Mark my words - the Dems are fighting now and aren't unified, but come the fall MN won't be even a little bit close.

They will vote for President Obama and Senator Franken.

I was going to question whether this was a very good indication of how close the race in Minnesota would be come November. But looking back at results from 2000, the polling was very close the entire time and the state only wound up going for Gore by about 2.5 points.

On March 2, 2000, Minnesota NPR reported close polling in Minnesota for the general election:

The Telephone Survey of 641 registered voters around the state shows Democratic Vice President Al Gore with a 43-40 percent victory over Texas Governor George W. Bush.

Interestingly the same poll showed McCain leading Gore 44-40. So there is evidence that at this stage, both Clinton and especially Obama are in a better position than Gore was in 2000. In any event , it looks like the race stayed close throughout the summer. A Minnesota Star Tribune poll conducted from June 12-18, 2000 showed Gore narrowly edging Bush 39-36.

I struggle to understand why these types of polls are considered all that relevant as of now. We're still seven full months away from the election. Polls are fluid. Obama has been absolutely slaughtered in the press the last three or four weeks, and yet he's hanging tough in the polls. We all know Hillary has her ceiling, and sure enough she can't break away despite the supposedly reeling Obama campaign.

So the fact that the Clinton campaign is staking its entire argument of "electability" on polls like these, taken so far in advance of the election and after Obama has been brutalized in the press for the better part of a month, really says something about how far they are willing to stretch logic.

This is an outlier. Every election year the Republicans try to convince the state that we're getting more conservative. Gore won by a few thousand in 2000, but Kerry won by over 100,000 in 2004. The Dems took back the state house and increased their control over the state senate. Coleman's on his way out and at least one of the 3 U.S. House seats that are occupied by Republicans now are going to switch. The governor and Michele Bachmann can thank the third party candidates for their wins last time around.

Please forgive me if the following is a neophyte question, but don't all these hypothetical Dem Vs. Rep polls suffer at least some loss of meaning because of the divide between the Dem candidates at this point? Meaning, isn't there a certain percentage of Clinton supporters who would, in order to help their candidate in the primary, claim to support McCain in the general in order to show Obama in a worse light (and vice versa for some Obama supporters)? If so I would expect the numbers to look a little better for the Dems after a nominee is chosen.

Maybe these polls account for this in some way I'm not aware of (hence my neophyte qualifier at the start), but I would think at least some of the support shown for McCain at this point would swing back to the Dems once this bruising primary has been over for a few months.