From Emerson College, rated a B+ pollster by 538. Small sample size in the DFL primary polling resulting in a near 7% Margin of Error (MOE), which puts even Murphy in the running. They’ve got Swanson at 28.7%, Walz at 28.2%, and Murphy at 19%. Testing the likely general election matchups, Klobuchar wins in a 24% landslide while Smith wins by an uncomfortably close 4%. Swanson beats Pawlenty by 8% and Walz beats him by 4%. Here’s the link to Emerson’s PR, I’m gonna dive into the crosstabs next…

Barely a week ago I wrote of how Lori Swanson’s running mate in the governor’s race, Rick Nolan, failed to respond to multiple complaints of sexual harassment in his congressional office and campaign. Couple days later web muckrakers The Intercept broke the story of Swanson pressuring staffers under her in the Attorney General’s office to do campaign work for her on and off the clock. Day or so later MN’s biggest newspaper picked up the story. More Swanson staffers came forward and corroborated the corruption reports, and today the NT Times and AP have taken the story national. All this media attention has brought the old story of Swanson’s union busting in the AG office back to the other front burner too.

Swanson’s response? Dumped a bunch of legally protected personal info on one of the sources of the leaks and mass mailed a hit job on another DFL gov candidate, Congress Member Tim Walz. That kind of graft and intimidation might get you elected in Illinois, Jersey, or Florida… But hopefully not in Minnesota. If this story of Swanson’s corruption can explode like this in a week, imagine how the GOP can run with it during the remaining 11 weeks of the campaign. Besides the now frenzied press feeding off the Swanson corruption story, the GOP controls the legislature and can hold oversight hearings on Swanson even though they’re outa session. Minnesota has pretty strong “sunlight” laws allowing citizen and media access to thousands of incriminating e-mails, staff time logs, and employee promotions and disappearances. Continuously campaigning, Swanson’s “volunteers” were known for documenting her campaign appearances… Her social media will be a trove of evidence. The run up to the general election will not be kind to Swanson, nor will it be kind to DFL candidates in Minnesota with Swanson dragging down the whole slate. And if Swanson wins the primary, we’re stuck with her- Minnesota law only allows a candidate withdrawal in the case of seriously debilitating illness, and she looks pretty healthy.

4 days before the primary we have one independent poll with Swanson at 27%, Walz at 24%, and “endorsed” candidate Murphy at 11%. PolSci 101 tells us that after a poll, the voters will tend to shift from lower polling candidates towards the winner and the same with the uncommitteds, or else they stay home… That means Swanson has probably widened her lead, Walz has lost some voters to Swanson and picked up some from Murphy, whose chances are becoming increasingly bleak. But how many percent has or will this scandal cost Swanson? This 538 study shows that in a competitive race a scandal drags a candidate down by almost 13%, which just happens to be about Swanson’s lead over likely GOP gov candidate Pawlenty. That 13% hit will hurt Swanson in the primary, but she just mass mailed an attack on Walz while the fossilized state party is still trying to elect barely in double digits Murphy, splitting the progressive and “honest candidate” vote.

So DFLers, let’s “shoot down” deathstar Swanson while we can before she takes down our whole slate. Quit worrying about the “endorsed” candidate, we need to unite behind our progressive leader Walz to stop Swanson, and if new polling shows Murphy the leader, I’ll happily switch my support to her. So unite behind Walz and keep the blue wage going!

 

In the last couple days AG candidate Keith Ellison won over a lot of new supporters in southwest Minnesota this weekend, and I don’t think he ever set foot in Farmfest. Keith’s streak started out Tuesday evening at the annual DFL fundraiser at Ted Suss farm where he fired up the crowd with a speech on the tyranny of big ag that would have done Wellstone proud. He followed that up Wednesday at the SD22 fundraiser in Windom where as well as giving a damn good speech, he took the time to sit down and listen to the problems local farmers were having.

