The Star Tribune’s Minnesota Poll, now out-sourced to New Jersey, has been in heavy play this past week. For decades a valuable snapshot of Minnesota attitudes, the Poll, as many of you know, was seriously down-sized under McClatchy ownership and “right-sized” into oblivion by Avista Capital Partners. The Poll’s most recent director, Rob Daves, was dismissed this year, the office shuttered and all institutional memory pretty well vacated.
With interim publisher, Chris Harte, cautioning his editorial section to avoid wild-hair liberal notions like calling for sufficient revenue to actually maintain the infrastructure we’ve got, I was intrigued to see that the question, “Would you be willing to pay more in gasoline taxes in order to pay for increased inspection and repair of bridges”, produced a 46%/50% yes/no verdict from the public. Though reporter Pat Doyle noted that that breakout falls within the 4% plus-or-minus margin of error, meaning you could if you wanted see a split decision, the usual suspects jumped on the “no vote” to affirm their campaigns to keep Minnesota’s finances just the way they are … or at the very worst shift some cash from all those lavish public schools and over-paid teachers to freeway construction.
Proper allocation and all that, you know.
Every poll depends on who you ask and how you phrase the question. In this case, the “Minnesota Poll”, contracted out to New Jersey-based Princeton Survey Research Associates, emphasized the hot-button word “bridge”, whereas polls conducted in 2004 and 2005 and at various times through the late ’80s and ’90s emphasized either “road improvements” or “road maintenance”.
Anti-tax crusaders and other status quo tub-thumpers will remain gleeful with the verdict because they can continue to make the argument that even after “goosing” the question with the word “bridge”, the pro-tax crowd “only” registered 46%, give or take 4%.
But if you dial back through the history of Minnesota Polls asking residents/voters about gas tax increases, it is interesting how thinking has changed, or not, over the last two decades. For example, in 1987 the yes/no split was 46%/48%. In 1990 it was 52%/45%. In 1993, 66%/32%. By 2005 it had drifted back to 41%/55%.
While 2007’s 46%/50% can be read as public sentiment against a gas tax increase, you could just as easily have said, “Public shows small increase in acceptance of gas tax hike,” based on approval moving up from 41% to 46% in the past two years.
Or … if you really wanted to stick a wrench in the spokes of the “non-partisan” Taxpayers’ League you could could point to the 2004 Minnesota Poll, which was conducted while Gov. Pawlenty and his transportation guru, Carol Molnau, were floating the idea of leasing out Twin Cities’ freeways to private contractors and charging tolls. In that context only 23% of Minnesotans favored increasing the gas tax.
With that in mind you could have had a headline on Sunday’s poll saying something like, “Support for gas tax increase doubles since ’04”, and been correct, technically.
I called Rob Daves, still here in Minnesota and busy assembling soon-to-launch Daves & Associates Research. He had only positive things to say about Princeton Survey. “Great firm. They do excellent work.”
He had been out of town this past weekend and hadn’t seen the gas tax poll. I read him the question as asked.
He offered that readers might have gotten a truer historical comparison had the gas tax question been asked the same way it always has, or at the very least, been subjected to a “split-ballot sample”, where half the 800-1200 respondents were asked the “road improvements” questions and the other half the “bridge” question.
That didn’t happen. So what we’re left with is a more or less an even split on the question of raising the gas tax, which is sufficiently fertile turf for legislation this winter. I mean, anytime you can get half the voters saying they’ll pay more you’ve got more than adequate
political cover.
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