DFLer Jim Meffert's campaign released an internal poll yesterday confirming what so many of us in CD3 have been hoping to hear: Erik Paulsen is seen as part of the problem in Washington.
Standard caveats apply - it's an internal poll, so the highlights are bound to be bad for Paulsen and potentially good for Meffert. And the toplines (Paulsen leading Meffert 44-22) aren't good by any means. But any survey from a reputable shop like Lake Research which shows an incumbent with numbers like these has to be seen as a warning sign.
Paulsen reelect Re-elect Erik Paulsen: 33%
Consider someone else: 31%
(Don't know): 24%
Vote to replace Paulsen: 12%
The two really important numbers in that second note are the Re-elect Paulsen and Vote to Replace numbers -- 33-12. Those should correspond pretty closely with the base numbers for the two big-party candidates right now -- which means that, if the survey is accurate, there's a pretty huge number of voters in CD3 who are willing to consider someone not named Paulsen. Especially when we consider that only 33% both know enough about Paulsen's performance to have an opinion and like that performance, there's an opportunity here.
What Meffert needs right now, in a bad way, is money and exposure. We'll be doing our part in that respect in the next week or so (more news as events warrant), but you might consider sending a few bucks his way. We could make a significant impact in this race with a relatively small investment, despite not having a boogeyman named Bachmann as an opponent.
The bottom line here is that Paulsen is seen as part of the problem, not part of the solution among those who even know who he is. It's a start.
Republican MN-GOV candidate Tom Emmer is known for being weak on policy. He proved it today with another gaffe. He stated that as Governor he would push for a MN GI Bill which is already law and which he voted against.
He really has no idea what he's talking about. We've got hypocrisy, cluelessness and schadenfreude all rolled into one gaffe. He truly is the perfect candidate from a DFL perspective.
"I don't know if you remember, a few years ago the governor had proposed [a Minnesota GI bill]," said Emmer, a state representative. "And I think that's something we should certainly be looking at and it's unfortunate we haven't done something like that already."
There's just one problem: The proposal became law in 2007. It was included in a broader higher education appropriations bill, which Emmer voted against.
Campaign spokesman Bill Walsh attributed the flub to "bad staff work," noting that Emmer was reading from an overview of Pawlenty's proposals.
Maybe Team Emmer needs to adopt a strategy from the Palin/McCain campaign: keep their candidate away from any media. He's a disaster.
What free-money scam will be next from Tom Emmer's gubernatorial campaign?
Don't get me wrong here -- exempting military pensions from state income taxes isn't necessarily a bad idea. Under the right circumstances, it could even be a good one. Politically, changing the subject from "I want to enable restaurants to pay their workers less" to "I want to help our veterans keep more" is probably a smart move, despite its low chances for success.
But what are the consequences of that program? Has Emmer really thought any of his recent proposals through, or is he simply trying desperately to throw some economic/budget proposal against the wall to see what sticks?
Think about it -- the tip penalty Emmer proposed two weeks ago would mean tipped workers are making less, and thus paying less in state income taxes. The restaurant owners would be making more, and Emmer already supports lowering business taxes so that's even more free money out of the coffers meant for critical projects like education, transit, health care, etc. Walking the idea back meant Emmer had to advocating making tips tax-free, which once more means less tax collection for those same projects.
And now Emmer is proposing yet another program in which the state collects less money for critical programs during a time when tax collections are falling short of the state's commitment to those programs. How will Hypotheticalgovernor Emmer pay for the $25 million such a proposal would remove from the good side of the ledger? Which education program would he cut? Which tax would he raise to compensate?
As with so many things in his gubernatorial campaign, this latest proposal looks like yet more smoke and mirrors.
It's been awhile since the Minnesota Governors race was polled, SurveyUSA released the last poll on the race over a month ago, so we haven't been able to update the GPI recently. Just a reminder on the methodology:
The weighted average is an average of all the polls, weighted against a variable called "weight". This variable represents a combination of the Pollster Rating and the age of the poll. The newer the poll and better the pollster the higher it will be weighted. The age of the poll has more effect on the weight then the pollster rating, with the age making up 75% of the weight and the Pollster Rating making up 25%. However the age weighting will essentially fall off at 50 days and this will get adjusted as we get closer to the race in question.
There are only two polls that meet the 50 day shelf life criteria right now, the just released Rasmussen poll and the June SurveyUSA poll, so the GPI is simply a weighted average of those two polls. The only recent poll on the DFL primary is the SuveyUSA poll, so there will be no update to the primary GPI right now.