Meanwhile about the only thing of interest around Farmfest was the gov debate, Farmer’s Union “hangout”, and the threshing exhibition at the museum next door. Leaving Farmfest came the final disappointment- The Walz signs on my motorcycle and sidecar rig had been stolen. The fact that this happened within view of a staffed gate and it looked like the cable ties holding the signs on were cut and not broken suggests it was the Farm Bureau’s via Farmfest’s dirty work. I’ll fess up to doing a bit of “bandit” advertising by parking the rig in a high traffic spot, but there were bigger vehicles with bigger GOP candidate’s signs in the same lot that went untouched. With Farmfest being close to the primary and a couple months removed from the November elections it’s becoming more of an inter party debate event than between parties. That suggests the DFL might want to forgo the considerable expense of Farmfest and hold the candidate forums at the frequent DFL fundraisers in rural Minnesota… We could have a congressional forum in each district and with 6 statewide races a half dozen more DFL fundraisers could host forums!

So DFL, it’s time to give serious thought to leaving Farmfest behind…

‘Twas a slow year for Farmfest, with many empty exhibit spaces thanks to the rural recession and manager Farm Bureau’s continual rent increases. Gettin’ so the last thing of importance at Farmfest is the political forums, and with no races next year Farmfest may disappear… You could rent space at a lot of county fairs for what Farmfest wants!

Here’s my lightly edited notes:

No media scrum for Swanson (yet)

Murphy says family grew tobacco in WI… That was way back!

GOPers and Murphy do the plaid shirt thing, Swanson does courtroom casual, Walz in comfy t-shirt.

Pawlenty disagrees with trade war, then fades into tax cuts.

TPaw disagrees with basic OSHA safety standards- vests, warning light on tractors. Heck, I wear a reflective vest and turn on the lights when I mow for the town, why should farmers get any less protection?

Walz gets it- pivots to health care

Murphy talks property tax relief

Swanson getting 0 applause outa LSP group.

Johnson is late convert to alt fuels.

TPaw and Johnson advocate regulatory capture.

Property tax reform- Murphy wants new MN miracle, Walz talks revenue sharing, Pawlenty wants ch179 tax write-offs then tries to label DFLers at Mpls advocates. Typical GOP- complains about big cities getting LGA, but demands a tax loophole for big ag!

Swanson steals “one MN” line, supports more LGA, Crowd warming up to Swanson

Health care- Murphy wants to open up MNCare, Swanson wants to go after drug cos. Audit HMOs. TPaw & Johnson Offer usual “competition” meme. Walz wants MNCare expansion & prevention.

Secondary ed: Swanson wants more funding, grants for value added ag. Johnson doesn’t trust U of M. Murphy and Walz advocate AG research. TPaw wants MN only research focus, ignores Borlaag’s international legacy… If we develop better crops, let’s share ’em!

Metro vs. Rural infrastructure: Swanson goes 1 MN, TPaw & Johnson roads, Walz wants transit & roads, Murphy favors 1MN. 

Bipartisanship- Murphy gets a dig in on TPaw, Walz brings up farm bill work, TPaw tries comparing Walz and Pelosi voting record, SWANSON mentions 3M and other cases, Johnson says he’ll end backroom bills?

Econ dev: TPaw wants to bring back corrupt enterprise zones, Swanson wants trade & education, Johnson welfare baits, Murphy pushes voc ed in high school, Walz pushed entrepreneurs and immigrants

Closing: Walz- common goals, TPaw- deregulation & cut taxes, Minneapolis baits, Swanson pushes generic “Better MN”, Johnson- running against government, says there’s a “war on ag”, Murphy repeats 1MN.

During the forum rumor spreads that the MSM from the cities has evidence of Swanson’s making AG office staffers campaign for her, so at the end of the forum the expected media scrum materializes. Swansons one “blocker” may be a big guy, but she needs a whole football team to block for her now. After a slow motion pursuit by the media she finally escapes, ain’t been seen since.

 

 

WiFi finally available, so a few tasty morsels:

In both this morn’s senate special election debate and afternoon’s congressional debate the GOP candidates with a chance, at least in the primary, are falling all over themselves to cuddle up with Trump. Senate candidate Housley even claims to have a direct line to the orange humanoid disaster… Betcha it’s even red! Unfortunately Housley hasn’t figured out that Trump lives on Twitter on the intertubes and never hears her call.

The GOP congressional wannabes are even more minor league… Arguing for congress to “take it’s power back” from the executive branch. Methinks theres a conspiracy theory infecting the GOP bottom feeders?

