MN-Sen: Handicapping Franken and Ciresi’s Chances

I’ve been giving alot of thought in recent months regarding next year’s Minnesota Senate race.  It’s very difficult to predict how it will unfold as there are a variety of converging forces in play.  Have the second-ring suburbs that helped elect Norm Coleman to the Senate in 2002 tired of him enough to vote him out?  Will anybody outstate be willing to take Al Franken seriously?  Would Mike Ciresi put more of the state in play than Franken would?  It’s a crap shoot across the board.  Minnesota has clearly taken a leftward turn since 2004 and I expect that to continue next year.  On the other hand, I’m not confident in the positive coattail capacity of Hillary Clinton if she’s at the top of the ticket, which the odds seem to favor at this point.  For the first time in years, I really don’t know what direction this could go, but I’ll give it a shot nonetheless with thoughts on the candidate’s personal and demographical strengths and weaknesses.

I closely track Minnesota political demographics and go into every election cycle confident that I can guess how each region of the state will vote.  Some years my predictions are dead-on, such as 2004, while other years I’m not nearly as clairvoyant.  The 2006 midterm elections fit the latter.  At this point in 2005, I had predicted close races would ensue in both the Senate and gubernatorial elections.  The Senate race, in my estimation a year in advance, would be a classic Old Minnesota vs. New Minnesota slugfest in which Klobuchar would dominate Hennepin and Ramsey Counties, along with northeastern Minnesota, while Kennedy would be competitive by scoring stratospheric numbers in outer suburbia and western Minnesota farm country, both of which he had represented in Congress and which I expected to bristle at “big-city lawyer” Klobuchar.  Needless to say, I botched that prediction badly, as did most of the pundits who also expected a close Senate race in Minnesota, failing to foresee that alleged wunderkind Mark Kennedy would run the worst Minnesota Senate campaign in recent memory.  Meanwhile, in the gubernatorial race where I expected Democrat Mike Hatch to do well outstate and for Tim Pawlenty to score the same boffo numbers in the nonurban metro area that he did in 2002, the Old MN vs. New MN contest I expected to see in the Senate race actually did play out.  Needless to say, it was a humbling experience for a guy who thought he had it all figured out. 

Hopefully, I fare a little better this year, but the campaign dynamic doesn’t strike me as being as clearcut this year.  With that in mind, I’ll start with the incumbent and cite scenarios where each of the three candidates could win or lose next year….

Norm Coleman–The 2002 Senate election was very much an Old MN vs. New MN election, with Coleman compensating for his deficiencies among elderly outstate  voters by sweeping through suburbia with absolutely astounding numbers.  Conventional wisdom is that Coleman will need to hang onto the same Democrat-trending second-ring suburbs (Bloomington, Minnetonka, Shoreview, Eagan) if he’s to be re-elected in 2008.  That might be correct, but not necessarily so, as Coleman’s outstate numbers in 2002 were below-average for a Republican, based partly on Mondale nostalgia among the area’s older voters, but also the perception that Coleman was a city slicker disconnected with rural values.  It’s not clear whether that perception will hold outstate next year, particularly if Al Franken is the Democratic nominee. 

Given that 2008 is a Presidential election year, it’s likely that turnout will be disproportionately higher compared to 2002 in the urban DFL strongholds of Minneapolis and St. Paul, which produces an immediate math challenge for him.  Assuming that prediction is correct, Coleman will have to pick up votes elsewhere to compensate for the deficit.  Potentially key to Coleman’s chances is the increasingly unpredictable white-collar city of Rochester in southeastern Minnesota, formerly a Republican stronghold but growing significantly less so in recent election cycles.  Nonetheless, certain kinds of Republicans (like Governor Tim Pawlenty) still do very well in Rochester, and if Coleman can adeptly portray himself as a centrist with growing doubts about the war in Iraq, Rochester voters might be inclined to hang with him.

Al Franken–The ultimate wild card of a candidate.  On the basis of fundraising alone, he’s a force to be reckoned with, and will have every opportunity to revamp his image.  But at least so far, there is little evidence voters are ready to take him seriously.  His funnyman history poses a unique challenge in that he can’t simply come across as the class clown slumming in politics, but will also be expected to produce moments of levity during the campaign so he doesn’t disappoint people as “just another boring politician”.  From my observations, he has a hard time with that balance and can be less than riveting when speaking on meat-and-potatoes issues in front of crowds.  But if his ground game and political skills prove as effective as his fundraising skills, he has a helluva good chance against an incumbent with a 45% approval rating, but that’s a big “if”.

Franken needs to run at least 50-50 in the aforementioned second-ring suburbs to have a chance, because he’ll be smashed in the fast-growing exurban doughnut and will most likely face a struggle outstate, particularly if Hillary Clinton is the Democratic nominee.  Outstate Minnesota has never had much of a fondness for Coleman in the past, so it’s not a lost cause for Franken, but he’ll have to earn his chops by touring some dairy farms and iron mines yet still avoid a “Dukakis in the tank” moment in the process.  That’s gonna be a tough needle to thread with Republicans chomping at the bit for an opportunity to portray him as “out of touch with Minnesota”.  I can’t say I’m optimistic, but am certainly not to the point where I can’t be persuaded to take Franken’s campaign seriously.

Mike Ciresi–In the interest of playing it safe, I would prefer to see Ciresi get the nomination over Franken, but I’m increasingly doubtful that will happen unless Franken makes a gaffe.  Ciresi is the “safe” candidate on every front, particulalry his self-financing ability, but there’s a fear he will be too safe, failing to excite the base enough to take down Coleman.  He was the presumptive favorite in the crowded field of candidates in 2000, but failed to seal the deal……against the uber-dreary Mark Dayton!  If Ciresi lacked the fortitude to hold back Dayton seven years ago, it’s worth asking whether he has what it takes to topple Coleman, who’s a much better politician in his sleep than Dayton.  Nonetheless, Ciresi hits the right buttons on the issues and could have a Klobuchar-esque ability to court GOP-leaning independents.  That’s just speculation, but back in 2000, Rod Grams was most worried about facing Ciresi compared to the handful of other contenders.

Demographically, Ciresi seems like an easier sell to second-ring suburbanites than Franken…..and these voters will almost certainly decide the outcome.  Ciresi’s “big-city lawyer” background is not a natural fit for outstate voters, but that didn’t hurt Klobuchar nearly as much as I expected last year…..and Coleman is much less loved outstate than what former country boy Mark Kennedy was expected to be, so I won’t take anything for granted.  Again, however, it’s almost a certainty that Minnesota’s outer-suburban growth zones will produce huge margins for Coleman, so Ciresi (and every Dem for that matter) will have to continue to improve their numbers in the rest of the state to compensate for the tens of thousands of new Republican voters coming out of the doughnut every four years.  In a hotly contested Presidential election, turning out the urban base and shaking out those “compensatory” votes doesn’t seem like it should be a problem.

That’s my early handicap of the 2008 Minnesota Senate race.  Expect to see this analysis expand and evolve as the campaign unfolds, and feel free to provide me any information I may have missed that falsely colored my thoughts at this stage.