Tag: Minnesota

Minnesota is going to possibly lose a seat and with a DFL governor, we’ll be able to do some damage.  These districts should pass any compactness laws as nothing is gerrymandered beyond unacceptability.  My 8 seat map is in the works and near done and both of these maps reflect what I think is possible and appropriate for Minnesota, all Dem seats with one GOP dump district.

I did none of this with a computer program or anything like that.  i was fortunate that MN provides all the info I needed to do this with the MnSOS office providing all the vote totals and also precinct maps of every state house seat, which was the main way I broke down the districts by vote and population when I didnt need to break it down to city/township/precinct level.  The state legislature websites has excellent maps with the two I used constantly were a map of the all the state house seats that also showed city boundaries which made it my go to map for figuring out my planned geography.  More importantly though, a precinct map of the entire state showing election results from dark red to dark blue.  I found county population totals for 2007 and when they broke down beyond that point, I wikipediad it which sometimes included 2006 estimates but mainly for 2000 totals and then I used common sense for population movements, figured out the percentage of growth for that county/area, etc to figure out the 2007 population of said city/precinct.  There is certainly some error involved in this but nothing that would alter more than a couple precincts here or there and then my map accounts for current population movement as opposed to 2000, little bit of a trade off there.

Everything is recorded in excel spreadsheets, they look like a hot mess.

map with county lines can be found here: http://s635.photobucket.com/al…

I figured I had three options with Minneapolis/St. Paul. 1. Put each in their own CD and have to expand them, which meant expanding into more Dem friendly suburbs, which in turn would mean I would end up strengthening Paulsen.  2. Put them both into the same CD, making one uber D+35-like district which would then leave behind all Dem burbs currently in the two districts plus a little bit of one of the cities.  I could then gerrymander two suburban seats into two Dem-leaning districts, most likely.  But McCollum lives in a burb just outside of St Paul so while it wouldnt make an Ellison v McCollum, it would mean her district being gerrymandered to be really Dem and then Paulsen would just get beefed up in return as a consequence.  I could put Ellison in a suburban district but well, that’d never work for him.   McCollum could survive it fine probably.  And option 3, which I chose, was to divide up MSP into three districts and pair them with adjacent suburbs, creating 3 solid Dem seats.  This was the more devious and fun way to go.

I will say at first, doing it this way REALLY bugged me but I was being politically minded, I looked at this and thought, that would never happen.  Quite frankly, I think it would have a decent shot after I’ve sat on it.  The map doesn’t look messed up, it puts the cities and suburbs all compactly into three districts and the other districts all make perfect sense.  It’s compact, simple, but really does a lot of damage.  You just have to get past Minneapolis dominating two districts.

CD1,7,8 all stay heavily rural districts with some exurban areas picked up and CD2 is one huge swath of Republican exurbia.

This map would result in a for sure 6/1 delegation as the seat I eliminated was Bachmann’s and Paulsen’s is now a heavy DFL seat.  An open MN-6 would probably make it 5/2 but maybe not.

As for the tables, the first 2008 is new the district’s 2008 total, the second is former districts.  I also did the 2004 totals since many of you asked in other redistrictings what they would be.  And then are the county totals for each one so one would know where to watch for votes and such.  

MN-1 Rep. Walz	Pop.	2008	2008	2004	2004
Total	740228	52/47	51/47	48.5/51	47/51
	Pop.	Obama	McCain	Kerry	Bush
Houston County	19515	54	44	48	51
Winona County	49802	58	52	48.8	49.3
Watonwan County	7535	53	44	47.5	48
Steele County	36378	46	51	56	43
Dodge County	19552	44	54	42	57
Wabasha County	21783	47	50	47	52
Olmsted County	76470	51	47	47	52
Mower County	38040	60	37	61	38
Freeborn County	31257	57	41	55	44
Waseca County	19528	45	53	43	56
Blue Earth County	59802	55	42	48	51
Nicollet County	31680	54	44	50	49
Dakota County	121909	46	52	43	57

MN-1 is now more based in the southeast corner and is almost indentical to the 1990’s lines (it just worked out that way), this makes it 1% more for Obama as the southwestern rural counties are the Republican ones while the southeast is heavily DFL.  It now includes some of exurban MSP, but still keeps its rural district title.  Walz lives on the edge of the district and should still be quite safe.

MN-2 OPEN	Pop.	2008	2008	2004	2004
Total	736283	42/56	48/50	38/61	45/54
	Pop.	Obama	McCain	Kerry	Bush
Wright County	112870	40	58	38	61
Scott County	126642	44	55	40	60
Carver County	75075	42	57	36	63
Sherburne County	78127	39	60	37	62
Stearns County	81037	39	58	38	60
Anoka County	132044	41	57	40	59
Washington County	7336	43	56	39	60

I combined all the exurban Republican counties from Kline and Bachmann’s districts as they are by far the most Republican in the state and a great population base.  Also, the district took in parts of Hennepin county for population and gerrymandering purposes.  The areas it picked up are exurban for the most part and are extremely Republican, the Lake Minnetonka cities (but not Minnetonka) and also Maple Grove had to be included, and these suburbs lean pretty heavily GOP, as well.

Kline now lives in CD1 but the city he lives in, Lakeville, borders CD2.  I would assume he’d opt to run in the new CD2 as he would certainly not beat Walz and the territory of his included in CD1 are his least favorable counties, and nor would he let Bachmann simply claim CD2 as hers.  Bachmann’s district is simply gone and I would assume she’d move to run here, which  means that I may not have eliminated Bachmann, but actually strengthened her, depending if she could win the primary.  Bachmann could dominate in the caucuses and probably get the GOP endorsement but primary voters would probably be more apt to voting for Kline.  This is a consequence we can live with as at least someone got eliminated still and she is a good fundraiser for us.

MN-3 Rep. Paulsen	Pop.	2008	2008	2004	2004
Total	739257	61/36	52/46	57/41.5	48/51
	Pop.	Obama	McCain	Kerry	Bush
Hennepin County	489340	65	33	60	38
Dakota County	249917	52	42	51	48

This district combines Edina, Eden Prarie,, part of Minnetonka, Bloomington, southern Minneapolis and also Eagan in Dakota County.  All of the suburbs are trending Democratic with most of the areas in the district voting for Obama, but also voting for Paulsen, except for Bloomington which went Madia.  Paulsen lives in Eden Prairie and would be in this district, but would certainly get his ass kicked by just about any Dem challenger.  This district is now solid Dem, whatever the political climate.

MN-4 Rep. McCollum	Pop.	2008	2008	2004	2004
Total	739603827	60/36	64/34	58.5/40	62/37
	Pop.	Obama	McCain	Kerry	Bush
Ramsey County	499891	66	32	63	36
Washington County	199318	53	45	49	50
Dakota County	22126	58	39	61	37
Anoka County	18098	49.2	48.6	44	55

This district stays pretty much the same except for it adds most of Washington county.  I initially divided MSP up three ways perfectly with some of the St. Paul state house seats going to CD5 but this district then dipped below 60% for Obama.  I wanted to maintain at least 60% in CD4&5 so this district maintains all of it’s Ramsey county territory and largely is a St. Paul+burbs district still.

