Question:

Hatch-D: 46%
Pawlenty-R: 37%
Hutchinson-I. 7%
Pentel-G: 1%
Undecided: 5%

About this Poll
This report is based on the most recent Star Tribune Minnesota Poll, a random-digit-dial (RDD) telephone survey of 818 adults statewide Oct. 6-11. One adult (18 or older) per household was interviewed.

The Information Specialists Group of Eden Prairie conducted the interviewing from its central interviewing facility where interviewers were trained prior to calling, and supervised and monitored during the interviewing.

They used a stratified, area-probability sample that the newspaper provided. Researchers stratified the sample by county, and thus it was a probability-proportionate-to-size (PPS) sample.

The Star Tribune's News Research Department provided the sample of telephone numbers from the department's telephone sampling database, which contains all working residential area code-prefix combinations in the state. (Consequently, all adults in the state who live in households with landline telephones were potential respondents; the sample was not limited to those with listed phone numbers, or newspaper subscribers, or other inappropriate populations.)

Interviewers also used the most-recent-birthday technique to ensure that the adult from each household who was interviewed was selected at random.

Weighting accounts for the fact that people have different probabilities of turning out to vote. In Minnesota, residents can register to vote on Election Day, and consequently all adults (except for some special populations such as felons, aliens and certain populations in group quarters), are likely voters. Some, however, are more likely to vote than others, and the likely voter model the Minnesota Poll uses takes into account predictors of voting, including registration status, voting history, interest in the election, and self-described likelihood of voting to give the responses of those most likely to vote heavier weights and those least likely to vote lesser weights. The sample is assumed to be representative of likely voters at this point in the election campaign, within the margin of sampling error.

The maximum margin of sampling error for percentages based on 818 is 3.4 percentage points, plus or minus, at a 95 percent confidence level. Those tolerances for smaller groups such as Democrats or Republicans will be larger. Sampling error does not take into account other sources of variation in public opinion studies such as non-response, question wording or context effects. All of those, including reporting of news events during the interviewing period, may affect the results.

Another factor that could influence results is the number of people excluded from the sample originally because they refused to be interviewed. The cooperation rate (COOP4, as defined by the American Association for Public Opinion Research) for this poll is 59 percent. The extent to which those persons who did not respond to the survey are different from those in the larger population may affect the results. (For complete definitions and a more extensive discussion of response rates and polling in general, see the American Association for Public Opinion Research's website at www.aapor.org).