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Minnesota DFL Attorney General Keith Ellison and his Republican opponent Jim Schultz were tied in a new survey from Embold Research commissioned by MinnPost, the latest evidence of a tight race for the statewide office.
The poll found 47% of 1,585 likely general election voters would pick Schultz and 47% would choose Ellison, while 5% were unsure of who they’d vote for. The margin of error was +/- 2.6 percentage points. Crosstabs can be found here.
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Note: The modeled margin of error is +/-2.6 percentage points.
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The survey, taken across Minnesota between Oct. 10 and Oct. 14, also found DFL state Auditor Julie Blaha was tied with Republican candidate Ryan Wilson.
DFL Secretary of State Steve Simon had a 7-percentage point lead over Republican Kim Crockett, the largest lead of any candidate for an executive office in the survey. Still, 10% of those polled were not sure who they would choose.
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Note: The modeled margin of error is +/-2.6 percentage points.
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Earlier Monday, MinnPost released poll results in the governor’s race, which showed DFL Gov. Tim Walz with a slight edge over Republican Scott Jensen.
A victory in any of the contests would give the GOP its first win for a statewide executive office since Republican Tim Pawlenty was reelected as governor in 2006.
Schultz remains somewhat unknown
In the race for attorney general, the October poll is similar to one commissioned by MinnPost in early June, which found Schultz and Ellison statistically tied. That was before Schultz won the GOP primary against Doug Wardlow.
More people have made up their minds about the race since, but neither candidate has gained an advantage from the previously undecided voters.
Still, weeks before the Nov. 8 election, the poll shows some warning signs for Ellison, who was elected to the position in 2018 after 12 years in the U.S. House representing the 5th Congressional District. A plurality of voters surveyed, 45%, had an unfavorable view of the incumbent. The poll found 36% had a favorable view of Ellison. That’s roughly the same as voter attitudes toward the AG in June.
However, Schultz has a ways to go on name recognition. A plurality of people in the October survey — 39%— said they had never heard of Schultz, compared to 69% in June. The people who did know who Schultz is in the October poll were about evenly split in having a favorable, unfavorable or neutral view of Schultz.
At the same time, Embold pollster Ben Greenfield said there is opportunity for Ellison to improve, because the undecided voters surveyed lean Democratic and plan to vote for Walz, Simon and Blaha by wide margins.
“I do think it’s good news for Ellison that the people who remain undecided are leaning pretty significantly towards Democrats in the other elections,” Greenfield said. “But the downside of that is he’s an incumbent, he’s a well-known figure in the state, so if he hasn’t won them over already it might be difficult to win some of them over.”
The poll found Schultz led Ellison by 26 percentage points in the seven-county Twin Cities metro — excluding Minneapolis and St. Paul — and by 18 percentage points in Greater Minnesota. Ellison, meanwhile, had a 32-percentage point margin in Minneapolis and St. Paul.
Compared to the June poll, Ellison has gained ground in Minneapolis and St. Paul, but Schultz has swung the suburbs in his favor. In June, the poll found Ellison had a 44-41 lead in the suburbs. Schultz had a 60-34 lead in the new survey.
There is a smaller sample size in the subregions of the state compared to the statewide poll, increasing the margin of error. The margin of error for the October poll is +/- 4 percentage points in the two Twin Cities, +/- 7 percentage points in the metro area excluding Minneapolis and St. Paul and +/- 4 percentage points in Greater Minnesota.
The AG’s race so far has revolved mostly around crime and abortion, two issues at the top of voters’ minds in the midterm elections. At an MPR News debate on Friday, Schultz said his top priority was “crime, crime and crime.” Ellison opened by saying he will “protect your right to a safe, legal abortion.”
The poll found 43% of those surveyed view the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade as a priority in their upcoming vote in November, while 42% said violent crime was a priority. The rising cost of goods was the only issue that held a larger share of voters listing it as a priority.
Far more likely voters surveyed who favored Schultz said crime and inflation were a priority in their vote compared to abortion. Abortion and the overturning of Roe was the most commonly listed priority for those favoring Ellison.
While likely voters who are undecided in the AG race lean towards the DFL, they more often listed violent crime as a priority than Ellison voters. But they also listed abortion as a priority more than Schultz voters. (The category does have a high margin of error because it is made up of a small number of likely voters compared to the overall survey.)
Those undecided voters also tend to view U.S. Amy Klobuchar favorably, but are split on Walz and have unfavorable views of Biden, Trump and Jensen.
Simon leads Crockett for SOS
Minnesota’s race for secretary of state has drawn nationwide attention and national money. That’s in part because of Crockett, who hopes to restrict early voting, limit absentee ballots and has questioned the legitimacy of the 2020 election.