Here's the current GPI poll list:
And now the actual GPI:
All of the DFL candidates increased their wAve by about 3 points while Emmer held steady and Horner dropped a couple. The trend lines certainly look good for the DFL going forward.
I just got back from Utah last night, and I'm pleased to say I'm coming back to good news: according to Rasmussen, of all pollsters, all three DFL gubernatorial candidates are leading Tom Emmer.
Dayton: 40
Emmer: 36
Horner: 10
Undecided: 14
MAK: 40
Emmer: 35
Horner: 11
Undecided: 14
Entenza: 37
Emmer: 36
Horner: 12
Undecided: 15
Dayton's and MAK's results are essentially the same -- it looks like the only real shift among all three is that Entenza runs a little behind the other two, losing a few points among self-identified Democrats to "Undecided".
Political analyst David Schultz said it looked like Emmer was clearly ahead back in May. He believes two things have changed. He believes the democrats are now better known than a few months ago and Emmer's recent dispute with waiters and waitresses didn't help.
"I think there is some erosion of support for emmer regarding comments he's made about tips and minimum wage"
Alec brings up a good point in that diary linked above -- Rasmussen's house effect is about four points. That doesn't make their numbers wrong (especially given that about half of the polls done this cycle have been done by Rasmussen, so there may be a "poll to push the results" effect when all is said and done) but it does give us some insight into the way they build their likely-voter models.
But folks -- there's more to this than Shultz is saying in the Fox9 article. The great news about this poll is that this is how a primary should be run. Instead of one campaign opposing Tom Emmer, we have three, and instead of the media allowing Emmer a free pass, plenty of news coverage has been showered on the three DFL candidates instead (Waitergate notwithstanding). All three teams are working hard, and there haven't yet been any public spats that will preclude them from working together, and hard, from August 11th through November.
It looks like we have a great shot at avoiding the intramural bloodbath some worried about before the state convention. No complaints here.
(The tradMed has picked up on the name "Waitergate". Bravo! - promoted by Joe Bodell)
Tom Emmer would really like his plan to cut wages to fade away. I mean really, really would like it to go away, but we wont let it. Not even with corporate cash coming in to try and change the subject from his record of harmful votes against working class folks will this issue go away. Why? Because even after two weeks of criticism for his plan to slash workers wages, and every spin attempt he could think of, he still said he would still sign a minimum wage cut as governor. There isn't any way around it, Tom Emmer is just not on the side of working class Minnesotans.
That's why us folks over here at Alliance for a Better Minnesota Action Fund sent a camera crew to Tom Emmer's town hall meeting last week to get the reactions of local workers on how Tom Emmer's plan to cut their wages--by as much as three to four dollars an hour-- would impact their lives. That's why we're putting this ad, "Plan",on the air starting today.
You'll notice that none of these folks look to be raking in $100,000 a year. Certainly none of these folks played a part in creating our economic troubles, so why does Tom Emmer think that our way back to prosperity includes reaching into their pockets for their wages? Because, simply put, Tom Emmer cares more about a corporate bottom line than a family's. We've had eight years of a governor who has chosen big business over working families, and it's time for a new direction.
Visit TomEmmersMN.org or EmmerTruth.MN to learn more about how dangerous Tom Emmer's plan for Minnesota would be to working people across the state. Follow us on Twitter, or find us on Facebook, and together we can make sure we start buidling a Minnesota that works for all of us again.
Tom Emmer held a town hall event yesterday at the Ol' Mexico Restaurante & Cantina in Roseville. The event was billed on Emmer's website as "a town meeting with servers in the hospitality industry to listen to their concerns regarding wages, tips, taxes and health care." Concerns would be the polite way to describe what most of the people at the event felt. Something like "really pissed off" would probably come closer.
By the time I arrived, the Banquet Hall where the "town meeting" was being held in was full, so I took a seat in the restaurant with the rest of the overflow. The event inside was audible through the restaurants audio system. Most of the people in attendance were wearing stickers that claimed "I'm not overpaid," supplied by Alliance for a Better Minnesota. One woman I talked to told me she had worked for Norm Coleman back when he was Mayor of St. Paul and again when he ran for Senate, but she was now questioning if she could vote for Tom Emmer. She was wearing a sticker.
