I’m actually a little torn on whether to rely much on the new Sunshine State News poll coming out of Florida today.  They have a decent track record in their own state, and as they report, their poll matches up with most other polling in Florida over the last week or two.  However, their cross-tab report was published in a text format, which makes it all but unusable, so it’s difficult to analyze the methodology or demographics outside of their own published report.  Who uses a raw text format in 2012 to publish results, anyway?

Still, it’s Friday, and we want to hear all the good news we can going into the weekend:

Of 1,001 likely Florida voters, 51 percent were ready to vote for Romney to 46 percent for President Obama.

Only 12 percent said the recent debates had any sway on their opinion, with 40 percent of those individuals saying they switched from Obama to Romney and just 22 percent going the other way. ..

The results run similar to many other recent polls for Florida conducted by:

• Rasmussen, 52 percent to 46 percent for Romney;
• CNN, 49 percent to 48 percent for Romney;
• PPP, 48 percent to 47 percent for Romney;
• Gravis Marketing, 50 percent to 49 percent.
• A Newsmax poll put the contest at 48 percent to 42 percent for Obama.

The RCP average for Florida has Romney up 2.1%, but that includes this poll.  In surveys conducted since October 17th, only Survey USA has Obama up at all — and only by one, 47/46, a hardly comforting number for an incumbent President with less than two weeks to go before the election.

SSN reports that Republicans have around a 50,000-ballot lead in early voting, which is pretty good news for the GOP, as Democrats usually do better on early voting and the GOP does better on Election Day.  They also show Romney winning men by a whopping 15 points, far outstripping Obama’s 5-point lead among women.  No word on how independents are breaking, but assuming that this poll is at all reliable, it’s looking pretty good for Romney in Florida.

In fact, it may be looking so good that Team Romney can start spending money in … Minnesota?

Mitt Romney will be running television ads in Minnesota over the weekend, The Associated Press is reporting.

The investment is described as a small buy that Democrats suggest is simply intended to generate media coverage and force President Barack Obama’s campaign to invest there as well,” the AP said.

Minnesota appears to be safely in Obama’s column at this point. According to the RealClearPolitics average of polls, he leads there by more than 7 percentage points, although polling is sparse because few believe it to be up for grabs.

Don’t read too much into this, at least not for Minnesota.  We’re no closer to going red than we were in 2004, when John Kerry beat George Bush by almost 4 points.  Our big media markets in Duluth and the Twin Cities have plenty of range into western Wisconsin, though, and I’d bet that Team Romney’s ad money will be aimed at getting their message out in that area.