I have not written about this incident before. Definitely would’ve liked to have had it addressed in the Readers’ Representative column back when the problem occurred, but the timing happened to be right on top of the 9-11 tragedy. So naturally, that situation far overshadowed any possible interest in more mundane things like local politics and how the Minnesota Poll was being (shoddily) conducted.

I was one of the 600-some likely Minneapolis voters interviewed by the Minnesota Poll that August or September, about the upcoming mayoral race between challenger R.T. Rybak and Sharon Sayles-Belton.

About halfway through the questions, I got uncomfortable enough with the interviewer seeming to be leading me to express stronger opinions, especially on obscure topics, than I genuinely had in me. . . such that I finally asked: “Don’t you offer a “don’t know” or “don’t care” option?

It was only then that the interviewer acknowledged that indeed she could accept and tally that sort of response too.

So then I said: “So, why didn’t you say so, to begin with? To half of the questions you’ve asked so far, I would’ve answered that way, had I known that I had that option.” She replied with something like: “Well, we find that we get better answers from people if we don’t bring that up; otherwise, we get too many “I don’t knows”.

[And, she would not let me go back to change some of my earlier responses to “don’t know”.]

Well, that’s a very unscrupulous polling practice. (And the Strib should’ve known that it was occurring.)

My guess then became that the subcontracting interviewing outfit had to be a commercial enterprise, intent on producing striking results, to please the client. . . . when faced with actual voters’ feelings about that mayoral race that were pretty tepid.

For the record, the outfit that the Strib was sub-contracting that interviewing work to was: Market Solutions Group (as the interviewer identified when I asked her, and as confirmed by my reviewing just now the Sept. 23, 2001, Strib article, from the Strib archives, in which the results of that poll were reported). Market Solutions is a downtown-Minneapolis Marketing-Research company.

One other point: Another good reason to abandon things like the Minnesota Poll as we know them is their reliance on lists of land-line phone numbers as the pool from which subjects are randomly drawn. Lots of people, especially younger ones, no longer have land lines. So land-lines lists are no longer a reliable sampling pool, except for surveys about land-lines.

[Note: I have also twice been selected by the Nielsen ratings outfit to participate in TV-viewing surveys in the past couple of years. I imagine that they too rely on land-line-users lists; if so, their methods and results are equally open to criticism.]