Republican gubernatorial candidate Tom Emmer has become incoherent on salaries and the minimum wage. This issue became a controversy for him last week at an event at the Eagle Street Grill in St. Paul when he claimed that servers make over $100,000 per year and should have lower wages. This statement in itself is ludicrous, but it's Emmer's history on the minimum wage and his subsequent floundering that makes him incoherent.
Because of this controversy, he's gone beyond flip-flopping. His clarifying statement confuses the situation saying he's not for lower anyone's wages while at the same time suggesting workers accept lower wages to protect their jobs. Now he wants to exempt servers tips up to $20,000.
Tom Emmer isn't a leader who has a plan. He's a back-bencher used to flinging poo and giggling at where it sticks. Now that he's under scrutiny, he's floundering.
I'll begin with the distant past ... 2005. Emmer introduced an amendment to abolish the minimum wage. This is the typically ridiculous kind of thing that fire-brand back benchers do.
Emmer repeatedly said he does not want to lower workers' wages, but (on May 2, 2005 2:15:00 into this clip ) Emmer proposed abolishing the minimum wage.
[picture removed]
Emmer withdrew the amendment after clearly stating "this would repeal the state minimum wage" sources say because Republicans told him it was not a good idea.
In 2008, Emmer clearly understood how much servers made and it wasn't $100K (h/t Flash):
In 2008, Republican Gov. Tim Pawlenty vetoed a bill that would have raised the minimum wage to $7.75 because it didn't include the tip credit for hourly service workers. Emmer voted against that bill. In 2005, DFLers defeated a tip credit amendment.
Emmer said he supports reinstituting the credit, which he said hasn't existed in Minnesota since 1990. He quoted a 2008 Hospitality Minnesota survey of restaurant owners that said state servers make an average of $15.43 an hour in wages plus gratuities.
Emmer made it clear which side of the worker/owner divide he was on back in 2005 and in 2008. However, he hadn't jumped the shark with any statement so ludicrously and blatantly false to make him look clownish.
A day before he was to hold a town hall with servers at a Roseville restaurant, Emmer on Tuesday proposed that waiters and waitresses be allowed to keep the first $20,000 of their tips tax-free. The average income for servers in Minnesota is $19,000.
"They should not have to report their tips," Emmer said. "Tips should not be taxed. That's my belief."
Wait a minute -- that's not what we were talking about, Mr. Emmer. We were talking about your earlier claim that since there were waitstaff making a hundred grand thanks to tips, their employers should be able to pay them less than the minimum wage. This new about-face seems little more than a ploy to save face with those workers who all of a sudden hate his guts.
It's telling that the GOP itself has been noticeably silent on this issue -- no one except the Emmer campaign itself has been trying to push back at the media, or the DFL, for their well-deserved critiques of Emmer's blatantly outside-the-mainstream claim and proposal.
WCCO reports that Republican Gubernatorial endorsee Tom Emmer waited on tables last night in an effort to...do something...about his boneheaded statement about wages and tips for wait staff. No media were invited, but his own campaign videographers were.
What the WCCO report doesn't tell you is that Ol' Mexico, the restaurant where Emmer shadowed a waiter, is owned by one Elizabeth Pavlick. Ms. Pavlick donated $250 to Tom Emmer's gubernatorial campaign on December 31st, 2009. You can find her name on page 19 of Emmer's year-end 2009 CFB report.
This isn't really about Pavlick -- business owners are entitled to political-donations-as-free-speech just like the rest of us. But given the context here -- Emmer insulting and bending the truth about an entire class of workers -- it might lend a little more credibility to his damage-control efforts if he went and did a little job shadowing somewhere that wasn't owned by one of his campaign donors.
Will Tom Emmer ever simply admit that he was wrong and move on? Will he continue to double down on his ridiculous claims? Or is he hopelessly lost in the belief that wait staff and other workers in the service industry don't deserve the same minimum wage as everyone else?
(We'll dig into the numbers later -- but thanks to Alec for getting the news out to the 'sphere.
This is good-to-great news, folks. - promoted by Joe Bodell)
Someone else can write a nice front page post, but I am very excited by this. Bachmann 48, Clark 39. MOE 4%. Hard to believe the IP candidate only got 6%. With no name recognition, Clark is only down by 9. Bachmann is below 50% and her name rec is universal.
KSTP/SurveyUSA will be publishing a poll of the Sixth district race between everyone's favorite insane violence-inciter Michele Bachmann and DFLer Tarryl Clark.
