StarTribune Minnesota Poll - Klobuchar vs Bills

Minnesota likes incumbents like Klobuchar - boring and dull - and Bills is a super-weak candidate. Good chance Romney will outperform him by double digits without even campaigning in MN.
 
Bills is in the same position in Minnesota that Paul Sadler is in here in Texas. (Both are running for Senate.) They've both been written off so they get very little media attention and few donations. When they actually do get some media attention, all the questions are about their viability as candidates and not about their stance on issues. I think Bills would have been a stronger candidate were it not for the disarray and infighting in the Republican party of Minnesota.
 
Here are the problems:

1) Establishment Republicans: they are sitting on their hands and their wallets because Kurt Bills was nominated by Ron Paul supporters.

2) Ron Paul Supporters: they ran out on Bills because of his endorsement of Romney and are refusing to help his campaign with donations or door knocking.

3) Bills' higher level campaign chairmen: they had many opportunities for endorsements but refused to let Bills fill out the paperwork or meet with the organizations. My union was really interested in endorsing Bills but the campaign never replied to their letters or my letters or my phone calls.

4) Special interests: They are excluding Bills from their flyers yet including the other Republicans. Case in point, I received a flyer from a Pro-Life organization that had a list of pro-life Republicans to vote for and starting at the top, it included Romney/Ryan and the next name was Congressman Chip Cravaack, no mention of Bills. Another example is, the NRA ranked Bills with an "A" and didn't endorse him, on the cover of their Election Special Magazine it listed the NRA endorsements for my area and this is how it was worded: President - Romney/Ryan, Senate - NO ENDORSEMENT see page 65, Congress - Chip Cravaack. This sounds as if there aren't any Pro-Gun candidates running for U.S. Senate.

Bills needed all of these things to help him overcome Klobuchar and unfortunately, he hasn't been getting much help from anyone.
 
DeMintConservative said:
Minnesota likes incumbents like Klobuchar - boring and dull - and Bills is a super-weak candidate. Good chance Romney will outperform him by double digits without even campaigning in MN.
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Klobuchar is like Feinstein, Boxer and Pelosi. She is nothing but an establishment participant and tool, albeit on the Mommy government side. It seems that Minnesota shares California's political predisposition.

Pisces said:
...They've both been written off so they get very little media attention and few donations. When they actually do get some media attention, all the questions are about their viability as candidates and not about their stance on issues. I think Bills would have been a stronger candidate were it not for the disarray and infighting in the Republican party of Minnesota.
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The establishment doesn't want Bills, thus the media will never be on his side or give him coverage. The neo-conservatives hate him, so they will sit this one out. Half of the Ron Paul people decided he wasn't pure enough for them after the Primary. Hard to generate any donations or attention under these circumstances.
 
Still voting for Bills happily next week, but this poll confirms my worst fears. We are looking at not just a loss, but a really gut wrenching blow out. To put it in perspective, Bills is polling about ten percent lower than what Mark Kennedy received against Klobuchar last time, and he was a very nasty neo-con who based his whole campaign around "staying the course" in Iraq.

I hope the GOPe in this state remains bankrupt and in disarray for sometime to come. Otherwise, they will easily be able to point to this race as an inevitable loss when you nominate liberty minded Republicans. I expect them to drum up another empty suite similar to Coleman and Pawlenty for Governor in 2014.

If that unfolds, I will return the party's favor by sitting on my hands and refusing to support their establishment candidate after what they did to Bills.
 
Classic example of political novices not knowing how to run a campaign yet allowing a gumshoe to go through the motions. Unfortunately, it was the outcome of the state convention and the Ron Paul name that was used to turn the average republican against him by the party brass. I'm thankful that Bills ran but he needed one of Rand's lieutenants from the start. Sending in interns from YAL isn't going to cut it w/o a pro to oversee the necessary political maneuvering that Bills sorely lacked.
 
FSP-Rebel said:
Classic example of political novices not knowing how to run a campaign yet allowing a gumshoe to go through the motions. Unfortunately, it was the outcome of the state convention and the Ron Paul name that was used to turn the average republican against him by the party brass. I'm thankful that Bills ran but he needed one of Rand's lieutenants from the start. Sending in interns from YAL isn't going to cut it w/o a pro to oversee the necessary political maneuvering that Bills sorely lacked.
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It's not the Ron Paul novices that are running the campaign, it's the establishment that replaced us. Every time we suggest something they look at us like we don't know what we are talking about and they disregard our suggestions. We've been hearing rumors for a while that the establishment have been trying to sabotage Bills' campaign and it looks more and more likely that is what has happened. We wanted him to run on a Ron Paul platform, which would have worked in Minnesota, but his new advisors wanted him to be more neo-con to solidify the Republicans he lost by being associated with Ron Paul. Unfortunately, that was the wrong way to go. If he had stuck with our suggestions, he would have appealed to the independants and that's the biggest political group in Minnesota.