The MinnPost poll found Simon had a 48% to 41% lead, the largest of any candidate in the four statewide races this year. Greenfield said it’s pretty unusual for a “down-ballot” candidate to have the biggest lead of any candidate. However, Greenfield said the remaining undecided people lean more Republican compared to other contests, which means Crockett could make up ground but is struggling to bring some GOP-friendly voters on board.
Simon is running for a third term. He was first elected in 2014.
Republicans are faring better in the race for state auditor, a position that primarily oversees spending by local governments and also sits on state boards connected to investments, economic development, pensions and housing.
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The poll found 40% of voters favoring the first-term incumbent Blaha and 40% siding with Wilson, an attorney who formerly ran a medical device research company. The two have clashed over the role of the auditor, and also whether to consider issues like climate change and social justice when deciding where to invest money like state employee pension funds.
Methodology note
The poll was conducted from Oct. 10 to Oct. 14, and respondents included 1,585 likely general election voters. The poll was conducted by Embold Research, the nonpartisan arm of Change Research. The pollsters recruit respondents via targeted ads on websites and social media platforms. Change Research has a B- pollster rating from FiveThirtyEight.
Embold Research uses a “modeled” margin of error, which it says accounts for the effects of weighting the poll (or making adjustments to better reflect the state’s demographics). The results were weighted on age, gender, race/ethnicity, region, and 2020 presidential vote.
Associate editor Greta Kaul contributed to this report.
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Remove Roe v Wade decision and the trump idiocy, a sweep of State offices would be quite possible
The fact that Ellison can run “I’m tough on crime” ad says all you need to know about this race. I almost fell over when I heard it. Somehow in the Leftie world, crime is not controllable and nobody is responsible for it. That is not the case and voters know it.
Ellison got convictions of Chauvin and three other officers. It is questionable that a Republican would have agreed to prosecute or would have sought a long sentence. Schulz had no experience whatsoever with crime, except if his hedge fund employees have committed one – funny, nobody as talks about his entire work experience has been protecting rich executives. From what he has said big dollar property crime would not be a priority. And how he plans to crack down on street crime as Attorney General. Nothing specific. The party of insurrection and Trump tough on crime – not if they are committing it. Watch how they blow off 140 police officers and block measures to prevent criminals from getting guns.
While I am not a fan of Keith Ellison, I have found no reason to support Jim Schultz. Since being admitted to practice in Minnesota in 2013, he has held three jobs: two private law firms and in-house counsel for an unnamed business. That’s a lot of movement for a young lawyer, movement that I’d like to see explained. There is no indication of any experience in criminal law, the courts, or any of the many areas of the AG’s responsibilities, except perhaps what his campaign site calls “regulatory and compliance law.” That may be at one or more levels of government but I’ve found no other information. (I do question whether as AG he would encounter any conflicts of interest, given the office’s representation of evey regulatory body in state government.)
Holding a license to practice law is a necessary but not sufficient condition to hold the office. His lack of any expertise in the areas he leans most heavily on (crime and criminal prosecution) should be a red flag for every voter. He has not, to my knowledge, explained how he would use the authority of the office to influence either the level of crime in Minnesota or the prosecution and sentencing of those accused of crimes. “Lock ’em up” is inadequate for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the AG’s limited powers in that regard. Minnesota does not need an AG who intervenes at every level of criminal prosecutions. (Ellison was wrong to intervene as he has, in my opinion.)
I am left with a choice between an AG with whom I don’t always agree and a relatively inexperienced young attorney who campaigns on issues beyond his known education, training, and experience. As a retired attorney with some experience working with the AG’s office, I’ll be voting for the former.
For those folks who say they’re not a fan of Ellison, or he isn’t tough on crime, I submit this four-minute video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tsp0v6B-Y5M
To folks who think a four minute video proves Ellison is not “not tough on crime,” I’ll ask this question: what do you think any Attorney General can do about crime in a State that makes the prosecution of crime the duty of county attorneys? County prosecutors have jealously guarded their monopoly over criminal prosecutions including taking the Minnesota Attorney General to the Minnesota Supreme Court to prevent them from intervening even after being requested by the Governor in writing (as allowed by statute).