I'll be pleased as punch if MDE's Hellier is right. If Clark is within six points when her opponent has near-universal name-recognition and her own campaign has a big warchest to spend on building up her own positive name-rec, that'd be just fine by me.
But that's simply not realistic. If Clark is somewhere around ten points down, that's probably as good as can be expected at this point in the race. If I wanted to spin the expectations wheel downward a bit, I'd say it'd probably be around twenty points, but that's not realistic either -- It's likely that around 70% of the electorate already knows who they're going to vote for in this race, and of that 75%, about 40% are voting for Bachmann and about 30% are going for "Anyone but Bachmann". Of the remaining 30%, Tarryl Clark probably needs to get about 18% (given a third-party candidate pulling a few points worth of "Hate Bachmann but can't bring myself to vote DFL" votes) to win this race.
The really interesting number in tonight's poll release will be the undecided numbers, and how they line up with Tarryl Clark's approve/disapprove/not enough info line.
And here I thought we weren't going to have material for our inaugural Weekend Hate Mail feature. This week's installment comes from Brad in St. Bonifacius:
To: [Us]
From: xxxxxxxx@frontiernet.net
Subject: Tom Emmer ad on realclearpolitics
Thanks for posting your ad about Tom's positions. I was not sure who I should vote for this fall and you have cleared that up for me. Tom Emmer is the man to run our state. We do not need anymore taxes and we need to cut goverment pensions, teacher pensions also need to be cut. Goverment programs need to be cut and that ridiculous additional sales tax for the arts needs to be cut. It sounds like he is our man to get this accomplished.
I am sending in my $100 gift to his campaign today.
Brad - Saint Bonifacius, MN
Thanks for writing, Brad. To be clear, we run text-based ads through Google Adwords, and it sounds like that's what you found -- we wouldn't normally enter into an advertising agreement with RCP. I do find myself curious as to how reading MN Progressive Project after clicking one of its ads would convince you to vote for Emmer -- unless you already supported him and thought you were being cheeky by "sticking it to us" via email.
In any case, let's run down who Tom Emmer's newest financial backer appears not to like having a good solid support base from the state government:
Public servants
Teachers
Artists
Parks and outdoor areas in our communities (which get a portion of the money from that "ridiculous sales tax" that was approved by a huge majority of Minnesotans)
Wait staff
All right, I added wait staff myself, but given all the coverage Emmer's Week of Waitergate has gotten here and elsewhere, one has to assume that if all this warrants a donation to his campaign, the donor probably agrees with Emmer's untenable, immoral position, right?
WCCO News had brief coverage this morning on Tom Emmer's ridiculous claims about waiters making $100,000/year and his proposal to reduce their wages. Emmer, of course, followed up with a self-contradictory non-apology, which should be no surprise. What's sad (and also not entirely surprising) is that the traditional media really can't make itself analyze the meat of what Emmer really said -- for fear of losing access or drawing the ire of the Big Scary Republican Party of Minnesota, all they could say is that Emmer's comments "caused controversy."
No. Sorry. This is completely incorrect. There is NO controversy over Emmer's statements. No one is defending them -- all Emmer's campaign and political benefactors could come up with was a limp, mumbled counterattack against "something something liberals something something." In no way did they defend Emmer's proposal, which is factually, politically, economically, and morally wrong.
There is no controversy, because there's no "other side." Emmer is wrong on this and wrong for Minnesota. And everyone outside of Emmer's inner monologue knows it.
Eric Roper of the Minneapolis Star Tribune wrote an article today about the fundraising of Michele Bachmann and Tarryl Clark. Once again, the Strib glosses over Bachmann's insane conspiracy theories, lying and bigotry. The strongest language Roper uses is "outspoken" and polarizing."
Bachmann certainly is these things, but when will the Strib EVER provide any analysis of what she actually said? When will it ever be appropriate to discuss her insane statements, lies and bigotry?
It's not like Bachmann doesn't provide enough material or do so often enough. It's simply a matter of the Strib has ALWAYS glossed over her insanity, lying and bigotry.
Will Roper and et al ever ask Bachmann any tough questions? Will they ever examine the truth of what comes out of her mouth? Are Roper and company averse to reporting the truth about her?
Personally, I'm not holding my breathe for any investigative or analytical political journalism to come from the Star Tribune anytime before November ... or ever, actually. Their journalistic standards are just so low.
