Over to You, Trunk

Two years ago, the Trunk deconstructed the Minnesota Poll run by the Minnesota Star Tribune, and showed why it is consistently wrong. Amazingly enough, it is consistently wrong in the same direction–it always predicts the Democrats to do better than they actually do.
Now, if you were running a poll and your goal was to make accurate predictions, you wouldn’t let that happen. You’d make adjustments so that your poll wasn’t consistently wrong in the same direction, much like a major league outfielder who finds that all of this throws to home plate are tailing up the third base line. But the Star Trib’s poll hasn’t done that. Year after year, it proudly cranks out wrong results. This is because the Strib isn’t interested in running a competent poll, they are interested in running a poll that helps the DFL party win.
In keeping with the Strib’s tradition of always-wrong-but-good-for-the-Dems polls, the paper reported this morning that John Kerry has a nine-point lead over President Bush in Minnesota.
That’s absurd, of course, but, much as CBS News is willing to go down the toilet if it helps the Kerry campaign, the Strib will do whatever it takes, sacrificing its own credibility if necessary, to lend Kerry a hand.
The good news is that no one cares. The competent polling, done mostly by the parties themselves, shows Minnesota a dead heat. The Trunk can supply any additional information that may be necessary to put the Minnesota Poll’s latest wrong numbers in context.

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