MN-Sen: Trying to Handicap This Race

I wrote a variation of this on Daily Kos a few days ago but thought this crowd might like it as well.

As a lifelong student of Minnesota politics, I’ll do my best to rise to the challenge of handicapping the wildly unpredictable three-way contest between Al Franken, Norm Coleman, and independent challenger (and former Senator) Dean Barkley.  I currently live out of state but visit the parents every three weeks or so, where I keep apprised of the goings-on in the campaign, and get vague updates from my dad who is active in the county DFL.  And of course, I keep up with the ads via the Internet and the crazy all-over-the-map polls coming out of the race.  Anyone who says they know where this race is going is either nuts or alot smarter than I am, but I do have some insights on specifics from past races that could give some sense of what the future holds.

First of all, the Barkley factor.  I didn’t see tonight’s debate, but it was essentially the starting point for Dean Barkley.  Not many third-party challengers come out of the starting gates with 18-19%.  Most Independence Party candidates in recent years are left-of-center and very well-spoken eggheads either on an ego trip or a journey of personal discovery through their candidacies.  My impression of Barkley is that he’s best friends with Jesse Ventura for a reason.  Both are pretentiously “centrist” would-be intellectual egomaniacs with a few keen insights, but a hard-time avoiding self-aggrandizing bluster that over time turns voters off.

In other words, a little of Barkley tends to go a long ways, but in the limited exposure Minnesotans will get of him in the October debates, his shtick may not quite reach the level of diminishing returns before election day the way it will by next spring if he ends up getting elected and being Minnesota’s junior Senator.  Combine his ability to leave a positive initial impression on swing voters and the hunger for a protest vote against two major-party candidates with high unfavorables and Barkley could prove to be a problem.  I give him a 20% chance of winning this whole thing, and above-average odds of getting at least 25%.

But the debates will be critical.  Jesse Ventura rose from 12% to a 37% victory in a month by impressing enough voters in the televised debates, with the help of a few clever TV ads, and weak, bickering opponents (one of whom was Norm Coleman).  On the other hand, the 2002 Independence Party gubernatorial nominee Tim Penny had the lead three weeks before that election, but uninspiring debate performances and a charisma gap with eventual winner Tim Pawlenty caused the bottom to completely fall out of Penny’s candidacy, falling by more than 20 points to an unimpressive 16% showing on election day 2002.  If Barkley doesn’t stand out in the debates, he could just as easily plunge to Penny’s level of insignificance, or substantially much lower since Penny still had a regional stronghold in his southeastern Minnesota stomping grounds that likely boosted his statewide numbers by 5%.

But the question is, where do we want Barkley’s numbers?  Clearly, we don’t want them to get too high.  Despite the Star Tribune’s recent overly optimistic poll, I suspect Norm Coleman has a basement of about 40% in the state, and if Barkley is pulling in numbers higher than 25%, those votes are most likely coming at Franken’s expense.  For the same reason, I don’t want to see Barkley fall too low either.  My suspicion is that Franken has more people who would never consider voting for him than does Coleman, meaning a Barkley collapse likely benefits Norm.  Essentially, I think Franken is best positioned for victory if Barkley stays where he’s at in the high-teens.  If Barkley is polling 15-19%, Franken probably wins.

The regional internals of this race are just as difficult to handicap, but to quote Joe Biden, “past is prologue”, meaning there is some basis to predict where the three candidates’ strengths are likely to emerge from.  When looking at the county map from the 1998 gubernatorial race, you can see that Jesse Ventura’s victories came in the Twin Cities metro area as well as the rural counties of central Minnesota, west-central Minnesota, and south-central Minnesota.  The common denominator of these counties is that they all lie in the Twin Cities media market.  Just as Jesse’s exposure was broadest in the Twin Cities market, so will be Dean Barkley’s.  That means it’s more likely to be a two-candidate race throughout northern Minnesota serviced by the Duluth, Grand Forks, and Fargo-Moorhead media markets, as well as southwestern Minnesota serviced by the Sioux Falls, SD, media market, and southeastern Minnesota, serviced by the Rochester, Austin, Mason City, IA, and La Crosse, WI, media markets.  Franken has little control over how well Barkley plays in the metro area market, meaning his performance in the outlying areas is critical.

