The first post-election poll is out and it says voters want Tom Emmer to go.
The survey, from Public Policy Polling, says 68 percent think Mark Dayton won the governor’s race and an equal percentage think Republican Emmer should concede. Only 22 percent think Emmer, who is trailing in the recount, should not concede.
North Carolina-based PPP surveyed 949 Minnesota voters over two days (Dec. 4-5) and claims a sampling error margin of plus or minus 3.2 percentage points. PPP’s executives are Democrats, but they produced a pre-election poll here that was pretty close to the final result. (PPP had Dayton up by 3 and he’s currently ahead by 0.4).
PPP is a robo-pollster: it does not use live operators, opting for recorded questions where voters use their phone’s keypad to answer. The pollster only calls land lines, meaning they miss voters who only have mobile phones.
Other interesting crosstabs:
– A plurality of Republicans (44 percent) feel Emmer should not concede, but 40 percent do. Among independents — voters the new GOP legislative majority will need in two years — 77 percent think Emmer should concede. Not surprisingly, only 5 percent of DFLers think Emmer should keep fighting.
– 80 percent of those surveyed describe themselves conservative or moderate. Overall, self-identified DFLers made up 37 percent of the sample; Republicans, 34 percent; Independents and others, 29 percent.
– Emmer’s favorable/unfavorable rating was 37/49; PPP didn’t ask about Dayton’s. While 79 percent of Republicans still view Emmer favorably, independents break 49-30 against.
Note that for subgroups, the margin of sampling error rises, sometimes doubling or more.
Anyone care to speculate how having an additional 3,000 frivolous challenges temporarily removed from Dayton’s lead would have affected public opinion? Despite the GOP poking holes in the new frivolous challenge rules, they appear to have effectively prevented a party keen on trashing the system from abusing it for political ends.
The challenge process during a hand recount is to identify legitimately doubtful ballots for further review by the canvassing board, not to play a numbers game in the press and the public mind. I’m glad the new system appears to have diminished the ability for either party to create its own phony elections integrity crisis by unilaterally casting doubt on thousands of ballots where in fact there was no reasonable basis for doubt.