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WASHINGTON – Statewide, Rep. Ilhan Omar is an unpopular member of Minnesota’s congressional delegation and Rep. Betty McCollum and Sen. Tina Smith enjoy high favorability rating, according to a new MinnPost/Embold Research poll.
Twenty-seven percent of the statewide poll’s respondents said they viewed Omar, D-5th District, favorably, while 57% said they viewed her unfavorably. By calculating the difference between the favorable and unfavorable percentages, pollsters come up with a net positive or negative score for politicians. In Omar’s case, the negative 30-point gap was the widest of any Minnesota politician included in the poll.
That’s a higher unfavorable rating than poll respondents gave former President Donald Trump in a state that has not elected a Republican president since Richard Nixon’s reelection in 1972 and where no Republican has won statewide office since Gov. Tim Pawlenty was reelected in 2006. Poll respondents gave Trump a 35% favorable and 57% unfavorable rating.
For President Joe Biden on this poll, that was -10 percentage points, with women, college educated voters and urban respondents giving him the highest marks. Crosstabs for the poll can be found here.
More bad news for Biden: 50% of Minnesotans surveyed preferred to vote for a congressional candidate who would “be a check on Joe Biden’s policies,” while 40% said they would vote for a congressional candidate who supported the president’s policies.
The MinnPost/Embold Research poll surveyed 1,585 likely Minnesota voters from Oct. 10 to Oct. 14. Its margin of error was +/- 2.6 percentage points.
Rep. Brad Finstad, R-1st District, who has only been in office since Aug. 12, was the only incumbent not included in the poll. Finstad won a special election to fill the remaining term of Rep. Jim Hagedorn, who died in February.
The poll found that Smith, a Democrat, had a net favorability rating of +3 points. So did McCollum, D-4th District. But the poll also showed there’s a gender gap, with both Smith and McCollum faring much better among women – especially college-educated women – than men. Male respondents gave Smith a 10-point unfavorable rating and McCollum a 5-point unfavorable rating.
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Note: The modeled margin of error is +/-2.6 percentage points.
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Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar, meanwhile, scored a +2 rating and, according to the poll, has the highest name recognition among the members of Minnesota’s congressional delegation. Only 2% of the poll’s respondents said they never heard of Klobuchar, who has served in the U.S. Senate since 2007 and ran unsuccessfully for the White House in 2020.
Omar also had high name recognition: Only 5% of those surveyed said they never heard of her.
Tim Lindberg, a political science professor at the University of Minnesota Morris, said Omar’s high name recognition could be a curse.
“For a U.S. House member, unless you are in a position of power like Nancy Pelosi, (name recognition) is not a good thing because it usually indicates you have a lot of negative attention on you,” Lindberg said.
Although Omar’s popularity ratings were dismal in the state as a whole, the poll showed she remains more popular in the area around her Minneapolis-based district. Respondents to the poll who live in Minneapolis and St. Paul gave Omar a -9 favorability rating, while Greater Minnesota and Twin Cities suburban respondents gave Omar -41 and -52 net favorability ratings, respectively.
Rep. Angie Craig, D-2nd District, who is in a very competitive race for reelection, had a -2 favorability rating. Women gave Craig, who has made abortion rights a major issue in her campaign, an 8% favorability rating, while men gave the candidate a -12.
Rep. Dean Phillips, D-3rd District had a +1 favorability rating. While Phillips wants a new generation of Democratic leaders in Congress and the White House, the poll showed he has the strongest support among likely voters who are 65 years old and older.
In a state with more Democratic voters than Republican voters, the Republican members of Minnesota’s congressional delegation all suffered from unfavorable ratings in the poll.
Most unpopular among the GOP lawmakers was Rep. Michelle Fischbach, R-7th District, who touted Trump’s endorsement. Twenty-eight percent of the poll’s respondents said they never heard of Fischbach, while 33% said they viewed her unfavorably and 17 % said they viewed her favorably for a -16 rating.
“I don’t know if that’s a reflection of her being the most ‘Trumpist’ of the lawmakers or if it has to do with the realization she can’t do as much as (former Rep. Collin) Peterson, who had been in office for years,” Lindberg said.
In 2020, Fischbach defeated Peterson, who had represented the 7th District in Congress for 30 years, climbing to the top of the House Agriculture Committee.
Meanwhile, the poll gave Rep. Tom Emmer, R-6th District, a -10 favorability rating and Rep. Peter Stauber a -6 favorability rating. But 40% percent of the respondents said they never heard of Stauber and 27% said they had never heard of Emmer.
The statewide poll said respondents were nearly evenly split when it came to a “generic” congressional ballot, with 45% saying they would support a Republican and 46% saying they would support a Democrat. However, a number of national polls show the GOP is gaining strength in polls regarding generic ballots.