The right-wing noise machine likes to blame Ellison and for that matter all Democrats for the spike in violent crime over the past two years. They’ve been playing on peoples’ fears of rising crime and the COVID-19 pandemic for over two years to distract attention from their stealth agenda of dismantling democracy and the Bill of Rights. For Republicans, crime increases are always someone else’s fault as they blamed others in 2004 -2006 when crime spiked on their watch. According to Wikipedia (citing Rachel Stassen-Burger in the St. Paul Pioneer Press):
“Crime in Minnesota was a high-profile political issue during Pawlenty’s governorship. When crime rates in Minneapolis spiked 16% from 2004 to 2005, city officials blamed Pawlenty for large cuts to state aid, which they said restricted public safety resources. He in turn criticized the city for poorly allocating its funding.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Pawlenty#Crime
When Republicans talk about getting “tough on crime”, they mean implementing things like the “Broken Windows Policy” and a lot more ‘stop and frisk” which Rudy Giuliani did as NYC Mayor in the1990’s. But the studies don’t support any claim that they stopped or prevented crime. According to Politifact:
“Part of Giuliani’s effort was a program called “Stop and Frisk,” which encouraged police to stop suspicious people on the street to look for guns, outstanding warrants or drugs.
“Aside from questions it raised about constitutionality, a 1999 study by the New York Attorney General’s Office found that “Stop and Frisk” was unevenly applied — minorities were stopped disproportionately — and led to relatively few arrests. Often, people were detained but never charged. Although Giuliani’s policies appear to have passed the ultimate test — crime did go down — researchers seeking empirical evidence have come up short.
“In a 2003 review, the National Research Council found little data to support the claim that the Broken Windows theory of policing works.
“`There is a widespread perception among police policymakers and the public that enforcement strategies (primarily arrest) applied broadly against offenders committing minor offenses lead to reductions in serious crime,’ the report said. `Research does not provide strong support for this proposition.'”
https://www.politifact.com/article/2007/sep/01/how-much-credit-giuliani-due-fighting-crime/
Talk is cheap. Republicans tough talk on crime offers no solutions to the problems of law enforcement or criminal justice.
I’m sorry you’ve bought into the “defund the police” propaganda. Being for strengthening community policing and police accountability for abuses like the murders of George Floyd and Philander Castile is not about “defunding the police.” It’s doing something to restore law enforcement to its legitimate role and not being the enforcers of rough justice in the streets that some parts of the public seem to think is being denied through the criminal justice system. “Tough on crime” brought us the deaths of Floyd and Castile and the innumerable incidents of harassment of African Americans, mainly men, by the police costing taxpayers millions of dollars wasted on civil rights action settlements to families and victims of police abuses. Something’s got to change.
I read Mary Moriarity is the leading candidate for Hennepin County Attorney at least according to the primary election results. Maybe she’s “soft on crime” too because she supports the same policies as Ellison. “Soft on crime” means admitting that “tough on crime” hasn’t worked and will never work particularly when gun control and regulation is sidelined as part of solution to combatting crime. Republicans aren’t going to do anything about that.
“The only propaganda is by people who try to explain the slogan defund the police as something than the actual meaning of the words.”
“Defund the police” was some meme dreamed up by someone too clever by half as a not-too-clever retort to the “defund the left” movement propagated by the Right. So you’re right in the sense that “defund the police” can only be taken by its actual words. The Right wing propaganda has also been to stretch it label ( or smear) anyone who is not militantly “tough on crime/back the blue/back the badge/no questions asked” sense. “Defund the police” got hung on the whole Minneapolis charter amendment movement not that many years after the charter had been amended to guarantee a specific equation for the number of police. If you’re not for “defunding the police” but for reforming law enforcement to try to end discriminatory stop and frisk or other injustices which were brought front and center in the last few years, you’re labeled as being for “defunding the police” by the Right wing propaganda machine. Which is of course a non sequitur but works for 30 second negative TV ads. That’s the sorry state of what’s laughably called “political debate” or “discourse” in this country today.
And I’m sorry for overlooking your earlier posts about your support for Ellison. He has not a very good job in political messaging and the need to keep his role as a political leader in Minneapolis separate from his role as State Attorney General. It was not his place to take a position in the Minneapolis charter amendment issue and that has hurt his stature as a State leader for example. Nevertheless, I think his actual performance on the job shows he has kept those separate. He has not “politicized the office” as his detractors claim and I’m certain will do if they get the chance.
Regarding polling….How accurate was the “weighting ” in the 2020 election? Once adjustments are made in a poll, all you are doing is looking at the past. This is how the polls were so inaccurate in 2016. Sometimes the raw numbers are needed, with the proviso of saying that this was an inaccurate poll due to how the respondents were selected.
True that. Anything that happened in 2016 was within the margin of error.
And the time I read or hear that “FiveThirtyEight predicted…” I’m going to scream.
Many pollsters engage in modelling, a way of adjusting for problems in sampling. It’s a convention widely accepted by those who are otherwise invested in the concept of polling. But it is a form of thumb on the scale, and no matter what you do, no matter how scientifically it is calibrated, a thumb will always be a thumb.
