Question: Whom would you vote for if the election for governor were held today and the candidates were...

43% Tim Pawlenty (R)
41% Mike Hatch (DFL)
5% Peter Hutchinson (I)
2% Ken Pentel (G)
2% Other/None
7% No Opinion

47% Tim Pawlenty (R)
28% Becky Lourey (DFL)

About this Poll This report is based on the most recent Star Tribune Minnesota Poll, a random-digit-dial (RDD) telephone survey of 813 adults statewide July 6-11.

Information Specialists Group, Inc., 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. ISG used a stratified, area-probability sample that the newspaper provided. It was probability-proportionate-to-size, and stratified by county. The Star Tribune's polling unit provided the random-digit-dial sample of telephone numbers from the unit's server-based telephone sampling database, which contains all working residential prefix-area code combinations in the state. (Consequently, all adults in the state who live in households with telephones were potential respondents; the sample was not limited to those with listed phone numbers, or newspaper subscribers, or other inappropriate populations.) Interviewers used the "most-recent-birthday" technique to choose the adult from each household to be interviewed.

Researchers modeled the likely electorate for the general election using four questions: past voting history, current registration status, interest in the election, and self-professed probability of voting. Respondents were weighted according to their likelihood of weighting: Those most likely to vote (registered, voted in 2002, definitely will vote, high interest) were assigned larger weights; those least likely to vote (not registered, didn't vote in 2002, won't vote and low interest) received smaller weights. Weights are based on formulas verified in past elections.

The maximum margin of sampling error for percentages based on 813 is 3 percentage points, plus or minus, at a 95 percent confidence level, if one ignores the effect of sample design. Those tolerances for smaller groups, such as Democrats or Republicans, will be larger. Other things such as question wording, question order and some practical difficulties of interviewing may affect the results. These difficulties include a limited interviewing period, and the effect of news events and campaign activities on public opinion . Generally accepted social science research procedures were employed at every step of the research to reduce such problems.