Another odd poll surfaces: MINNESOTA (Obama +3) Star Tribune/Mason-Dixon

[TroyD]

This Minnesota poll is odd for the following reasons:

1. It's by Mason-Dixon, a pollster that seems to lean Republican

2. The article seems to want to push the narrative that the race is becoming close all over the country

3. A 3-point lead for Obama in Minnesota is probably the lowest he has ever polled here

4. Most odd of all is that this poll shows Obama going WAY UP in support with Independents! If Obama was going down, wouldn't he be losing the support of Independents?

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Minnesota Poll: Obama leading, but Romney sees gains

As the presidential race tightens across the country, a new Star Tribune Minnesota Poll has found that it is narrowing here as well, with President Obama holding a 3-point lead and Republican Mitt Romney making gains in the state.

The poll shows Obama with support from 47 percent of likely voters and Romney earning backing from 44 percent -- a lead within the poll's margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.

Last month, Obama had an 8-percentage point advantage in the Minnesota Poll. Romney has apparently cut into the Democrat's advantage among women since then and picked up support from Minnesotans who were previously undecided or said they would vote for a third-party candidate.

Independents, on the other hand, are leaning more toward Obama. Barely a third supported him last month, but that number has grown to 43 percent. Romney's support among independents remains virtually unchanged, with 13 percent of that group remaining undecided.

In an indication of how close the race has become, both campaigns have started airing ads in the state targeting Minnesota and western Wisconsin voters.

The poll was conducted among 800 likely Minnesota voters who were contacted on their land lines or cellphones between Oct. 23 and Oct. 25.

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More here:

http://www.startribune.com/politics/statelocal/176113071.html

[imgbitepolitic]

1. Well

O is also leading women 53/37 and older voters, according to this poll. Anyways, O gonna win MN. Romney has never led in MN and its beyond silly to worry about it at this point.

[S_E_Fudd]

2. Statistical Oddity...

Happens every cycle there...some poll comes out showing the election in MN closer than you would expect...never true. Other than this one poll Obama has been ahead consistently by 8-10 points...including one released yesterday...

[DemocratSinceBirth]

11. Reminds Me Of The Tied Hawaii Poll In The Waning Days Of Campaign 04

Why folks obsess about every poll baffles me when there are hundreds to choose from. I look at a bad poll, then grimace, take a deep breath, and move on.

[fujiyama]

21. Yeah every once in a while these kinds of polls appear

Kerry won MN by a fairly close margin ~4 points and it will definitely be a closer race than '08, but this is not 2004.

Obama will win the state by a comfortable margin.

[Zynx]

3. Mason-Dixon is full of shit.

They show Romney up 7 in Florida, 13 or 14 in Missouri, tied in Wisconsin, within 3 in Minnesota... seeing a pattern here?

It's also a pattern that no one else is picking up.

[TroyD]

5. I agree & I'm suspicious

Mason-Dixon also showed McCaskill only 2 points ahead of Akin in Missouri, even though most polls, including Rasmussen, give her a much larger lead.

But these polls still get media coverage. Dana Loesch was trying to spin the Mason-Dixon poll yesterday by claiming that it showed women don't care about Akin's abortion comments.

I'll be glad when this crap is over.

[Zynx]

7. The level of BS that people spew with regards to elections is truly stunning.

[Jennicut]

4. If Obama was close in Minnesota he would be behind nationally by 7 points.

It's like the close Arizona poll that was favorable for Obama a few weeks ago. Just. Not. Happening.

[Zynx]

6. I've looked up state by state polls in the past few elections and you always have a fair amount of

total bullshit in the mix.

[TroyD]

8. Both the OH & MN polls are on Political Wire this morning

http://politicalwire.com/archives/2012/10/28/latest_swing_state_polls.html

[Pakid]

9. If one wants to steal an election then the polls have to be close

after all if Obama has a 15 point lead in a state then it is impossible to steal. Now I don't know if they can or can't steal an election. But I do know that the GOP would steal it if they could. The Republican are as dishonest as they come and the fact that in the past the paper trail has disappeared sure makes me wonder. We need a much better way to vote, one that takes corporate America out of the picture.

[TroyD]

10. I agree completely

America probably has the least secure electoral system of any country in the Western world.

That's why it's laughable that America thinks it's qualified to oversee elections in 3rd-world countries. It's not much further ahead itself.

[Fringe]

12. It's Mason-Dixon that's all you need to know, it leans right.

I've compared a lot of polls from 2008 till now and noticed that Mason-Dixon has a right lean of at least a couple of points and some times more.

[WI_DEM]

13. On the other hand, another poll yesterday had Obama up by 53-45 in MN

[ProSense]

14. The poll shows Obama with a 16-point lead among women.

"Independents, on the other hand, are leaning more toward Obama."

For a right leaning poll, this isn't really cause for concern.

Seems like it's more fodder for the narrative.

[WI_DEM]

16. Many white men this election appear to be hopeless

We will win Minnesota but these polls are adding to the narrative that Obama may win the electoral vote but lose the popular vote because he isn't getting the margins he needs from many 'blue states.'

[Orangepeel]

15. Polls have margins of error for a reason

(Lecture not intended for the OP, just in general)

Any one poll, even a poll that is very well done (and I don't know if that's true here) might be off simply due to random error.

Say you have a jar of blue and red marbles and you want to know how many of each color are in the jar. Let's say that there are 10000 marbles in the jar and that in reality, 5500 are blue and 4500 are red (but you don't know that yet).

If you randomly pick 10 marbles out of the jar, you should get 5 or 6 that blue and 4 or 5 that are red. But there are a lot of reasons you might not. You might pick 7 red marbles. Maybe you did so because the marbles were mixed up and you picked them all from one area of the jar. Or maybe you are shady and threw some marbles back and picked new ones until you got what you wanted. If you really want to know about the marbles, you wouldn't do either of those things.

But even the most honest marble picker might pick a set of marbles that are not 55% blue and 45% red just because of random chance. If you picked 100 marbles instead of 10, there is a better chance you will be closer to 55/45 because one "wrong" marble isn't going to have such a big impact on the results. If you repeated the experiment 100 times and averaged the results, there's a very good chance you'd be very close to the truth.

You could just try to count all of the marbles, but that's not practical. It would take a lot of time and money, some of the marbles don't want to be counted, some don't know what color they are, and you are estimating the total number of marbles in the jar, too. So you take a reasonably sized sample, try to make sure that it is representative of the marbles in the jar, and add in the margin of error.

So this 47/44 result from this poll, might theoretically reflect a reality anywhere from 50.5/40.5 to 43.5/47.5. But when we consider it with other polls, it is much more likely that the reality is closer to 50/40 than it is to 43/47 (ignoring the 10% of marbles stuck to the side of the jar).

[MjolnirTime]

17. Another TrollD thread surfaces

[silvershadow]

18. Don't fret your purty little head...I see you are new here. We are perfectly used to BS from the

other side.

[BluegrassDem]

19. Mason-Dixon would show Obama up 2 points in the city of Chicago

That's how right leaning they are. Mason Dixon is more right leaning than Rasmussen. Please ignore this poll

[ashtonelijah]

20. Obama will win Minnesota by 9+. Bet on it.

$10,000 bet?