PHOTO: James Cridland, Flickr CC
Brace yourself, Minnesota political junkies. You’re about to have your mind blown.
The New York Times hired Siena College to conduct polls in competitive House races across America. One of them is Northern Minnesota’s 8th Congressional District.
They’ll be uploading polling results from the district as they come in, updating the results each day. That means we’ll essentially have a daily tracking poll in Minnesota’s 8th District.
Right now you’ll see that there aren’t enough completed calls to have a valid result, but once they have 150 calls they’ll post and update the results on a rolling basis.
One thing you notice right away is how many calls they make and how few people take the time to respond. That’s one of the big problems in modern polling.
Sure, polls are polls. They can be wrong. But in a race that has relied so much on speculation it will be interesting to see what some voters are actually telling pollsters.
If these calls continue for weeks to come, we’ll have a really interesting read on trends in this race.
Don’t forget, I’ve been covering Minnesota’s 8th District from the inside for several years. I’ve got a special coverage page. I live blogged the primary, analyzed the results and recently previewed some big factors in the 8th District.
Makes me wonder if any of the calls I have been ignoring and leave no message are the pollsters instead of the spam calls I usually get.
I’m not sure they will be running the poll repeatedly. I think they are running a number of different polls, with calls made over a two day span, and publishing the results as they get them. After this Friday, the 7th, I assume they will move on to other districts.
I think you’re right about that, now that I look at it. Nevertheless, it’s bonkers watching this stuff comes in.
Watching a New York Times news operation close up is mind boggling when compared to the usual thing we see from media. They have commissioned this poll and sent reporters to CD8 while our local media have a hard time doing any decent coverage of the race at all (although the kerfuffle over Stauber violating the law regarding officials using public resources and time to work on politics has drawn two consecutive days’ coverage in the DNT.)
I happened to be in Bemidji on business during the Red Lake shooting tragedy several years ago. The New York Times had eight people at the scene, two at the borders of the reservation, two in Bemidji at the hospital, two with law enforcement, and two in Fargo where some of the seriously injured had been taken for medical care. The most any of the local and state media had was two, not counting helicopter pilots. Perhaps the new Jeff Bezos financed Washington Post can deploy similar resources, but otherwise the Times is just playing in another league compared to other news media.