MN-5 Rep. Ellison	Pop.	2008	2008	2004	2004
Total	740611	62/35.5	74/24	60/40	71/28
	Pop.	Obama	McCain	Kerry	Bush
Hennepin County	569459	65	33	61	37.5
Anoka County	171152	53	45	49	50

This district takes in the north half of Minneapolis (where Ellison resides) and includes all the suburbs to the west and then also to the north in Anoka County of Minneapolis, and then also picks up suburbs on the Hennepin/Anoka border and also Blaine.  Everything except Maple Grove and Plymouth are Democratic in Hennepin while the Anoka areas vary with Dem leaning to slight Repub suburbs.  Keith Ellison is really liberal but doesn’t cause very many waves and would still be safe here.

MN-6 Rep. Peterson	Pop.	2008	2008	2004	2004
Total	737087	47/51	47/50	43/55	43/55
	Pop.	Obama	McCain	Kerry	Bush
Kittson County	4505	58	40	50	49
Traverse County	3712	51	46	48	50
Stevens County	9624	49	48	47	51
Swift County	11192	55	42	55	43
Todd County	4378	43	54	41	57
Yellow Medicine County	10000	51	46	49	50
Lake of the Woods County	4095	42	55	38	60
Marshall County	9618	49	48	42	57
Becker County	31964	45	52	40	58
Polk County	30708	51	47	43	56
Pope County	11065	51	47	49	49
Clearwater County	8245	44	54	43	56
Red Lake County	4118	51	45	44	54
Mahnomen County	5129	61	36	53	45
Pennington County	13756	50	48	44	54
Clay County	54835	57	41	47	52
Otter Tail County	57031	42	55	37	61
Douglas County	36075	44	54	44	54
Grant County	6021	51	46	49	50
Big Stone County	5385	52	46	50	48
Lac qui Parle County	7258	52	46	53	46
Renville County	16132	48	49	45	53
Lyon County	24695	48	50	42	57
Beltrami County	43609	54	44	50	48
Roseau County	15946	40	58	31	68
Chippewa County	12465	52	46	52	47
Wilkin County	6418	45	52	33	65
Sibley County	15007	45	52	39	59
Kandiyohi County	40784	46	52	44	55
Norman County	6685	62	35	47	51
Hubbard County	18781	42	56	42	57
Wadena County	13382	40	58	39	59
McLeod County	9603	40	57	36.5	62
Meeker County	23211	43	54	43	56
Le Seur County	28034	47	51	45	54
Stearns County	2465	55	43	49	51
Wright County	4502	48	50	48	51
Martin County	20462	41	56	42	57
Brown County	26013	43	55	37	61
Murray County	8511	49	48	44	54
Jackson County	10883	47	51	46	52
Cottwonwood County	11349	46	52	43	56
Nobles County	20128	48	50	42	56
Pipestone County	9305	42	55	38	61
Rock County	9498	42	56	39	60
Faribault County	14869	46	51	43	55
Fillmore County	21037	53	44	49	50
Lincoln County	5877	49	48	47	52
Redwood County	15519	42	55	38	62
Watonwan County	3487	41	56	38	60

This is the old MN-7 with it having the same base and will have the same congresscritter.  The district had to expand and the only option was into CD1 as CD2 areas are way Republican and the old CD8 is a northern Iron Range district that consistently elect a pretty progressive Dem.  (Oberstar is a lot more liberal than one would think based off the district.)  I managed to only make this district a tick more Republican, which is pretty good considering the areas to expand were all Republican.

MN-7 Rep. Oberstar	Pop.	2008	2008	2004	2004
Total	737135	53/44	53/45	52/46	53/46
Cook County	5398	60	37	53	45
Lake County	10741	60	38	60	39
St. Louis County	200528	65	33	65	34
Carlton County	33893	62	35	63	36
Pine County	228164	49	48	50	49
Koochiching County	13459	54	44	50	48
ItascaCounty	44542	55	42	55	44
Cass County	28723	45	53	43	56
Crow Wing County	61648	45	53	42	57
Morrison County	32733	39	58	41	58
Mille Lacs County	26354	45	52	43	55
Kanabec County	16090	44	53	44	55
Aitkin County	15910	49	49	48	51
Chisago County	50128	44	54	43	56
Isanti County	38921	41	56	41	58
Benton County	39504	44	53	44	55
Stearns County	62549	53	46	50	48
Sherburne County	8160	57	40	56	42
Washington County	7655	43	51	42	57

This is the old CD8 with its base up north in Duluth and on the Iron Range.  Unlike what many have done, I left it completely intact except by removing Bemidji. I put in St. Cloud and then also included the colleges St. Ben’s and St. John’s which are blue.  It was tricky to figure out where to put St. Cloud since it is +2000 votes for Obama but the counties attached to it are all so Republian.  The district had to pick up counties south for population and I managed to make it a tick less Republican.  Oberstar is safe and so is his successor, House Majority Leader Sertich.  He could be speaker if Kelliher runs for governor, and he’s young so it’ll be in our hands for the next 50 years guaranteed.

I am now on Episode 10 of my redistricting series, if you can believe it! Tonight we cover Colorado and Minnesota. I drew two maps for Minnesota — one if the Republicans hold Tim Pawlenty’s governorship in 2010, and the other if Democrats manage a gerrymandering monopoly. (The Dems have solid state legislative majorities, so that element seems set in stone.)

Previous efforts:

Diary 1: Massachusetts and Texas

Diary 2: Michigan and Nevada

Diary 3: Iowa and Ohio

Diary 4: Georgia and New Jersey

Diary 5: Florida and Louisiana

Diary 6: Pennsylvania and Utah

Diary 7: Illinois and South Carolina

Diary 8: Indiana, Missouri, and Oregon

Diary 9: Alabama, Arizona, and Kentucky

Jump below, if and only if you dare!

Colorado

The process here is fairly straightforward. Whether Democrats hold their current monopoly in 2010 or lose the governor’s mansion (the state legislature seems locked-in), incumbent protection will be the name of the game, aimed especially at solidifying Democratic Reps. Betsy Markey and John Salazar (most pointedly the former). Democrats would be foolish to try for a 6-1 majority and no one seems to think they’ll try it.

My map definitely solidified Markey without hurting DeGette, Polis, or Perlmutter, but it didn’t go as far as I hoped in protecting Salazar (my 3rd remains quite rural and is more of a swing district, but far from strongly Dem-leaning). Given the need to dole out favorable Denver suburbs to Polis, Perlmutter, and Markey, there’s little Denver-area turf left to give Salazar. What to do?

District 1 – Diana DeGette (D-Denver) — all of Denver and 19% of Arapahoe preserves a solidly liberal district.

