Wednesday, October 8, 2008

Minnesota Daily Roundup - 10/8/08

Lots of news in the Minnesota political world today. And since I'm a Minnesota political junkie I'm going to try to do a roundup of it daily.

MN-03:

-KSTP and SurveyUSA have a new poll out showing Democratic candidate Ashwin Madia leading Republican Erik Paulsen and Independence Party candidate David Dillon in the race for the open seat in the 3rd congressional district

SurveyUSA (10/6-7, 634 likely voters):
Ashwin Madia (D): 46
Erik Paulsen (R): 43)
David Dillon (IP): 8
(MoE: ±4%)

Those numbers are pretty close to a recent DCCC internal poll showing Madia leading by 44-39 which is surprising beacuse the KSTP/SurveyUSA polls of Minnesota have tended to have a Republican lean. Also they polled the presidential race in the 3rd district. Obama leads McCain by 49-47. Bush beat Kerry here by 51-48 in 2004. Full details of the poll are available here. Other interesting finds in the poll. Bush has a 28-68 approve/disapprove ratio in the district which should help Madia but current Representative Jim Ramstad has a 58-10 ratio which should help Paulsen. 66 percent say that the economy is the number one issue, all other issues are in single digits. 48 percent of voters say oil companies are to blame for high gas prices, nothing else comes close. Also when asked if they'd support a candidate favors offshore drilling as a energy solution or one who favors alternative energy the candidate who would favor alternative energy won 62-29.

-Tom Scheck over at Polinaut is reporting that the NRCC has scaled back their mid-October ad buy in support of Paulsen, and now only has $216,450 in reserved time for Paulsen but is buying $126,000 of ad time in the 6th district despite Michelle Bachmann having tons of cash and not being a target of the DCCC, interesting.

-So now Paulsen is getting desperate and calling Madia a lier.



MN-Sen:

-James Dobson's Focus on the Family PAC has a mailing out in support of Norm Coleman. You can view the PDF here.

-A new poll from MPR has Franken up 4

MN-06:

-Forum Communications has a nice series about the MN-06 race. One is a general profile of the race, one is a profile of Democratic/IP candiate Elwyn Tinklenberg and one is a profile of incumbent Republican Michelle Bachmann.

-The Star Tribune also looks at the race.

Presidential Election:

-Michelle Obama will be in Minnesota on Monday.

-Rasmussen's latest poll of Minnesota has Obama up 7.

-McCain is outspending Obama $608,000 to $121,000.

-MNPublius says he's going to double that amount.

Other Stuff:

-After being rejected overwhelmingly by the voters anti-Instant Runoff Voting activists are headed to court. Go IRV!

And that's the news for today.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Hey I found a really cool website called the voting site . The sites mission is to evangelize the instant run off voting. Users can create there own instant run off elections and vote in other peoples instant run off elections. The site does a good job of showing how instant run off voting works.