Republicans have a long and storied history with the Minneapolis Star Tribune's pollsters. The short version: They loathe Minnesota polls. A new survey out over the weekend shows a surprising result in the state's U.S. Senate race, causing tensions to flare up once again.

The poll, conducted by Princeton Survey Research, surveyed 1,084 likely voters 9/30-10/2 for a margin of error of +/- 3.7%. Republican Senator Norm Coleman, satirist Al Franken of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party and Independence Party candidate Dean Barkley were tested.

General Election Matchup
Franken........43 (+6 from last, 9/12)
Coleman........34 (-7)
Barkley........18 (+5)

Pollsters found Coleman's once-strong job approval rating diving to 38%, the lowest ever measured in the Star Tribune poll, and suggested Franken's lead can largely be attributed to Barack Obama's strength in the state.

Republicans fired back, with Coleman's pollster issuing a memo questioning the Star Tribune's results. The memo points to a SurveyUSA poll from earlier last week that showed Coleman with a ten-point lead over Franken, and to eight of eleven polls that have Coleman ahead.

The Star Tribune poll "is wrong and inaccurate," pollster Glen Bolger wrote, arguing that Democrats were significantly oversampled. "These numbers would be accurate if the Star Tribune had done this poll in New York -- not in Minnesota!"

"Based on our own internal polling, as well as the trend averages of public polls over the past month, it is my opinion that we hold a narrow, but statistically significant lead going into the final weeks of the campaign," Bolger concluded.

Republicans have had problems with Star Tribune pollsters since at least 2002. But the most recent poll over which Republicans cried wolf turned out to be surprisingly accurate. Two Star Tribune polls out in early October and early November 2006 showed then-Hennepin County Attorney Amy Klobuchar leading Rep. Mark Kennedy by a 21-point margin. After the Star Tribune took serious beatings from the GOP, Klobuchar won by twenty points.

The paper is using a different pollster now than they did in 2006, but it hasn't stopped Republicans from finding fault with the Star Tribune's numbers. The barely-concealed hatred is bubbling back to the surface.