District 2 – Jared Polis (D-Boulder) — it may look rural and Rocky-heavy on the map, but the population anchors are Boulder County, which is kept whole, and Adams County, of which 35% is included. Less strongly Dem than before, but still plenty safe, with a moderate-liberal bent.

District 3 – John Salazar (D-Manassa) — my disappointment is that I only moved the needle a couple points in Obama’s direction here. It’s still very rural, and competitive in an open seat situation. There are big pockets of population in Grand Junction, Pueblo, and Jefferson County.

District 4 – Betsy Markey (D-Fort Collins) — New and improved for enhanced Democratic performance! 100% of Larimer, 65% of Adams, and 53% of Weld make for a safe district.

District 5 – Doug Lamborn (R-Colorado Springs) — meant to pack Republicans tightly.

District 6 – Mike Coffman (R-Littleton) — ditto in that this low-elevation “Colokansas” district packs GOP votes efficiently. I did cause some mischief by putting Coffman’s home in the 7th.

District 7 – Ed Perlmutter (D-Golden) — decidedly Democratic suburban Denver seat comprising half of Arapahoe and 80% of Jefferson.

Minnesota

This is the first state for which I drew two maps, one a Dem gerrymander and the other a bipartisan compromise map. Since Minnesota is expected to lose a seat for a new total of seven, there were some key differences in how I handled the dropped district (as well as how I drew the urban/suburban Twin Cities seats). Collin Peterson’s new 6th and Jim Oberstar’s new 7th are configured similarly in both maps, with Oberstar’s diluted a bit and Peterson’s shored up a tad to create two mildly Dem-friendly rural districts (though Peterson’s is still tough, especially with its geographical identity changing as population loss forces it to leech toward the Iowa border!).

I will run through the bipartisan map first since Republicans currently hold the gov’s mansion:

District 1 – Tim Walz (D-Mankato) vs. John Kline (R-Lakeville) — honestly, Walz vs. Kline was the only logical, not-too-awkward bipartisan incumbent showdown I could seem to configure. This district would be more or less evenly divided in partisan performance and evenly weighted in population between Walz’s southern base and Kline’s exurban territory.

District 2 – Erik Paulsen (R-Eden Prairie) — this map being the bipartisan variation, Paulsen gets a clearly more Republican district comprising Anoka County, 35% of Hennepin, and 26% of Carver.

District 3 – Betty McCollum (D-St. Paul) — anchored in Ramsey County, safely Democratic.

District 4 – Keith Ellison (D-Minneapolis) — 65% of Hennepin County, and that’s it, for a mostly urban Minneapolis district.

District 5 – Michele Bachmann (R-Stillwater) — I wanted to soak up all the Republicans I could find (and Bachmann will need them if she keeps up this way).

District 6 – Collin Peterson (D-Detroit Lakes) — how to protect Peterson without giving Oberstar an untenable district? Knowing the district would have to extend south, I tried to improve the PVI a bit by taking some rural Dem counties from his neighbor, but not move the needle too dramatically as that would jeopardize the esteemed Transportation & Infrastructure Committee Chairman.

District 7 – Jim Oberstar (D-Chisholm) — more of a swing district than before; Oberstar would be safe but Dems would have to fight for this as an open seat. Is it worth shoring up Peterson’s seat at the cost of making this one equally swingy? I’m no longer convinced.

Overall summary: two safe Dem seats (McCollum and Ellison), two relatively safe GOP seats (Paulsen and Bachmann), two swing seats that would remain safe for their current Dem incumbents (Peterson and Oberstar), one battleground (Walz v. Kline in the 1st).

And now, the hypothetical Democratic gerrymander should luck break our way in the governor’s race (and that certainly didn’t happen in 1990, 1994, 1998, 2002, or 2006, but I suppose the DFL is overdue for some good fortune in this given area):

The two North Country districts certainly don’t look much different, but the other five, I think, would be quite altered under a Democratic plan.

District 1 – Tim Walz (D-Mankato) — this version mostly steers clear of the Twin Cities area and is heavier in small towns and southern counties that know and like Walz. I can’t knowledgeably estimate the presidential numbers here, but assume Obama would have still won, as I pointedly tried to avoid weakening Walz for other Democrats’ benefit.

District 2 – John Kline (R-Lakeville) vs. Michele Bachmann (R-Stillwater) — yay, a chance to eliminate Bachmann! Except that, based purely on factors of geography, media coverage, and name recognition, Bachmann would have a good fighting chance in a Republican primary here. Oh well, at least it’s an eliminated GOP seat.

District 3 – Erik Paulsen (R-Eden Prairie) — given how hard it will be to shore up Collin Peterson land without undermining Oberstar’s Iron Range seat, you can bet the Democrats would milk the Twin Cities for every vote they’re worth, and that means messing with Paulsen. Here his district comprises 58% of Anoka, 20% of Dakota, and 42% of Hennepin, for a moderately Dem-leaning/Obama-friendly suburban seat.

District 4 – Betty McCollum (D-St. Paul) — Give and take, give and take. So the 4th gets diluted a bit as it suburbanizes; it’s still plenty solid, but doesn’t waste votes as before.

District 5 – Keith Ellison (D-Minneapolis) — extends into Anoka County to hurt Paulsen but remains liberal and overwhelmingly Democratic.

District 6 – Collin Peterson (D-Detroit Lakes) — not a heck of a lot different than in the bipartisan map.

District 7 – Jim Oberstar (D-Chisholm) — ditto.

This map only includes one super-safe GOP seat, two very safe Dem seats, three swing seats that would be strong for their Dem incumbents (Walz, Peterson, Oberstar), and one swing seat that would be vulnerable to ousting its GOP incumbent (Paulsen).

Thoughts on either state are much appreciated!

We have added the MN-06 Democratic nominee funds to the list of candidates we will be supporting in 2010. I chose this for several reasons and the most encouraging being the latest Michele Bachmann comments that we posted yesterday. Bachmann is perhaps the most divisive politician on the National scene.

Help us now as we do all we can to level the playing field for the eventual nominee who will run against her in 2010. A number of $5, $10 and $20 contributions to whoever she will face will provide an early assist to take her down.

As soon as we find out if there is a leading contender to take on Bachmann whether it be the 2008 nominee Tinklenberg or someone else we will gladly support them.

As is my tradition after evaluating specific numbers statewide, I will offer my detailed final thoughts on the 2008 election in my home state of Minnesota.  From a broad standpoint, it’s hard to say the outcome in Minnesota this year wasn’t slightly disappointing at every level.  The Democrats had the potential to pick up two House seats and a Senate seat and have fallen short on at least two of them, with the Senate seat looking increasingly in doubt as of this writing.  Minnesota’s worthless Independence Party has inarguably denied us two of those three seats, increasing an already lofty Democratic body count at the bloody hands of the largely center-left IP.  Even with the IP noise aside, I’m still struck that Minnesota saw the least improvement in Democratic margins called to all four of its neighbors.

