For a long time there the Twin Cities was getting far more TV advertising in Minnesota’s Eighth Congressional race than the traditional Duluth-area base of this northern district. That’s all done. Duluth TV is now marinated in MN-8 advertising from the campaigns of both Rep. Chip Cravaack, former Rep. Rick Nolan and their outside allies (though Cravaack’s allies have much more money and ads).
While both sides have ads that would qualify as effective and others that qualify as noise, the whole thing sounds like a din in which it’s hard for any ad to break out.
So lets look at some other information.
First, a Star Tribune poll now shows Nolan with a 50-43 lead. That’s seven points, a much bigger lead than any candidate has shown in this race. The Cravaack team has dismissed the poll, and the Strib poll has had mixed results in the past. Nevertheless, since other polls have shown at least modest leads for Nolan one could consider this further evidence that Nolan is running just slightly ahead at this point.
Second, the Mesabi Daily News endorsed Cravaack this weekend. This was widely expected — the MDN is a rabidly pro-mining paper and has been friendly to Cravaack throughout his first term. Still, it’s in print and certainly helps Cravaack. Though the Iron Range often bucks the endorsement of its center-right newspaper, circumstantial evidence would suggest that Cravaack has made permanent gains of some kind on the eastern Mesabi in particular.
UPDATE: The Duluth News Tribune added their endorsement this morning, also for Rep. Cravaack. The DNT endorsed Cravaack in 2010 and has stuck with their reasoning.
Finally, the last debate is scheduled on the Iron Range — a Halloween affair that was originally scheduled for 90 minutes. Team Cravaack has apparently been trying to negotiate this down to 60 minutes, to the press release delight of Team Nolan. This is very interesting to me, because candidates that are ahead usually want fewer, shorter debates while candidates that are behind preach the opposite.
I think both campaigns sense that Nolan isn’t really a full seven points ahead and the whole thing is very, very close. Nolan knows that he needs to make up ground on the Range, while Cravaack believes that if he breaks it open here he has his best chance to craft the long term coalition he’d need to stay in office for a career.
But consider that Nolan’s family goes way, way back in the Brainerd area — a place where Cravaack made huge gains two years ago. And consider that Duluth is behaving much differently than the Iron Range. Cravaack has not made any gains in the district’s largest and most Democratic city and that may be, in the end, his undoing … if his Range strategy falls short.
The ads are running. They’re on now. It goes on and on, but we are just 15 days away from knowing what happens.
The Strib doesn’t have mixed results, it has almost uniformly bad results. They were so far off in the Dayton-Emmer race as to be useless and they always have a pro-DFL bias.
Agree with David on this one, it is the Star Tribune with an extremely biased editorial staff. Take it for what it is worth, not much.
The Star Tribune’s editorial staff is becoming more conservative. They have endorsed as many Republicans for major races as they have DFLers in recent years. The editorial staff doesn’t dictate the results of a poll.
The problems with the poll have to do with methodology, which is different than ideology. It’s a single-day poll performed by a pollster I know very little about. Now, it could be this is an outlier (that seems to be how both campaigns are treating it) or it could be that they’re geniuses. Only time will tell.
MPR summed it up nicely three weeks ago…For the first time since at least 1996, MPR is out of the political polling business.
“No polls from us,” says Chris Worthington, MPR’s managing director of regional news.
Worthington didn’t further spell out his rationale, but MPR’s exit comes two years after their sponsorship of a University of Minnesota Humphrey School of Public Aaffairs poll erupted in controversy. The U’s survey, conducted 7-10 days before the election, had Mark Dayton up 12 percentage points — rising from a month earlier, while other polls showed a tightening. Dayton wound up winning the contest by 0.4 points.
And The Red Star is more biased/less accurate than MRP…
You’ve been drinking the cool-aid too long Aaron. Not all your fault, it’s the circles you run in.
All three a ya just pucked the pipe there. Aaron’s point was that neither candidate is smokin’ the poll, currently.
I agree the Strib sucks, but somehow I think we arrived at that conclusion from different routes.
Are there statisticians sitting around figuring out how to doctor poll results? If so, how does that benefit the Strib? Aaron mentioned that methodology =/= ideology. Congrats on that, by the way, Aaron. You may have memed the new correlation =/= causation.
Personally, I like the Timberjay. Which circle is that?
Good show last weekend Aaron!
In a sense the motivation for the Strib polling doesn’t matter. It doesn’t need to be conscious bias or a conspiracy. But the fact is the poll is generally worse than useless and even if it, like the broken clock, is right twice a day leaning on it is like leaning on the thinnest of reeds. The results of the Strib poll are only newsworthy in the sense of a curiousity or a point of trivia.