Gotta run and staff the DFL booth, while I’ve been purged from the CD7 DFL Farmfest is in CD1 and I’m still welcome in the DFL there.

 

I don’t think so. But some of ’em sure as heck are tryin’…

Now this ain’t just about the 17 points behind Murphy campaign here in Minnesota that thinks they’ll win with en masse social media and doorknocking when they can’t afford enough paid media to get name ID. This is about the campaign after campaign that loses because they let emotion drive their campaigns rather than data. And I know of what I speak, because I’ve made the same mistakes.

I campaigned big time for Dean in Iowa in the year before the ’04 Iowa caucuses, still got my “Iowa Perfect Storm” orange stocking cap to prove it. We had such a massive “ground game” that in the weekend before the primary you couldn’t find a passenger van for rent in or within a hundred miles of Iowa- We had them all. And we were so damn busy doorknocking and e-mailing our exploits that we didn’t even notice that we were dropping in the polls. By caucus eve we had at least a hundred doorknockers and a real campaign office in Mason City, we laughed at Edward’s two guys with a desk in the back of a local lawyers office, and the Kerry campaign was MIA. We lit up the internet, doorknocked ’til we dropped, and on caucus night we finished 20 points down from Kerry with no ground game and Edwards with little ground game. Damn, if I would have just followed the polls…

So comes the next quadrennial political silly season to Iowa and a newbie senator from Illinois is all the buzz, even though he’s 13% behind leader Edwards in the polls. But Baraak had another stat in his favor, drawing thousands in below freezing weather to his outdoor campaign kickoff in downstate Springfield! Being semi-retired and laid off for the winter, I made my usual trips to Iowa to sample the candidates and noticed Obama’s supersized crowds. I did some counts and checked the local census stats and WTF… Obama was routinely drawing 5% of rural counties population for weekday events! By spring Obama was within single digits of Edwards, within the MOE of Hillary, and gaining… I was ready to go “all in” with Obama and applied for an internship, and was offered one as a labor liaison in Iowa. OK, but figuring I was going to be making a tour of union halls 200-300 miles from home I insisted my travel expenses be covered and was assured they would be. Couple weeks later and I’m supposed to be headed to campaign HQ in Chicago for training and no expense money was forthcoming… I said a polite “no thanks”. I was learning from my mistakes… No point in blowing my retirees limited income and missing union scale temp work in the fall for a 3rd place candidate. Good move- By xmas layoff from UPS I’d put over $10,000 pay in the bank and replenished my unemployment account that paid me benefits clear into 2011! By preserving my resources early in the campaign I was able to spend every remaining weekend in Iowa campaigning for Obama.

Come 2010 and the MN Democratic Farmer Labor party (DFL) had done their usual disaster of a gubernatorial endorsement, the party activists having blessed yet another underfunded state legislator. Challenging the party’s endorsement and threats in the primary were former U.S, Senator Mark Dayton and legislator Matt Entenza, who I sided with. I ignored the party’s laughable threats and campaigned hard for Entenza, but by late July the polls showed him far outside the MOE… I cut my losses and pulled out of Entenza’s campaign and Dayton won the primary. Again following the polls which showed a tight race I campaigned hard for Dayton in the general and we pulled out a victory, close enough to mandate a recount.

Come 2016 and we’re awash in so much polling data and analysis that you’d have to make a serious effort to ignore it. But some campaigns did… While Hillary’s campaign reputedly spent millions on data and analysis, by labor day you could read fivethirtyeight.com for free and see a path to victory for Trump through the rust belt. By october that path was so clear and the Clinton campaigns strategy so fogged that I began a “plan B” for surviving a Trump presidency. On election eve 538 gave Trump a 30 odd percent chance of winning, and at the first hopefully victory party of election evening I noted stronger than expected results for Trump in rural Florida counties. On the hours drive to the next party the bad news oozed from the radio, and the next event was more a funeral than a victory celebration.

So here we are in 2018 and a primary victory by a “democratic socialist” in a yellow dog democratic district has the local “progressives” suddenly thinking they can win red districts with state legislated socialized medicine despite being pre-empted by a Trump GOP federal government. Despite the environment placing a weak 4th or 5th as the “most important issue” in polling, we have a candidate make global warming and banning copper mining pretty much her whole platform. And despite her coming in 3rd in a 3 way race for the endorsement, the winning candidate pretty much adopts her losing platform. Again, instead of following the data, democrats are repeating the same mistakes that made us a minority party.