I’ll begin with the Presidential race.  As predicted, the 2008 county map for Minnesota most closely resembled the 1988 Dukakis county map, with a broad coalition of western farm counties joining traditional DFL strongholds and a couple suburban counties to give the Democratic candidate a 9-10 point margin of victory, even as the modestly populated but growing counties in central Minnesota remained red.  

But as a rule, outstate Minnesota margin bumped up only a few points for Obama over Gore or Kerry.  This is contrast to Iowa and Wisconsin where Obama scored across-the-board gains, as did North and South Dakota.  The easiest factor that one can attribute to Minnesota’s relative stagnancy is the advertising gap.  Minnesota was never taken seriously as a battleground state by the Obama team and thus didn’t spend much in the way of advertising dollars there, whereas McCain held on in the hopes of an unlikely upset and clobbered Obama there with ads well into the early fall.  For that reason, it’s unsurprising that the counties where Obama saw the greatest improvement were counties in the Fargo, Grand Forks, Sioux Falls, and La Crosse advertising markets where it was Obama with an outsized advertising presence.  There are some other factors I will outline in my more detailed district-by-district evaluations a little further in.

The Senate race lived up to its hype as an unpredictable barnburner with so many wild cards that even most the most seasoned political hand couldn’t effectively handicap the race.  With that said, the final result produced a statewide map that was virtually identical to the 2004 Presidential map, a map that generally represents the realignment we can expect to see in the foreseeable future in close statewide races.  Kerry and Franken both won 24 Minnesota counties, only one of which was unshared (they swapped the Kerry county of Fillmore in southeastern Minnesota for the Franken county of Aitkin in northeastern Minnesota, both of which have roughly the same population).  In individual precincts, Barkley loomed large, and while in most places he clearly denied victory to Franken, there were still large numbers of precincts where Barkley clearly denied victory to Coleman…almost to the point of cancelling each other out.

Now for more specific breakdowns of performances district-by-district….

District 1–It’s been amazing seeing how fast Rochester, Minnesota’s third-largest city and formerly known as “the heart of soul of the Minnesota Republican Party, has changed.  The first signs of GOP softening came in 2000, with a Mark Dayton victory over Senator Rod Grams and a soft four-point margin for Bush over Gore.  After several cycles of shifting, Rochester completed it’s transition to a Democratic-leaning community having voted for Barack Obama by nine points.  Considering that most of the rest of the district has been more politically competitive, having the population anchor of the district trending Democrat gives MN-01 a decidedly blue tint, at least unless the Republican party moves back towards the kind of political moderation that was the hallmark of the state GOP in decades past and was embraced by Rochester.

Tim Walz mowed down third-rate competitor Brian Davis even more lopsidedly than I could have imagined.  Walz won all 23 counties in the district, a feat I wouldn’t have imagined possible this year given that Pipestone and Rock Counties in the southwest corner are shut out of the Minnesota media market (and thus tend to vote party line on essentially every non-national race) and have populations that are more than 20% evangelical that vote so overwhelmingly Republican that it makes nearly any Democratic victory unattainable.  I think Dick Day had the potential to mount a stronger challenge to Walz had he won the primary, but still would have likely fallen far short.  Walz’ rock-solid 30-point victory gives me confidence in his ability to weather more defensive political cycles that may emerge in the years ahead.

Other thoughts…..Worthington, formerly a Democratic stronghold in southwestern Minnesota that has been trending Republican in the last couple of decades, had another pretty good year for Democrats, following an upwardly mobile 2006.  College towns Mankato and Winona saw dramatic improvement for all Democrats on the ballots.  Traditional Republican strongholds like New Ulm and Owatonna were, for the second election cycle in a row, softer than usual across the ballot.  That leaves Fairmont as the district’s only population center that remains unflinching in its allegiance to the GOP.

In District 2, I was struck by how much improvement Obama saw in the southern suburbs.  Back in 2002, I looked at this district as easily being the state’s most Republican under the new district configuration and questioned embattled incumbent Democrat Bill Luther’s decision to run in this district rather than challenge Republican Mark Kennedy for the northern suburban/exurban district.  I’ve definitely changed my mind in the years since as I’ve seen the southern suburbs soften and the northern suburbs harden towards the GOP.

The big population prize in MN-02 is Dakota County where Obama was victorious.  Obama still didn’t get within double digits in the GOP epicenters of Carver and Scott Counties, but he avoided the 20-point drubbings that were assured four years ago.  Carver and Scott performed as strongly as usual for Coleman over Franken, but I honestly I expected the margins to be even worse for him there.  The rural/exurban counties on the south side of MN-02 were more disappointing.  It’s easy to blame suburban sprawl on the lack of Democratic growth in the previously Democratic-leaning counties of Le Sueur and Goodhue as well that still-Democrat-but-much-less-than-it-used-to-be Rice County, but all of those counties continue to produce significantly stronger margins for DFL candidates in statewide downballot races.  It’s always been a politically unpredictable trio of counties, but in the most consequential federal races, they seem to be letting us down more often than not.

Steve Sarvi performed about as predicted in his kamikaze race against John Kline.  Hard to see how Kline can be taken out in this district even in a perfect set of circumstances.  We’re 10 years away from being genuinely competitive in this district.

In District 3, I honestly thought Ashwin Madia was the odds-on favorite of winning this seat and am a bit startled by his eight-point drubbing by a man who is very clearly too conservative for the district.  It appears that my original hunch may have been right that the DFL was too cocky in nominating Madia over the more conventional pick of Terri Bonoff.  Sure, Bonoff will probably give it another go, but the odds of victory decrease with an incumbent in the mix.

The good news is that even as the residents of Bloomington, Minnetonka, and Plymouth were voting for Erik Paulsen, they were also continuing the district’s trendline towards Democrats elsewhere on the ballot, with Obama winning the district comfortably and expanding blueness even into turf like Eden Prairie, the McMansion-land that is Paulsen’s hometown.  Even Franken did better in MN-03 than I would have expected, losing the population center of Bloomington by only a half percentage point.

Nothing too significant to report in either MN-04 or MN-05 other than the fact that Obama managed to overperform the Kerry numbers from four years ago that I previously considered a Democratic highwater mark brought about only with near-unanimous urban turnout unlikely to be repeated.  Instead, Minneapolis increased it’s margin of victory for Obama to 81% from Kerry’s 79% while St. Paul improved from 73% to 76%.  Taking out the Barkley noise and comparing a strictly a Franken v. Coleman faceoff, Franken’s numbers were about on par with Kerry’s four years ago.  The fact that Franken was performing this well in Minneapolis and St. Paul but still narrowly trailing Coleman statewide is unprecedented.

