Clinton's visit follows poll numbers that show Mitt Romney gaining on President Barack Obama in Minnesota.

There's one stark difference in recent polls that will likely be the key to Tuesday's vote: the makeup of the electorate in each. The disparate top line results can almost solely be laid at the feet of this key difference.

The last KSTP poll showed DFLer Mark Dayton at 42 percent, Republican Tom Emmer at 37 percent support. Tom Horner had 14 percent. In the last MPR/Humphrey poll, Dayton had 38 percent, Emmer had 27 percent and Horner had 16.

Tom Emmer is losing the governor's race. Of the 12 polls released since June, only one showed the Republican gubernatorial nominee with a lead - and that was a statistically meaningless one-point edge.

Polling guru Nate Silver, of the FiveThirtyEight blog, has released his latest analysis of gubernatorial contests across the country. The upshot: Mark Dayton has a 77 percent chance of winning the governor's race based on polling results that have been released so far.

Nate Silver, the baseball/sabermetrics guru who brought a new level of sophistication to the analysis of political numbers when he launched fivethirtyeight.com in March 2008, posted a revised set of numbers on the most accurate political pollsters in the land last month -- and there are a few points of local interest.

Nate Silver, the one-time sports statistics guru (he cut his teeth at Baseball Prospectus) whose website fivethirtyeight.com rose to fame during the 2008 election cycle, ...