Did SurveyUSA Get Franken vs McFadden Poll Wrong?

Yesterday, Breitbart News reported on a new KSTP/SurveyUSA poll that has Democrat Al Franken leading Republican challenger Mike McFadden 53 to 38 percent. We later updated with a statement from the McFadden campaign. Additionally, subsequent research of our own casts further doubt on the poll’s reliability.

Update: The McFadden campaign has offered the following response to the survey. From Tom Erickson, McFadden for Senate spokesman, “If the guys at SurveyUSA really think that Democrat turnout in Minnesota will be higher than 2008 or 2012, then we’d like whatever they’re smoking. Clearly the Democrats don’t feel like Al Franken has a double-digit lead, or they wouldn’t be launching a million dollar attack ad campaign tomorrow.”

First, we discovered on our own that McFadden’s camp had recently questioned another Survey USA poll for KSTP TV. The campaign did not direct us to that previous incidence.

The manager of Republican Mike McFadden’s U.S. Senate campaign is disputing a poll that shows DFL Sen. Al Franken with an 18 point lead over McFadden.

We then discovered this item by NRO’s Jim Geraghty, which raises additional questions as regards SurveyUSA’s results. Geraghty cites other recent instances where SurveyUSA polls appear to favor Democrats in a manner seemingly not entirely consistent with other available polling.

Are SurveyUSA’s Polls a Warning to the GOP? Or Just Outliers?

And finally there’s this. It seems unusual that in a year when Democrat turn out is expected to be down, if anything, that the Dem +8 weight of the sample in this most recent Franken vs. McFadden is open to question. Without this latest SurveyUSA poll which puts Franken up by 15, the current Real Clear Politics poll average for the race would have Franken up by between 7 – 8 points. Without any additional results in line with SurveyUSA’s latest, we believe that 7 – 8 points may well be the better indicator as to where the race currently stands.

              10/21-23/06 ;   10/16-18/08 ;   10/24-27/10 ;   10/26-30/12 ;   10/14-16/14  

DEM           38                       38                         33                        37                           39  

GOP            34                        31                         35                       30                            31  

IND              24                      27                         29                       28                            29  

                  Dem +4               Dem +7            GOP +2              Dem +7                  Dem +8