MN-06 is easily our most serious long-term trouble spot.  Michelle Bachmann would probably not have been re-elected without spoiler candidate Bob Anderson cannibalizing 10% of El Tinklenberg’s potential vote, but the fact that Bachmann was able to score 47% of the vote here only three weeks removed from calling for McCarthyism 2.0 underscores the challenge we’re facing.  She remains too conservative for the district and is such a ticking time bomb that I suspect she goes away at some point (expect a Marilyn Musgrave-esque gradual acceptance of her vileness), but Bachmann is merely the public face of a much more serious problem in this district, which 15 years ago could have been described as center-right at worst.

If not for the college town of St. Cloud and the more moderate southeastern precincts in this district (Washington County), Obama would have seen no growth at all from Kerry’s numbers in MN-06.  The more yuppie-oriented young conservatives in the southern suburbs/exurbs proved mildly persuadable this cycle and last, but not the less affluent, megachurch attending social conservatives that now populate Sherburne, Wright, and northern Anoka County.  The Star Tribune did a report earlier this year on the “ghost towns” of brand new subdivisions in fast-growing Wright County, documenting the magnitude of the foreclosure crisis in exurbia.  I went into this election expecting some notable softening in the region, but Coleman defeated Franken by margins similar to his 2002 blowout over Mondale, and Obama’s Wright County margin narrowed only two points from Kerry’s, and the growth came almost completely from the precincts that have the longest-standing settlement rather than the growth zones hit hardest by the housing crisis, some of which became even redder this year.  Consider MN-06 a VERY long-term project.

Rural MN-07 is arguably the state’s most complex district as there are nationally low-profile issues such as sugar subsidies that loom very large here.  Furthermore, there are six different media markets operating here (Grand Forks, Fargo, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Mankato, Sioux Falls, and Watertown, SD) which will present a serious challenge to Collin Peterson’s successor who tries to hold the seat.  Underscoring what a tough district it is, Obama won 19 of the district’s 34 counties (and lost two more by less than two points) yet still lost the district by three points.  The Democratic counties are thinly populated farm counties, while the population centers are less agricultural and more Republican.

Obama nonetheless saw by far the most significant growth in MN-07 compared to other districts, but still didn’t max out on Democratic performance potential in the region.  For whatever reason, the most die-hard DFL counties in west-central region of the state (Lac qui Parle, Swift and Chippewa) saw little or no growth for Obama compared to Kerry.  These counties are capable of significantly higher numbers, and combining that with a few other things going right and the Democrats can hold this seat in Peterson’s absence and win future Presidential elections.  After the next reapportionment, I suspect St. Cloud could be back in MN-07.  That insertion would largely be a wash politically, but in high turnout years it could prove beneficial for Democrats with the surge of youth in an otherwise gray-haired region.

MN-08 was a disappointment.  Only in a few counties did we see significant improvement.  The zero-growth Iron Range and Arrowhead regions responsible for this district’s Democratic tilt seems to have maxxed out in turnout in 2004 as the needle barely moved at all up there.  The region is socially conservative and its history suggests there may have been racial resistance towards Obama in some otherwise true blue circles.  The numbers were not necessarily “concerning”, but do suggest a slow erosion of support is likely imminent here given the continued population decline and aging of the area.  The college town of Duluth is of course the exception and overperformed Kerry’s 2004 margin, thus providing Obama’s tiny margin of growth in St. Louis County (this was the first time in 25 years of tracking Minnesota elections where St. Louis County was not the most Democratic Minnesota county in every partisan contest….Ramsey County narrowly edged it out).  

The southern half of the district was most troubling though.  Obama saw virtually no movement in the counties in and around the Mille Lacs Lake area.  Most of this area was solid Dukakis and Wellstone turf in years past, but has been changed by the gun issue and exurban sprawl (the latter particularly in Isanti and Chisago Counties) to the point where McCain and Coleman were winning by double-digits in places like Kanabec County.  Most of these counties are still winnable, or at least closer, in downballot statewide races, but have become predictably GOP in higher-profile Senate and Presidential contests.  Certainly the right kind of pro-gun, socially right-of-center Democrat can continue to win by healthy margins here, but the Democrats really need to choose wisely when selecting a replacement for Oberstar upon his retirement, because it’s not out of the question that a Republican could win here.

Interestingly, the disparity between Obama and Franken was smallest in District 8.  At first I was suspicious of Franken’s ability to connect with northern Minnesotans, but relative to other regions, it appears he did okay here.

Sorry for the long-windedness of this diary but when I start talking about Minnesota politics I tend to ramble on.  Hopefully someone else considers it a good read as well.

Americans appear ready to sweep a lot of Democrats into office on November 4. Not only does Barack Obama maintain a solid lead in the popular vote and electoral vote estimates, several Senate races that appeared safe Republican holds a few months ago are now considered tossups.

Polling is harder to come by in House races, but here too there is scattered evidence of a coming Democratic tsunami. Having already lost three special Congressional elections in red districts this year, House Republicans are now scrambling to defend many entrenched incumbents.

In this diary, I hope to convince you of three things:

1. Some Republicans who never saw it coming are going to be out of a job in two weeks.

On a related note,

2. Even the smartest experts cannot always predict which seats offer the best pickup opportunities.

For that reason,

3. Activists should put resources behind many under-funded challengers now, instead of going all in for a handful of Democratic candidates.

Allow me to elaborate.

1. A lot of seemingly safe incumbents have lost in wave elections, even in districts tilted toward their own party.

The Republican landslide of 1994 claimed my own Congressman Neal Smith, a 36-year incumbent who had a senior position on the House Appropriations Committee. Democratic House Speaker Tom Foley spent “what aides say may total $1.5 million to $2 million, a staggering amount for a House race” in 1994, but he still lost to George Nethercutt in Washington’s fifth district.

Many of you probably remember long-serving House and Senate Democrats in your own states who were swept away in the Reagan landslide of 1980.

By the same token, a lot of entrenched Republicans lost their seats during the 1974 post-Watergate wave. That was the year Iowans elected Tom Harkin and Berkley Bedell in the fifth and sixth Congressional districts, where both candidates had lost elections in 1972.

2. Even the political pros and the best analysts cannot always handicap Congressional races accurately, especially House races where public polls are scarce.

In 2006, could anyone have predicted that Lois Murphy (who almost beat Republican Congressman Jim Gerlach two years earlier) would fall short again in PA-06, while the massively under-funded Carol Shea-Porter would defeat Jeb Bradley in NH-01?

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee poured millions into IL-06 in 2006, only to see Tammy Duckworth lose to Peter Roskam. Meanwhile, Larry Kissell didn’t get the time of day from the DCCC and came just a few hundred votes short of beating Republican incumbent Robin Hayes in NC-08.

My point is that we can’t always know where our best chances lie. Sometimes a stealth candidate can catch an incumbent napping in a race that hasn’t been targeted by either party.

Look at the seats Republicans are now worried about, according to Politico:

GOP Reps. John B. Shadegg of Arizona, Lee Terry of Nebraska, Henry Brown Jr. of South Carolina and Dan Lungren of California are all fighting for their political lives, a reversal of fortunes that has caught even the most astute campaign observers by surprise.

