A new poll by the University of Minnesota's Humphrey Institute and Minnesota Public Radio was released today indicating Barack Obama still has the advantage over John McCain in the Gopher State.
The poll, conducted over an 11-day period ending August 17th of 763 likely voters, finds Obama leading McCain 48 to 38 percent, with Ralph Nader and Libertarian Bob Barr earning 3 percent and 1 percent respectively.
The HHH / MPR poll is the first released in a month to find Obama’s lead in double-digits in the Gopher State. McCain has not led Obama in any poll of Minnesotans since a mid-March poll conducted by SurveyUSA.
The poll internals suggest Obama is benefiting from a 14-point net gender gap, with female voters supporting the Illinois Senator by a 52 to 36 percent margin.
To read the full 10-page report on the presidential race in Minnesota, please visit the Humphrey Institute’s Center for the Study of Politics and Governance website.
I assume that polling only engages persons who have land- lines. That being the case, I'd also assume that younger potential voters are under-represented in your poll and in other like polls because a larger percentage of them only have cell phones. This issue isn't discussed in the report. Is it considered?
In general, commercial and academic pollsters have found the cell phone issue to not be a problem when conducting their random sample surveys. The Pew Research Center posted a report on this a year ago:
http://pewresearch.org/pubs/515/polling-cell-only-problem
The study concludes: "Thus, although cell-only respondents are different from landline respondents in important ways, they were neither numerous enough nor different enough on the questions we examined to produce a significant change in overall general population survey estimates when included with the landline samples and weighted according to U.S.
Census parameters on basic demographic characteristics."