Meanwhile the republicans studied the data of their 2008 losses, read the “rulebook” AKA constitution, and came up with a plan to use small rural districts and states with inordinate electoral power to make their minority of the voters the majority party. So democrats, will we use the same data and analytical tools to become the majority party, or will we follow our emotions into more failed campaigns and let the republicans be the permanent majority party by our default?

 

 

 

This Washington Post article highlights polling that shows that 81% of democrats and 61% of independents won’t vote for a candidate accused of sexual harassment by multiple women. The leading candidate in the MN democratic primary race for governor, polling at 28%, has a running mate who multiple former staffers say dismissed complaints of sexual harassment and even knowingly rehired a staffer who had suddenly retired when accused of sexual harassment. The story is growing but still hasn’t gotten much coverage by the MSM.

The dynamics of the race predict some unexpected consequences- The leading candidates polling at 28%, AG Lori Swanson running for governor and Congressmember Rick Nolan for Lt. Governor, are the most conservative democrats in the race. Next polling at 24% are more progressive Congressmember Tim Walz running for Gov and legislator Peggy Flanagan for LG. In distant 3rd are the Erins, both extremely progressive state legislators and polling at 11%.

Now PolSci 101 taught us that as we progress towards the election supporters of the lowest polling candidate (the Erins) will tend to shift their preference to a higher polling candidate (Walz and Flanagan) with the most similar position in the political spectrum. And while word of Swanson and Nolan’s sexual harassment scandal has yet to really blossom in the MSM, a lot of DFL primary voters have heard of the scandal and will most likely shift their votes to Walz and Flanagan. Gaining support from both the right and left of the DFL and running an excellent campaign, Walz and Flanagan will likely pull ahead and defeat likely GOP candidate Pawlenty by at least the 11% margin that polling predicts.

Except for one minor problem, our state DFL leadership and their penchant to spend even six figure sums on losing candidates just because they were “endorsed” by less than a thousand party activists. Reading the campaign finance reports showing little spending on the losing Erins campaign I was hopeful that the party was going to let them lose without party assistance and save their money for more important and winnable races. Unfortunately I was wrong and the state party is filling my mailbox with two identical glossy mailers for the Erins most every day, despite their own database IDing me as a Walz/Flanagan supporter.

So lets game out the scenario here… Despite all the DFL party’s spending on their behalf the Erins still lose, but keep enough voters from migrating to Walz/Flanagan to give Swanson/Nolan a primary win and make them the DFL candidates for governor in the november election, and as the scandal broke they had an 11% lead. The MSM and GOP discover the Nolan sexual harassment scandal and it leads the nightly news for weeks before the election. Remember the 81% of democratic voters that won’t vote for a candidate accused of sexual harassment? If even half of the DFLers leave the governor’s race ovals blank on the ballot likely GOP candidate Pawlenty wins. If they stay home most of the DFL ticket goes down to defeat.

So yes, the DFL leadership may be helping elect Pawlenty and the rest of the GOP slate…

The Timberjay is northeast Minnesota’s newspaper of record, and it’s opinions hold sway: Here’s their editorial.

For  most of this decade South Dakota has been written off as terminally red, as the SD dems have been unable to win a statewide race. We had a few rays of hope when Senator Rounds 2014 U.S. senate run turned into a 3 way race with former senator Pressler running as an independent, but Rounds won handily with barely a majority of the votes.

Then came Billie Sutton, a top college rodeo athlete who overcame a life changing rodeo accident that left him a paraplegic to graduate, become a small town banker, and return home to help run the family ranch. In the legislature he’s been a voice for honest government in the midst of a corrupt republican supermajority that would make the old Chicago machine blush.

This poll shows that Sutton is no sacrificial lamb, polling only 4% behind his battered GOP opponent, congress member Kristi Noem (R-Big Ag). The poll was sponsored by the Sutton campaign, but the pollster played it fair and when the participants were given additional info, support for Sutton increased to a 6% lead!

DNC, better put South Dakota back on your map…

 

This story continues to grow, link here.