Markos commented on the Politico piece,

Shadegg’s AZ-03 is R+5.9.

Terry’s NE-02 is R+9.0.

Brown’s SC-01 is R+9.6

Lungren’s CA-03 is R+6.7.

We haven’t had any public polls in Iowa’s fourth or fifth district races, but last week Republican incumbent Tom Latham (IA-04, D+0) released his first negative television ad, suggesting that his internal polls may show Becky Greenwald gaining on him.

I can’t tell you today who will win on November 4, but I guarantee you that some Democrats in “tossup” seats will lose, even as other Democrats take over “likely Republican” or “safe Republican” districts. Which brings me to my third point.

3. We need to expand the field of Republican-held districts we’re playing for.

Thankfully, the bad old days when the DCCC would target 22 races, hoping to win 15, are just a memory. The DCCC has put more than 60 Republican-held seats in the “Red to Blue” category. Not all of those seats have seen media buys or other significant financial investment from the DCCC, however.

Plus, as I mentioned above, Dan Lungren is sweating bullets in CA-03, which isn’t even on the Red to Blue list.

In 2006 we won at least two seats that were not in the Red to Blue program (IA-02 and NH-01) and came oh, so close in NC-08.

The bottom line is that a lot of Democratic challengers with the potential to win are not getting the support of the DCCC. This post at Swing State Project lists lots of seats once thought safe for Republicans, which are becoming competitive.

Where can netroots fundraising have the most impact? In my view, it’s in the winnable districts where there will be no influx of hundreds of thousands of dollars from the DCCC or other outside groups. Many of these are districts where an additional $50,000 or even $25,000 can make the difference.

The mother of all moneybombs dumped three-quarters of a million dollars into Elwyn Tinklenberg’s campaign in 24 hours over the weekend. It was a strong statement against the intolerance and bigotry Michelle Bachmann (MN-06) displayed on Hardball.

While I respect the enthusiasm, I can’t agree with those who are still asking the netroots to give to Tinklenberg, even after he’s collected more than $750,000 and the DCCC has promised to put $1 million into this race. Tinklenberg now has the resources to run an aggressive paid media and GOTV effort for the next two weeks. He probably has more money than he can spend effectively with so little time left.

Raising $50,000 for each of ten good challengers would be a better use of our energy than continuing to push activists to give to Tinklenberg.

Remember, few challengers are able to match incumbents dollar-for-dollar, but that doesn’t mean they can’t win. They don’t need to match incumbent spending, but they do need the resources to improve their name recognition and capitalize on the Democratic wave.

Which House races should we target for a moneybomb? I would suggest looking at the list of candidates on the Blue America ’08 page at Act Blue, as well as the candidates endorsed by Russ Feingold’s Progressive Patriots Fund. We have good reason to believe that those candidates will stand up for progressive values.

I would then pick a few Democrats on those lists who are not benefiting from large independent expenditures by the DCCC or others.

Our money will go further in districts with relatively inexpensive paid media.

I would also favor candidates taking on particularly odious incumbents, such as Dennis Shulman (running against Scott Garrett in NJ-05) and Debbie Cook (facing Dana Rohrbacher in CA-46). RDemocrat has written a book’s worth of material on why we should support Heather Ryan against “Exxon Ed” Whitfield in KY-01.

And what kind of Iowan would I be if I didn’t mention Rob Hubler, who is taking on Steve King in IA-05? My fellow Iowa blogger 2laneIA published this comprehensive diary showing that if we’re talking about the most ignorant and bigoted wingnuts in Congress, King gives Michelle Bachmann a run for her money. Click the link to read all about King’s “greatest hits,” including his suggestion that we electrify the border fence with Mexico like we do “with livestock,” his prediction that terrorists will be “dancing in the streets” if Obama becomes president, and his pride in working to scale back funding for the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (which he calls Socialist Clinton-style Hillarycare for Illegals and their Parents). King considers his work to reduce SCHIP funding a “key moment” in his Congressional career.

Amazingly, there’s even more to dislike about King than 2laneIA had room to mention in that piece. For instance, while still a state senator, King was a leading advocate for Iowa’s “official English” law, which was adopted in 2002. Then he filed a lawsuit in 2007 to stop the Iowa Secretary of State’s office from providing voter information in languages besides English. It’s not for nothing that Ann Coulter calls King “one of my favorites.”

Hubler is a good progressive who spoke out against the FISA bill and supports the Responsible Plan for Iraq. I just found out yesterday that during the 1980s he was INFACT’s national director of the boycott against Nestle. Hubler also happens to be running a great campaign, but he is not getting much outside help except from Feingold’s Progressive Patriots Fund, which has sent an organizer to work on the campaign.

Two dozen House Democrats already represent districts with a partisan voting index of R+5 or worse. We should be able to increase that number in two weeks and send home Republicans who didn’t even realize they were in trouble.

Few people have enough money to donate to every worthy Democratic candidate. But if the netroots could raise more than three-quarters of a million dollars for Elwyn Tinklenberg in just over 48 hours, we ought to be able to raise $50,000 each for ten good challengers, whose races are relatively low-profile.

Who’s with me on this, and which districts should we target?

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.

Note From Diarist:  This diary is primarily about the Presidential campaign.  I wrote it for Daily Kos but didn’t feel it got the exposure I was hoping for.  It’s very much inside baseball politics so I thought it might have some fans around here, but it is about the Presidential campaign which I know is no longer the focus of the website.  If the moderator wishes to delete it, I’ll understand.

Anybody following the horse race at all has a pretty good idea where the key battlegrounds are expected to be. My personal opinion is that the three markets that are most likely to determine the 2008 election winner are, in this order, Denver (including Boulder and Fort Collins), Detroit, and Northern Virginia. Beyond those three, there are at least a dozen markets in key battleground states that will be sucking up the vast majority of campaign resources in the next 50-some days until the election. That’s the way the game is played and always will be for as long as the Electoral College is a reality. My thought process this morning was dedicated to isolating some geographic hotspots that are perhaps under-the-radar of conventional wisdom yet could nonetheless be very productive investments of time and resources for the Obama campaign. The top-10 I came up with are listed below in descending order.

10. Flagstaff, Arizona–Because it’s John McCain’s home state, nobody expects Arizona to be a swing state in 2008. It probably won’t be, but the most recent poll released from the state showed McCain leading by only six in Arizona, a smaller lead than he held in the expected battleground state of Nevada. The Obama campaign needs to do some internal polling in Arizona and see if their findings reflect the recent polling of a single-digit McCain lead. If it is, I think it would be entirely worthwhile to pour some campaign dollars in the less-expensive media market of Flagstaff, which is already favorable Democratic terrain, and also to set up a campaign stop there. It would be very embarrassing for the McCain campaign if Obama went to the university town of Flagstaff and filled the streets with tens of thousands of screaming fans in McCain’s backyard. Obviously this is not something we’re likely to see in the closing weeks of the campaign, but for headfake value alone, it’s something worth doing in September.