With that in mind, Franken needs to work overtime in Duluth and the Iron Range, where he has the best chance of running up the score on both Coleman and Barkley.  Outside of that, I’m not sensing too much favorable turf for Franken.  The Rochester area has been trending Democrat, but Republicans that meet their defintion of “moderate” still seem to do well.  Tim Pawlenty, for instance, won Olmsted County by 17 points in 2006.  Now that’s not to say Rochester area residents will view Coleman through the same lens as they did Pawlenty, but my hunch is that they’ll feel more comfortable with Coleman than Franken in a region that can still be best described as center-right.

That leaves northwestern and southwestern Minnesota farm country.  Coleman did very poorly, particularly in northwestern Minnesota, against Walter Mondale in 2002….and probably would have done just as badly against Paul Wellstone had he lived.  The myth of western Minnesota is that it’s full of right-wingers and is hopefully Republican, but that’s not the case, particularly in the farm areas which have a long-standing populist tradition and tend to vote Democratic more than Republican.  The region was skeptical about Wellstone’s liberalism for years, but anecdotal evidence heading in the 2002 race was that Wellstone’s long-standing fighting on behalf of family farmers was winning them over against New York City transplant and agriculture agnostic Norm Coleman.  Six years later, the tables are likely to have turned.  Coleman is now fairly well versed in farm policy and the former Saturday Night Live comedian is not a comfortable fit with the populist but socially conservative region.  It’s always hard to predict how these voters will go, particularly in northwestern Minnesota’s Red River Valley, but if Franken is serious about winning them over, he’d best draw the battle lines on the trade issue where Coleman didn’t stand with the sugar growers during the 2005 CAFTA debate.

My parents live in southeastern Minnesota and I know those media markets are running an abundance of Franken and Coleman ads.  I would guess the same is true in Duluth.  But I’m less certain about Fargo-Moorhead and Grand Forks.  Franken would be well advised to ramp up his campaign operation there, both in terms of campaign visits and TV advertising since he’s most likely to win over votes there based on the aforementioned policy reasons and the reduced effect of Barkley interference.  And I’d be very surprised if either candidate was advertising in Sioux Falls or La Crosse (Minnesota candidates rarely do), but if Coleman isn’t, it might be worthwile for Franken to do so in the final two weeks as a handful of counties in those corners of Minnesota are effectively isolated from Minnesota politics, and could yield some modest advantage for one candidate who does reach out that direction.

Franken’s challenge and opportunity is that the regions of the state where he is probably running the furthest behind right now are the very regions where he is best positioned to improve his standing with some savvy campaign moves.  But these areas account for only about 20% of Minnesota’s population.  Take the Duluth market out of the equation since it’s a safe bet Franken is already doing well there, and that number shrinks to about 10%.   But that could be decisive in a race this close.

Lastly, what to do if Barkley really starts catching on in the weeks ahead?  Does Franken go negative on him?  I’m hoping Franken is prepared for this possibility because Ventura went unchallenged in 1998 and ended up winning because of it.  Right now, Barkley appears to be more of a gadfly against Coleman, so it doesn’t make sense to go after him right now.  But the Barkley factor could change with just a few more percentage points of support, at which point Franken would be well-advised to poke some holes in Barkley’s story.

I was 13 years old in 1990 when I experienced two very exciting and unpredictable Minnesota elections (Wellstone v. Boschwitz in the Senate and Grunseth/Carlson v. Perpich in the Governor’s race).  Those races set the stage for several more wild roller coaster rides.  The 2008 Minnesota Senate race seems likely to carry on that fine tradition, and frustrating as it is to try to handicap these races based on what I thought I’ve learned from previous races, I wouldn’t have it any other way.