Minnesota staying blue so far

The Strib has come out with a new presidential poll that shows that John McCain is down 13 percent to Barack Obama and is down 9 to Hillary Clinton. Now, we have heard for the past couple of presidential election cycles that Minnesota is a battleground state. This goes against the reality that the last Republican to get Minnesota's electoral votes was Richard Nixon in 1972. Now, we need to keep in mind that the Star Tribune poll has historically been wrong, and there is reason to believe the poll skews towards the Democratic candidate in any given race. However, even with this bias, I guess I have a hard time seeing John McCain getting Minnesota's 10 electoral votes come November. I think McCain has a much better shot of flipping Wisconsin. Obviously, we are a long way from the election, and one x-factor here is whether Tim Pawlenty actually does get the VP nod from McCain. Also, it's possible for McCain to get a pretty good post-convention bounce given the convention is here in the Twin Cities. We shall see. But, I don't think things are looking good. The core cities are liberal, as always. The Iron Range and Duluth are liberal, as always. The problem is that from what I can see, the burbs here are not going to be reliably conservative this time around. I could be reading this wrong, but I think McCain is going to need something to happen on the ground before Minnesota really comes into play.

One somewhat related quibble in the article: It called Minnesota the heart of the three-state region that is in play, the others being Wisconsin and Iowa. I think that Twin Cities media has believed and continues to believe it wields a lot more influence in Wisconsin (and Iowa for that matter) than it really does. I can tell you with a pretty high degree of certainty that hardly anyone east of Highway 53 gets their news from Twin Cities media. This goes to the whole Minneapolis-St. Paul is the center of the universe thing. But, that is another post.