A Harvard CAPS-Harris poll released Monday found that if the election for Congress was held today, 53% of its respondents said they were more likely to vote for a Republican and 47% said the same for a Democrat.
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Every Democrat has more a higher positive impression score than every Republican. As House Republicans have to independent agenda and achieved nothing, many people know very little about this. In fact, Republicans vote in such lockstep and are so controlled by Trump, it doesn’t matter that much who they are. They are rubber stamps to be pulled out and used every time Democrats propose something.
Omar is everything Republicans dislike – a non submissive and very vocal progressive women who is a Black Muslim immigrant. That is enough strikes against her for two strikeouts. However, she won in a highly contested against a highly qualified moderate Black male candidate. Nothing she does going forward will alter how she is viewed, because conservatives will never consider someone like her suitable. The modern conservative is not know for seeking out information that contradicts their beliefs.
I enjoyed the very interesting interpretation of the survey results. You say, regarding Omar’s unfavorable rating, “That’s a higher unfavorable rating than poll respondents gave former President Donald Trump”. Actually, respondents gave both Omar and Trump identical unfavorable ratings – 57%. The only difference is that Trump garnered slightly higher approval than Omar (35 vs 27%) suggesting fewer neutral responses. The only effective difference is in the net positive/negative scores algorithm which ignores neutral responses.
Minneapolis is unpopular statewide. Doc Jensen is basically campaigning on platform that says more of us should be jailed for longer periods of time. Carjackings are rarely committed by Minneapolis residents who are behind bars. Studies show it.
And when they get out? I agree some need jail/prison. News flash, eventually they are released and in prison they are not obligated to engage in services, on probation they are. We need more structured programming for younger offenders and their families. Also, crime was up in many red states that do jail more frequently and that does not seem to be overly effective. Also there are many offenders in car jackings who live in other places(one recent one had them living in Buffalo and Eden Prairie).
I am way outstate and I like the progressive Omar. We need more progressive thinking so as to effectively make this country a people-oriented Democracy rather than corporate-oriented republic.
Outstaters tend only to know Omar from the ugly stuff thrown at her on Twitter and by Trump’s followers at rallies. She doesn’t represent them, and they know really nothing about her. Their views are really irrelevant, as are mine about Tom Emmer, who is intelligent but a fervent 2020 election denier, and obeyer of The Former Guy!
What astounds me is that there isn’t more analysis and emphasis on our senior Senator: Amy Klobuchar is probably the second most powerful female elected official in the U. S. government after Vice President Kamala Harris and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. Klobuchar actually has more current power than Harris (whom Biden is not using well), from her Senate committee positions and her proven ability to work with Republicans as well as Democrats to get good things done in D. C. Amy Klobuchar is highly respected in the Congress and administration, for good reason. Yet she’s almost not present in the poll here, or at least in its recap in this article.
Well, of the candidates mentioned in this article on MionnPost’s poll, only Tina Smith is running for state-wide office. And she’s not up for election in 2022, either. But she’s here, unlike Klobuchar.
Why should I care how people statewide think orfTom Emmer, or Ilhan Omar, or any other House candidate, if they are never going to be able to vote for them?
This poll is weird.
“a check on Biden’s policies”
Hoo boy, the mysteries of polling. I’d like to know how many of those voters who responded thusly to this question could name two “Biden policies” they think need to be “checked”. His most important policy right now is almost unconditional military support to Ukraine in opposing Putin the Terrible’s unprovoked war of annihilation. They think that low-cost, critical policy protecting all Eastern European democracies should be “checked” by the allies of Putin, who will be enabled and empowered if these nihilist Repubs take control of the House? Really?
How about the first national Infrastructure bill passed in over 40 years? A policy like that should be “checked”? Or the first bill passed to actually cut CO2 emissions and develop renewable energy, as we watch the planet essentially burn up? Does that policy need to be checked by climate denialist Repubs?
I suppose these voters might repeat something like “inflation”, as though that’s a policy or has been somehow caused by Biden and not the Covid pandemic, Putin’s war and corporate power over pricing and price gouging. And what are the Repubs going to do about inflation, cut taxes again? That’ll really stop inflation! (Sarcasm).
Or I suppose they’ll say the “Open Border!” Yes, so “open” that’s how the border authorities are stopping record percentages of attempted entries. None of these are actual Biden “policies”; they are just coordinated lies and 24/7 propaganda spread by the Repub party and its associated Noise Machine.
