MN: Harper Polling (R) - Biden +3

[neostassenite31]

Harper is the actual pollster of Jason Lewis, so unless his campaign wants to run on completely partisan data, these numbers should be what they're actually seeing (albeit maybe a best case scenario).

[neostassenite31]

Hopefully all these R polls of Minnesota will motivate one of the B+ or A tier pollsters (not Emerson) to conduct a poll here.

You're going to (almost certainly) get both SurveyUSA and Mason Dixon within the next three weeks, so rest assured.

[neostassenite31]

I remember Harper being decent in 2016, but obviously take R internal with grain of salt.  I still don’t really think Trump should invest here over Michigan.

Hasn't the Trump campaign already triaged Michigan?

They're not abandoning Michigan completely but more resources were diverted to MN presumably because of either 1.) better polling; 2.) smaller state so cheaper to campaign in; 3.) that Trump is a "trophy collector" and wants MN as a prize. The trade-off between these two is a larger African American population versus more college educated whites  

[neostassenite31]

Trump got fewer votes in the state of Minnesota than George W. Bush did in 2004.

That's because Bush actually targeted MN in 2004 with a massive investment and 3rd parties were a non-factor that year. I don't exactly believe in the concept of hard ceilings because turnout characteristics versus total turnout changes from election to election, but in a head-to-head matchup I still struggle to picture Trump getting the better of Biden in this environment   

[neostassenite31]

Can we please get some credible polls here so we can put the very unlikely possibility of Trump flipping this state to rest?

This is a reiteration, but we can expect at an absolute minimum SurveyUSA and Mason-Dixon within the next 2-3 weeks for MN given trends in prior cycles. Results from these two pollsters combined should settle this debate much more definitively

[neostassenite31]

Can we please get some credible polls here so we can put the very unlikely possibility of Trump flipping this state to rest?

This is a reiteration, but we can expect at an absolute minimum SurveyUSA and Mason-Dixon within the next 2-3 weeks for MN given trends in prior cycles. Results from these two pollsters combined should settle this debate much more definitively

Susa was very bad in 2016...

You could argue that most pollsters were pretty bad in 2016 I suppose. I don't believe they weighed for education by race in 2016, but they started doing it during the next cycle for sure. Indeed ultimately the only judge of accuracy is the final election results.