9. Aberdeen, South Dakota–I’ve seen only one poll coming out of South Dakota, and it showed McCain with a scant four-point lead. I don’t expect Obama to win there, but I’m puzzled why the prospect of a competitive South Dakota is not even being discussed even when the polls are similar to those of North Dakota, which is a battleground. Aberdeen is a worthwhile target for a September campaign stop and television ads for a number of reasons. This is the Democratic part of South Dakota. Tim Johnson and Stephanie Herseth pulled out statewide victories in 2002 and 2004 by running up the score in the counties in and around Aberdeen. Given that the Democrats have adopted a much more friendly platform to controversial-everywhere-but-the-Corn-Belt biofuels than Republicans in 2008, Obama could pick off alot of GOP-leaning farmers in eastern South Dakota who don’t trust McCain’s commitment to agriculture. Beyond that, Obama could do a rally with hometown boy Tom Daschle and really make some connections to voters who were out of reach for Gore and Kerry. I’m not certain about particulars of the Aberdeen media market, but I suspect it would be one of the cheapest in the country for advertising, and cuts into portions of North Dakota making it even more useful.

8. Wheeling, West Virginia–I have a good friend who lives deep into the hollers of Logan County, WV, and still insists from her interactions that she believes Obama will win West Virginia. I suspect that puts her in a minority small enough to count on one hand, but I still think some outreach effort into West Virginia would be valuable, particularly in the Wheeling area. Obama essentially ceded West Virginia to Hillary in the primary, making only one campaign stop in Charleston on the eve of the primary. Voters there don’t know him, but I suspect that if more do, the margin for McCain in the state could potentially be far less lopsided than if he doesn’t set foot there. More importantly though, I think Wheeling is important for the same reason it was important for Kerry four years ago. The market cuts into Ohio and Pennsylvania, specifically the very blue-collar regions of Ohio and Pennsylvania where Obama has the most work to do to win over skeptics. I suspect campaigning in this area is something of a defensive move, meaning his best hope is probably to cut losses rather than win over Bush voters, but in the context of controlling losses within statewide races in OH and PA, the old adage that the best offense is a good defense certainly seems to apply.

7. Council Bluffs, Iowa–Each new round of poll numbers indicate that Iowa appears less likely to ultimately be a battleground state, with Obama managing double-digit leads in the state. Again, I surmise that the untold story accounting for Obama’s strong performance throughout the Corn Belt (even Indiana!) is ethanol, specifically McCain’s previous hard-line opposition to it. The reason Council Bluffs is a secret weapon is twofold. It’s location in the heavily Republican southwest side of Iowa means the Obama campaign is on offense there, competing for traditionally Republican votes in western Iowa, but also competing for votes in Omaha, Nebraska, just across the Missouri River from Council Bluffs. We don’t hear much anymore about the prospect of Obama winning one (or even two) of the electoral votes in eastern Nebraska, and it remains a longshot. Nonetheless, raising Obama’s presence in western Iowa will have spillover effect in Omaha and the corn farmers surrounding it in Nebraska, leaving the prospect of robbing McCain of a Nebraska electoral vote on the table while simultaneously running up the score in Iowa.

6. Durango, Colorado–Chances are, the suburban doughnut surrounding Denver will decide who wins Colorado’s nine electoral votes, but if the race is as close there as most suspect it will end up being, smaller Colorado markets loom large. The fast-changing demography of Colorado was abundantly clear in the 2004 election, and perhaps no place was the change more obvious than Durango, formerly a Republican stronghold in Colorado’s southwest corner, where population growth is apparently fronted by left-leaning young people drawn to the area’s ski culture. I believe there were only five counties in America that Bill Clinton never won in 1992 or 1996, but where John Kerry won in 2004. La Plata County, Colorado, home of Durango, was one of them. If we assume that the trendlines that had clearly transformed Durango in 2004 have continued, Obama should be able to grow upon Kerry’s margin rather significantly in the area in 2008. The fact that neighboring battleground state New Mexico is a few miles south of Durango is an an additional bullet point for its utility.

5. South Bend, Indiana–Congressman Joe Donnelly showed us the potential northern Indiana holds for Democrats if we simply try there. The lesson appears to be learned as Indiana is deemed a battleground state in 2008. South Bend strikes me as the most consequential market in Indiana. Notre Dame University gives Obama a youthful base of operation while simultaneously providing Obama an outreach to Catholic voters, a demographic long cited as one of his most difficult to reach. The South Bend market also reaches into southwestern Michigan, and despite fairly encouraging polls of late, I think Obama will ultimately need all the help in can get in Michigan. Probably outside of the South Bend market but still worthy of mention is another Indiana town in Joe Donnelly’s Congressional district, Kokomo. This is a blue-collar factory town that Democrats should be winning, but rarely do. Voters in Kokomo may be some of the most likely to swing if the Obama campaign reaches out to them in a serious way.

4. Elko, Nevada–In 2004, it seemed like John Kerry was spending more time in Republican-leaning Reno than in Democratic-leaning Las Vegas. I didn’t really understand it at the time, until I saw the election returns and noticed Kerry had significantly cut into the GOP’s advantage in Reno and surrounding areas. The reason Kerry lost Nevada was that he got absolutely destroyed in rural Nevada. Obama, by contrast, beat Hillary in most rural Nevada counties, meaning there’s at least a basis for thinking he could overperform Kerry in places like Elko. Campaigning and advertising in Elko would really be taking Kerry’s 2004 effort to go on offense in Reno to the next level. Considering Kerry got less than 20% of the vote in Nevada’s fourth most populous county, worse than both Mondale and Dukakis did back in the day, there’s easily room for improvement in the area, and even a little improvement upstate Nevada could be the difference in the state.

3. Cincinnati, Ohio–Now considering Cincinnati is the third-largest media market in what is considered perhaps the most critical battleground state, calling for an Obama campaign presence there is on the surface a no-brainer, but most importantly, I see metropolitan Cincinnati as the region of Ohio where Obama is best-positioned to make gains over John Kerry. Kerry narrowly lost Hamilton County (home of the city of Cincinnati and the core of its suburbs), but with a high African-American turnout in 2008, I strongly expect the county to turn blue. Just as important are the three crimson red exurban counties surrounding Cincinnati, which accounted for Bush’s entire margin of victory in Ohio in 2004. In every election since 2004, the needle has moved dramatically against Republicans in all of these counties (Butler, Clermont, and Warren), with Jean Schmidt, Ken Blackwell, and Mike DeWine, all badly underperforming traditional GOP margins in the area. If Obama can keep this trendline going and trim his losses by a few percentage points in suburban Cincinnati, it will go a long way towards offsetting his likely underperformance in the rural portions of Ohio. And to whatever extent the Cincinnati market is an outreach into Indiana is also a feather in our cap.

