A look at the MPR poll
You'll note that the time stamp on this post is 3 a.m. Rest assured, I'm not actually working at 3 a.m., but the MPR poll story on the governor's race is embargoed. I'm actually writing this at 3 p.m. on Tuesday after working on setting up the poll results on the aforementioned page and trying to make sense of these numbers.
They don't make sense. And the reason they don't make sense is the governor's race, as near as I can tell, is defying the usual things I look at in elections.
I'm not a statistics expert, I'm not a political scientist. I'm so unschooled that I have always thought that the popular candidate will win out over the less popular one and that incumbency matters.
That's so yesterday, apparently.
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As I've posted here before, my usual antennae do not detect a big problem for Pawlenty. And yet the polls keep showing that he's got a problem and every person I know -- who knows -- says Pawlenty is afraid he's going to lose this election, and he might.
But I'm not sure it's going to be his fault.
The more I look at these numbers, the more I think that if the numbers are right, Pawlenty's caught in some sort of whirlpool that isn't entirely of his doing. Maybe it's an anti-Republican thing. Maybe it's an anti-Iraq thing. What it doesn't necessarily appear to be is an anti-Pawlenty thing.
Check out the job approval ratings that I could dig up from past MPR polls. The percentage indicates the number of people who say he's doing either a good or excellent job as governor.
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There's not a huge swing there, and most of it seems to reflect the state budget "crisis."
His numbers now, however, aren't far from the worst numbers Ventura racked in the middle of his term. He was hanging around 52% in February 2000 with a low of 43% shortly before that.
Now let's look at the current poll. Forty-seven percent of those surveyed said Pawlenty is doing a "good" or "excellent" job as governor. That's up 1% from the last survey (statistically insignificant, I guess). But only 42% say they'd vote for him.
Where did that 5% go? Moreover, what does it mean that 5% of the voters won't vote for you, even if they think you're doing a good job. How do you run on that?
The other thing about this poll is that Pawlenty's favorables went up 2% in this survey over a month ago, while Hatch's went up 5%. Peter Hutchinson's went up 2%. Relatively even.
The "unfavorables", however, went up 9% for Hatch, and went up only 4% for Pawlenty. They went up 12% for Hutchinson.
The "neutrals" went down 13% for Hatch, 16% for Pawlenty and went up 4% for Hutchinson.
Hatch's previous "neutrals" went mostly to the "unfavorables." Pawlenty's previous "neutrals" were mostly split between "favorables" and "unfavorables" . But a whole chunk of the former "neutrals" seems to have disappeared -- at least to this untrained eye.
Peter Hutchinson, meanwhile, got a lot of voters to recognize his name, but too many of them decided they didn't like him ... at least based on favorables.
So what does all of this mean?
It means Tim Pawlenty doesn't have Tim Penny to help him get elected this year. Penny pulled 16% of the vote four years ago.
Peter Hutchinson is pulling 4% right now.
It's a two-person race and that apparently is not a good sign for Pawlenty.