Amy has been running some really heart-felt, feel-good ads and when Bills had one chance to air an ad, his advisors had him run a negative ad against her and he looked like an ass. He should have run an ad focusing on his middle class union upbringing and his career as a teacher, that would have appealed to everyone in Minnesota and it would have worked better for him.
 
Michael Landon said:
It's not the Ron Paul novices that are running the campaign, it's the establishment that replaced us. Every time we suggest something they look at us like we don't know what we are talking about and they disregard our suggestions. We've been hearing rumors for a while that the establishment have been trying to sabotage Bills' campaign and it looks more and more likely that is what has happened. We wanted him to run on a Ron Paul platform, which would have worked in Minnesota, but his new advisors wanted him to be more neo-con to solidify the Republicans he lost by being associated with Ron Paul. Unfortunately, that was the wrong way to go. If he had stuck with our suggestions, he would have appealed to the independants and that's the biggest political group in Minnesota.
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Sounds like they sabotaged the campaign. And the neo-cons were never going to donate to the campaign or promote him anyway, so catering to them was futile. I don't know what would fly in Minnesota, but I would have recommended emphasizing "no TARP or Wall St bailouts", "decriminalize marijuana", and "no more nation building and endless wars". At least that might have gotten some attention instead of using generic Republican rhetoric. As much as a focus on the Federal Reserve is great, it's not convincing anyone one way or another during a campaign. We are the people who care, and we already knew were he stood on that.
 
Bills' real victory was the primary (convention), not at the general. I was there, I helped make it happen.

The thing is that he can go on to run for perhaps Governor, or Congress, because his name recognition has increased because of this.
 
Matt Collins said:
Bills' real victory was the primary (convention), not at the general. I was there, I helped make it happen.

The thing is that he can go on to run for perhaps Governor, or Congress, because his name recognition has increased because of this.
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Exactly. The first time out of the gate for him for a Federal office. In a state like MN, going against an incumbent, name recognition is the only realistic goal.
 
tsai3904 said:
Minnesota
October 23-25
800 likely voters
+/-3.5%

Amy Klobuchar 65%
Kurt Bills 22%

Story:
http://www.startribune.com/politics/statelocal/176350381.html

Results:
http://www.startribune.com/politics/statelocal/176021251.html

Key figure:
52% of respondents didn't recognize the name Kurt Bills.
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actual results:

Amy Klobuchar 65%
Kurt Bills 31%

They got Klobuchar's number exactly right, but the Bill's number was way off, much farther than their standard deviation of 3.5%.

Either the Poll was propaganda, or they are incompetent.
 
Brian4Liberty said:
actual results:

Amy Klobuchar 65%
Kurt Bills 31%

They got Klobuchar's number exactly right, but the Bill's number was way off, much farther than their standard deviation of 3.5%.

Either the Poll was propaganda, or they are incompetent.
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The Undecided was 12% of which Bills got 10% of it. How is their poll incompetent or propaganda? Their poll was basically dead-on.
 
TCE said:
The Undecided was 12% of which Bills got 10% of it. How is their poll incompetent or propaganda? Their poll was basically dead-on.
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The details of the Poll don't say anything about "Undecided". There's no way to know how many people answered "undecided", if any. Maybe people named third Party candidates and they didn't report those numbers.

Getting 10% of 12% (83%) of undecided would not be normal in any case.

They were outside of their margin of error in reporting Bills numbers. That is a failure. And as has become abundantly clear, over or under estimating a candidates numbers in a "poll" is a political technique, not science.
 
Brian4Liberty said:
The details of the Poll don't say anything about "Undecided". There's no way to know how many people answered "undecided", if any. Maybe people named third Party candidates and they didn't report those numbers.

Getting 10% of 12% (83%) of undecided would not be normal in any case.

They were outside of their margin of error in reporting Bills numbers. That is a failure. And as has become abundantly clear, over or under estimating a candidates numbers in a "poll" is a political technique, not science.
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Go here: http://www.startribune.com/politics/statelocal/176021251.html?refer=y

KLOBUCHAR BILLS OTHER UNDECIDED
STATE 65% 22% 1% 12%


It shows Undecided.
 
TCE said:
Go here: http://www.startribune.com/politics/statelocal/176021251.html?refer=y

KLOBUCHAR BILLS OTHER UNDECIDED
STATE 65% 22% 1% 12%


It shows Undecided.
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Ah, got it (my bad, I didn't scroll all the way down the page).

Well, getting the vast majority of the undecided would be highly unusual. Something still wrong with the poll. I might guess that they worded the poll in a way which excluded people who knew they would vote GOP, but didn't know or couldn't remember Bills name. "Q: Who you voting for? A: The Republican, don't remember his name." Then they mark that down as undecided. That would be a way to spin the results.
 
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