By Jo McMullen / KVSC reporter

While we may have been feeling that voters see and feel things very differently about politics and government leading in to Tuesday’s midterm elections, now there’s research data backing up that feeling.

The 42^nd annual Fall Survey of Minnesota Adults conducted recently by the St. Cloud State Survey Research Center researchers suggests that Minnesota voters are sharply divided along partisan lines.

Respondent attitudes on hot-button issues like abortion, immigration and K-12 curriculum differed by 60% or more between Democrats and Republicans. Also, job approval ratings for President Joe Biden and Governor Tim Walz were more sharply opposed than ever.  

In the case of Biden, not a single Republican in the sample approved of his job performance, while 69% of Democrats rated him as either “excellent” or “pretty good.” At the state level, 83% of Democrats approved of Governor Walz, but only 6% of Republicans did.

Of the Minnesotans surveyed, the most important state and national issues are the economy and inflation, with crime and partisan division rounding out the top three. 

The results for election preferences in the races for Governor, Attorney General, and Secretary of State suggest an advantage of ranging between 12-16 for the Democratic candidates, but the researchers caution that the unusually large margin-of-error (+/- 8%), coupled with high non-response rates from conservative Republicans are making those finding unreliable. 

Responses for the survey were gathered from 235 randomly-selected landline and cellphone adult users October 10-30th.