The rural vote in 2020 (Part II): Montana

 Here's a story from today's New York Times on the U.S. Senate race in Montana.  An excerpt from Nate Cohn's piece follows:  

A New York Times/Siena College poll of Montana shows a close race for Senate. But it has an important flaw: It named Green Party candidates who won’t be on the ballot this November.

In August, the Montana Supreme Court denied a Republican-backed effort to qualify those candidates on the ballot. An appeal at the U.S. Supreme Court was rejected while our survey was being conducted. (They should have been removed from the poll beforehand anyway; the mistake was mine.)

With the Green Party candidates officially off the ballot, the poll is a flawed test of the preferences of Montana voters. .

But it still contains useful information about the attitudes of Montana voters. After all, no survey can ever offer a truly definitive measure of a race. There are many possible sources of error in polling, whether from the inherent imprecision of random sampling; unpredictable turnout; or the potential biases of question wording or interviewer effects. In this case, the flawed ballot test undoubtedly added a source of error. In fact, it’s a reason we know it’s wrong. But the magnitude of the effect is well within the range that we ordinarily tolerate.