The reality is that the party that needs to be “checked” is the nihilist, anti-democratic Repub party, who are making clear what their “policies” will be: cutting social security, engaging in fiscal hostage-taking over the debt “ceiling” just as they did with Obama, refusing aid to Ukraine in order to save Putin’s dictatorship, disbanding the Jan 6 Committee as a lifeline to the leader of the party Trump, and undertaking a parade of ridiculous investigations into imagined “scandals”. Capped by some nonsense impeachment just to make the descent into chaos abundantly clear to all.
The idea that the Biden WH is the branch that needs to be checked over the next two years and not the MAGA nihilists in Congress is hard to fathom. At least for anyone who is not a far-right extremist…
“Social” media has had a profoundly negative effect on the brains of the American electorate, especially in the ability of far-right extremists to spread disinformation instantaneously.
In the supposed “Information Age”, people are perhaps more ignorant and misinformed than ever. Yet they imagine they are “doing their own research”. And the egregious Elon Musk is about to return Twitter to the unregulated Disinformation Wars. But that hardly matters, given the proliferation of “platforms” on which to spread lie after lie.
So in reality we have unwittingly created the Post-Truth Era.
Exactly!
Let’s pull out Bidenism root and branch:
Restore no negotiation with big pharma on drug prices
End $35 insulin for seniors
Stop the Ohio Intel factories and move them to China
Replace infrastructure projects with infrastructure week discussions
Send out invoices to every person who got a COVID relief check: NET 30
And that is just getting started, so many things supported by 60% of the people need to end ASAP.
Not unlike a majority opposed to Obamacare and a majority supporting the affordable care act in 2010.
I think polls like these perpetuate ignorance and division which is probably the point. I would like to know WHY you don’t like someone instead of childish “I don’t like you” (or why you like someone for that matter)… makes me stupid just thinking about it. Even if the answer is “because I’m a Republican” at least there’s a half baked attempt at self awareness as to what is informing your opinion most of the general voting public desperately needs.
People often say they prefer divided government, a government where neither party has too much party, and where compromise is necessary to move forward. We see this in Minnesota where its rare for one party to control the governorship and both house of the legislature. I note here that because of the two-year senate term, for the rest of this decade, both houses of the legislature and the governorship will be for election in the same year. This has a lot of implications, one of them being that a governor will always have to deal with the same senate during his term.
I think this vision of two parties, each representing different constituencies, with different views, but working together to find common ground for all the common good is a pleasing one. But it has very little to do with how legislation is conducted in St. Paul today, or in the country generally. Common ground is disappearing if it isn’t already gone. The parties are polarized, seeing the other side as not just an adversary but as an enemy. Differences over policy accusations of a lack of patriotism. The other side, isn’t just wrong, or in my usual view, it just doesn’t represent different interests, rather the other side is corrupt. And on occasion it is believed and even said to be in league with the devil.
From my perspective, I see how people can work with me when they think I am a good person, but just wrong headed. But how can I reasonably expect them to work with me when they see me as a manifestation of evil, of all that is wrong with this world, and quite possibly the next? How can they compromise with me while preserving their souls?
Omar needs to get out into outstate MN and campaign with DFLers.
Rut row, Angie Craig numbers don’t look good.
Omar is not running for a statewide office.
Its so weird, you spend millions pounding away at someone, run multiple ads calling them a radical, parsing every single comment looking for offense and low and behold people end up having a negative opinion of them, I just don’t know how that could have happened. Look at Stauber and Emmer, no one is running the kinds of ads against them, the media doesn’t pound away at their “extremism” and yet they have negative ratings as well, does this negate my argument or does it show that Pete and Tom are just nasty people and it comes through in all that they say and do. Inquiring minds want to know.
When Rep Omar runs in a statewide race, her statewide polling will be relevant. Until then, what’s the point?
Nancy Pelosi appears in Republican ads as well, is she Poison to the Democratic party too?
Hilarious. These goobers didn’t feel the need for “a check” on a Russian sycophant who was married to a classic example of a “Red Sparrow.” When Trump was handing national secrets over to Saudi Arabia, Russia, North Korea, and every other US enemy these goobers kept chanting “Make America Grate Again.” And the rest of us were definitely grinding our teeth for 5 long, miserable years that degraded this country, escalated the national debt by another $4T without anything to show for it other than more useless billionaires, and moved the US even further from being a functioning democracy.
I actually do think many voters feel free to vote for Republicans because they think Democrats will check their most extreme and obnoxious views. This is consistent with the larger view that if we have balanced government, middle of the road, common sense legislation and policy will emerge. People still think we live in an era where the ideas of “How a Bill Becomes a Law” still prevail in state capitals and Washington. They haven’t grasped that in these times, the problem isn’t so much that our legislatures do good or bad things, rather that they have lost the capacity to do anything at all.