Modelling is based on what we have learned from past elections. It is based on what we are warned not to do, predict the future based on past results. Knowledge of the past is helpful, but if that is all that mattered, Babe Ruth would still be hitting 60 home runs a year. The fact is, our elections are changing and the rate they are changing is increasing. That makes modelling more difficult and less effective in ways we cannot know until we get the actual results on election day.
This article claims the race is tied. There are three million voters in Minnesota. What do we think the chances are that the race is tied?
Schultz’s faith based opposition to abortion is an important issue which Keith Ellison’s campaign has rightly emphasized. But there are others on which Schultz has so far been give a pass:
1) Schultz has publicly attacked as “frivolous” the State’s case against the American Petroleum Institute, Exxon, Koch Industries, Inc. and its Minnesota based subsidiaries for their alleged false advertising and public relations campaign to create public doubt about climate change. Schultz is a climate change denialist, sounding and acting like he is counsel for the defense. His attacks on the lawsuit and the lawyers assigned to it are unprofessional and reveal a complete ignorance about the actual facts and claims.
2) Schultz has not stated publicly whether he believes the 2020 election was fair, whether he thinks the election was “stolen”, whether President Joe Biden is the legitimately elected President or what he thinks about the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol? It would be nice to know if Schultz thinks it was just a visit by some tourists or an insurrection. Silence in this election by any Republican candidate cannot be construed as anything but evasion.
3) Schultz has said nothing about his relationship to the Federalist Society. Are there any Republican lawyers in public office or seeking election or appointment to public office who aren’t members or past members of the Federalist Society? There’s an Association of Republican State Attorneys General comprised of Federalist Society members as far as I can discern. This Association and their members in Mississippi, Alabama and other States with republican Attorneys General have been the ones responsible for overturning Roe v. Wade (not just the majority on the US Supreme Court that actually signed the opinion). The public deserves to know what this Federalist Society’s agenda is all about, and its ties to the Association of Republican State Attorneys General. What are its (their) ties or its obligations to Charles and David Koch, the Koch family foundations, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Olin Foundation, Donors Trust and the other extreme right wing foundations and “philanthropies” that have funded their extreme right-wing libertarian agenda?
4) Schultz has criticized Ellison for “politicizing” the AG’s Office and said publicly he will fire certain attorneys to “depoliticize” that office. Does that mean he will replace them with “Republican” attorneys, as the 2018 Republican Candidate for Attorney General publicly promised he would?
5) Schultz was previously in-house counsel for Varde Partners (umlaut over the “a”). Varde Partners is “a leading global alternative investment firm specializing in credit and credit-related assets.” In other words a “hedge fund.” “Hedge funds” are defined by their lack of public transparency or accountability. Schultz’s Statement of Economic Interest states he is presently self employed. Since when? To whom does Jim Schultz now beholden? For the other categories, Schultz’s “Statement of Economic Interest” – : “sources of income”, “securities”, and “real estate”- “none is reported.” Does that mean that he has no income, no securities and no real estate or that Schultz has simply refused to report them?
If you’re going to run a stealth campaign, going on the offense may be the best defense if no one asks any questions. Schultz’s offense hasn’t addressed Ellison’s actual work as Attorney General because Schultz doesn’t know what the Attorney General does. I wish Ellison would keep his political opinions to himself but as far as I can tell the only way these have affected his job as AG is giving the Republican Senate an excuse to deny his request for more funding for county prosecutors. As a former assistant attorney general, I think Ellison has done a professional, effective and nonpartisan job as Attorney General. He deserves to stay on the job to continue to protect reproductive rights in Minnesota, to make sure that the climate change lawsuit that he started gets a full and fair hearing and to keep the Office of the Attorney General nonpartisan and professional.
Thank you, but this should be an actual op-ed. Ellison and his allies are completely failing to make any of these critical and relevant points in ads or elsewhere, and the hapless media apparently can’t investigate and report on any of them, including what exactly are Schultz’s imagined qualifications for the office. He is being allowed to run a stealth campaign, playing entirely on fear of urban crime.
A far right extremist as AG can do more direct damage to the interests of a majority of Minnesotans than any other office, including governor. Unfortunately very few people understand this, although professional rightwing activists do…
Of course they’re tied. An experienced Attorney General with a proven track record and an inexperienced right wing wacko. Its going on all over the country. I think a lot of has to do with the insane race baiting anti-Ellison ads running constantly on our TeeVees. Its really disgusting, but that’s where we are.
Survey participants self-selected rather than being randomly chosen. I question whether the poll results can be extrapolated to the larger voting population.