sitting for long periods in the chair while he took phone calls, probably from campaign staffers. I still have the cap so he did a good job, nonetheless.
I would like to think there is still a majority of people in Minnesota with some common sense but I have my doubts about any state that chooses Al Franken to represent them in the Senate, even if there was fraud involved. It shouldn’t have been close enough to matter.
I hope I’m wrong but I think there are just too many neurotic liberals in Minneapolis/St. Paul for the state to go red.
Your last sentence is the key. The population of the Twin Cities, almost entirely liberal, plus the union-dominated Iron Range, overwhelms the rest of the state, which is reliably conservative. I have a retired friend who lives near Brainerd, who keeps telling me about the upcoming Romney landslide, predicted by all his neighbors, and cannot be persuaded that it may well not happen.
In many ways Minnesota is like New York State, where people living outside The Big Apple might as well not vote.
SurveyUSA does not have a history of being the most reliable pollster on the planet. I’d want to see numbers from others before saying Minnesota is in play. After all, this is a state that the GOP has not won since 1972, even Reagan couldn’t do it. Color me skeptical for the moment
Yes, Reagan did not carry Minnesota in 1984. It was the ONLY state he did not carry*. The fact that Walter Mondale was the Democratic nominee may have had something to do with it.
* Reagan also lost DC’s three electoral votes, for a grand total of 13 electoral votes for Mondale.
And Mondale carried MN by only 3,761 votes out of 2,084,449 votes cast.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election_in_Minnesota,_1984
Party Candidate Votes Percentage Electoral votes
Democratic Walter Mondale 1,036,364 49.72% 10
Republican Ronald Reagan (incumbent) 1,032,603 49.54% 0
Others 15,482 0.74% 0
Invalid or blank votes —
Totals 2,084,449 100.00% 10
Voter turnout 68% —
Certainly the Romney campaign has its own trustworthy polling they employ. Mn turning red seems like a false flag to me.
Polls are interesting and malleable things. I have been thinking about just how malleable. Most polls are pollers talking to pollees and recording answers. It is well known that most pollers are female grad students getting extra credit. Further pollees are frequently swayed by pollers and by not wanting to make non PC statements in front of friends.
Suppose that the poller had a thingy similar to the credit/ debit card device that are on most retail counters. If the device was set up so pollees could give answers in secret (can you say secret ballot?) would we still get the same results?
Just asking,
ta
Reagan couldn’t win Minnesota because native son and Hubert H. Humprhey protege Walter Mondale was on the Democrat ticket in both 1980 and 1994. These voters have probably now realized Obama’s Democrat party is not the party of HHH.
Minnesota isn’t as true blue as many national analysts make it out to be. It is common for the winner in either major party to get under 50% of the vote in a statewide election because about five percent of the voters identify with the Independence Party of Minnesota. Only Jesse Ventura has been able to win statewide office as a candidate of IPM but support for that party has probably kept the Republicans from winning several statewide races. For all the IPM party’s talk of lower taxes and the need for personal responsibility many IOM members would rather act the spoiler than put aside their deep antipathy for candidates who also espouse traditional religious values. As a result Senator Al Franken and Republican Mark Dayton each won close elections.
Mark Dayton is a Democrat.
And I don’t think Al Franken received more votes than Tom Coburn in 2008.
Bingo!
I live in Oklahoma, and Tom Coburn was reelected in ’10 not ’08.
What really has the Obama team fretting is the “Bradley Effect”, named after the California Democratic Governor nominee who lost to a lesser known Republican even though all the polls had him ahead comfortably until the end. Bradley was black, and it has been theorized that many white voters did not want to be seen as “racist” for not supporting a black man for governor, so they would tell pollsters they were for Bradley, but in the privacy of the voting booth voted for the other guy. With all the charges of “racism” throughout the entire term of Obama, they have fanned the flames to produce a whopper of a Bradley effect. It would not surprise me to see a 2-3 point shift due to the Bradley effect in this election, which could result in a 40+ state win for Romney.
The only problem with that would be that then all the Democrats would be whining that the Republicans “stole the election” again like they did in 2004.
Hell will surely have frozen over if MN goes to the GOP this election, or any. Might be the last liberal bastion of America and history shows that on the electoral maps.
But I will throw one more dig into the, “maybe it could happen here this time” files. The Paul people ran riot over the GOP establishment in caucuses, etc. Including the Senate nominee taking on the difficult to beat Amy Klobuchar. Scuse if I spelled that wrong Didn’t ever like her so didn’t waste time memorizing how she spells the fam name.
Assuming the Paulbots didn’t lose all the fire in their belly from Ron Paul falling way short of the objective to be a real player in the national convention, the Paul spawns overtaking Congress with wins depend on their turnout. And, if they still have fire in their belly, I guarantee they had no intent on voting for Obama. Which could make the unlikely electoral votes of MN going GOP in the end. No other way it would happen that I can see.
One thing to keep in mind too is that WI went Repub with their Governor and he fought the establishment. It showed many in MN that the unions can be put into their place and prosperity regained. Unions in MN became very, very quiet after the WI recall victory! Even Klobo is losing ground. Last poll she had 69% now she is down to 55% and her Repub opponent hasn’t started campaigning much. Klobo voted for ObamaTaxes and it is not favored here.
If Romney were to win Minnesota, he’d be the first GOP nominee in 40 years to do so. Last one was Nixon.
Writing from up here in Minnesota, I see Prez Obama winning the state, for two reasons:
1) Voter fraud is gonna be the key for Democrats in close races everywhere, and it’s been established here. In 2008, the state supreme court seated Stuart Smalley into the U.S. Senate over RINO Norm Coleman with a ruling that certified votes cast for Smalley in one county that, when combined with the votes certified for Coleman, were in excess of the total number of voters registered there.
2) Michelle Bachman’s gaffe the other day will turn many voters away from Romney. Her mistake was being stupid enough to tell the truth about Moslem infiltration into the federal gubmint. Since, the two big newspapers here have been gleefully slicing and dicing her for racial bigotry, religious intolerance and plain hillbilly ignorance, dismantling her with every sensational headline on the story. They did this by not addressing the fact that what she said was true. That’s how things work up here, just like in other blue states.
Self-serving dishonesty is a hallmark of Minnesota politics. They prove it with the turnspeak built into the oft-used phrase Minnesota Nice.
I hate to nitpick, but I’m sick of seeing people mispell her name.
It’s Michele Bachmann. One “L” and two “N”s. Got it? Good.
Michele is in a bit of trouble in the 6th District. She is being opposed in the primary and her DFL opponent is quite conservatve and wealthy. Wouldn’t it be funny if Romney won Minnesota and Bachmann lost her district?
But I don’t see either happening. I would need huge odds before betting a nickle on Romney in Minnesota. As to Michele, she’s only had one easy election (2010). She’s a fighter and she’ll win again.
I live in Minnesota and just saw my first Obama attack ad against Romney on a local channel, KARE 11. Looks like they might be thinking Minnesota is in play. Conservatives here are fired up.