MN-Sen: Rasmussen shows Franken 44 – Coleman 42

Cross-posted from Minnesota Campaign Report

Rasmussen Reports has published a poll showing DFLer Al Franken leading incumbent Republican Norm Coleman in the 2008 Senate race, 44-42.

Reports published elsewhere indicate that SurveyUSA also has a poll coming out tonight, and S-USA will show a 52-39 advantage for Coleman.

Clearly, one of the two polling firms is going to end up with a good deal of egg on their face on November 5th unless one (or both) of their trend lines changes.

SurveyUSA’s result seems to fit in the recent trend of rising (and now, peaking) numbers for Coleman, and is right in line with the firm’s previous results. However, Rasmussen’s result, while out of line with other firms’ recent results, is right in line with its own results, which are generally pretty good and respected for accuracy on both sides of the aisle. Rasmussen shows 14% undecided, while SurveyUSA shows just 9%, so that certainly factors in a bit.

There’s another factor that may be in play here, which was addressed earlier today on Salon as “Obama’s missing 2%”: younger, college-educated, property-renting voters who may be getting severely undercounted in polls because they’re more likely to use cell phones as a primary means of communication. Granted, Obama is leading by as many as 13-15 points in these same pollsters’ polls, but that doesn’t remove the possibility that those same voters, which could comprise as much as 14% of the electorate this year, aren’t being included in these polls and thus are detracting from Franken’s numbers.

So we’ll see. And I’ll check back over the 2006 numbers to see which of these two major pollsters called the Senate race more accurately.