2. Michigan’s Upper Peninsula–With the racial polarization of metropolitan Detroit, enflamed by the Kwame Kilpatrick scandal, and Obama’s call for tougher CAFE standards fiercely opposed by Detroit automakers, the McCain campaign has some serious ammunition against Obama to take into Michigan. I fully expect Obama will underperform Gore and Kerry in metropolitan Detroit. With that in mind, the thought process should become where we can pick up additional votes in Michigan to offset the possible hemorrhaging in the population centers. To that end, it seems like a no-brainer for Obama to take his campaign up north…way up north. The blue-collar Upper Peninsula of Michigan is sparsely populated, but its demographics seem to align with other Midwestern areas that are Obama-friendly. More to the point, the Upper Peninsula of Michigan looks like Wisconsin, thinks like Wisconsin, and votes like Wisconsin. When you look at Obama’s healthy standing in Wisconsin polls compared to Kerry four years ago or Gore’s eight years ago, my thinking is that every Obama campaign rally that begins in Green Bay should make the quick drive to Marquette, Michigan, from there.

1. Fargo-Moorhead (North Dakota/Minnesota)–I suspect there is no other media market in the country where the needle will move more significantly in Obama’s favor compared to 2000 and 2004 than Fargo-Moorhead. To the extent that North Dakota has already been identified as a battleground state, Obama’s campaign already has a presence in the area, but may nonetheless not appreciate just how many things are working to their candidate’s favor here. First of all, the cities of Fargo and Moorhead are islands of youth in a region otherwise dominated by gray hair. That cuts to Obama’s advantage demographically. Furthermore, in addition to Obama’s more farmer-friendly stand on biofuels, the Democrats have an additional ace-in-the-hole here because the region is one of the nation’s top sugar-growing areas. The sugar industry has enjoyed its relative “cartel” status and has become decidedly protectionist since the passage of CAFTA in 2005, a vote which helped every Democrat on the ticket in Minnesota in 2006 score landslide margins in the Red River Valley. Particularly on the Minnesota side, this area is historically Democratic, even though both Gore and Kerry were destroyed here. This advantage on both sides of the river extends further to the Grand Forks area, a region of North Dakota where every Democrat needs to win big in a competitive statewide race. It’s expected that Minnesota is leaning heavily Obama, but don’t underestimate the pseudo-maverick image of John McCain fooling alot of moderate suburbanites in Minneapolis-St. Paul. That raises the stakes for Obama’s need to win in places like the Red River Valley, which early indications suggest he is poised to do.

The conventional wisdom is that Franken is struggling in the MN Senate race – as evidenced by a series of polls showing Norm Coleman opening up a lead

So what to make of the poll released yesterday by the Minnesota Public Radio/ University of Minnesota showing Franken ahead of Coleman by 1%?

http://minnesota.publicradio.o…

The full poll results are here:

http://minnesota.publicradio.o…

The poll says that among “likely voters” Franken holds a 41-40 lead over the incumbent Republican, with Dean Barkley (Independence Party) polling 8 % and 11% undecided. (Margin of error is cited as 3.6%)

An incumbent Senator polling just 40% (even in a 2 1/2 way race) at this point seems remarkable. His approval/disapproval is a very close 46/42 (although elsewhere on the MPR website it says 42/40… but the 46/42 number comes directly from the poll internals, so I’ll assume it is accurate).

The poll also reports a 51-40-10 DFL – Republican – Independent party split overall, with Coleman holding 81% of Republicans, Franken 71% of DFL. Independents are listed as breaking 36% Coleman, 30% Franken, 11% Barkley, 23% undecided.

Among the 11% of likely voters the survey considered to be “swing voters” (with no definition of how they arrived at that definition), shows an even more undefined race, with Coleman leading at 35%, Franken at 26%, Barkley at 12%, and fully 27% undecided.

Assuming this is a very close race the 27% undecided among swing voters are obviously crucial if they break one way or another. Similarly, the nearly 30% of DFLers not currently supporting Franken (8% for Coleman, 8% for Barkley, and 13% undecided) are crucial…. if Franken can bring the bulk of these voters home, the current party breakdown in MN gives him a built in advantage.

One potentially big obstacle for Franken is that Coleman appears to be perceived as closer to the political centre than Franken. Fully 46% of those polled said Franken was “too liberal”, with 33% rating him “about right” and 4% “too conservative.” (Presumably the remaining 17% had no opinion.)  By contrast, Coleman was considered “too conservative” by 36%, “about right” by 42%, and “too liberal” by 10%, and 12% unaccounted for. (Would be a great opening for a right wing independent/3rd party candidate to siphon off some votes from disaffected conservatives, wouldn’t it?)

—

I’m not sure what the UMN record on polling is, but while the results are tremendously encouraging, a number of key questions jump out.

The first is that the poll was conducted over an extremely long period of 11 days (Aug 7-17). This period of time is far longer than usually seen in more reliable polls. (Although the sample size of 763 is pretty good for a statewide poll.) An 11 day poll conduced in the middle of summer vacation season (when many of Minnesotans are off at the cabin…) has some inherent weaknesses.

The methodology of defining “likely voters” is briefly described in the poll report, and it makes reference to weighting by demographics and region – but little detail is provided to be able to assess how the “likely voter” screen may have impacted the results. (They don’t provide totals for all respondents to let us know if there is a “likely voter” bias toward one candidate or the other – although in a relatively high turnout state like Minnesota, that may be less important than in some other states.)

Similarly, no demographic information is provided about poll respondents — assumptions about turnout by urban, suburban and rural residence, and by age, sex, race/ethnicity, income, education etc could have a huge impact in interpreting this race — without information about these details, it is harder to make sense of this poll.

Finally, the Barkley support at 8% seems to be a critical. Will it hold up as high as 8% (or even grow) or will it collapse?

While Barkley briefly served in the Senate (he was appointed by Jesse Ventura to fill the remaining months of Paul Wellstone’s term), his record of running for office is not impressive – winning 7% for Senate in 1996, and 5% in 1994, and more impressive 16% in 1992 running for the newly redistricted 6th district seat.

Third party candidates have demonstrated greater appeal in Minnesota than in many other states, and Barkley appears to be tapping into some of the same types of voters who in the past have voted for Ventura, Perot, Tim Penney, Jim Gibson, and Peter Hutchinson – while only Venture won, the others showed a willingness to vote for independent candidates by a chunk of the Minnesota electorate.

At the moment, Barkley appears to be serving as a parking place for voters highly dissatisfied with Bush and Coleman but not ready to vote for Franken. Can Franken ultimately win over enough of these voters with an anti-Republican, anti-incumbent message?

As the analysis of the poll makes clear, Barkley is hurting Franken at the moment:

“The environment could be hurting Coleman more if Barkley were not in the contest. He is competing with Franken for the angry voter who disapproves of Bush and sees the country as off on the wrong track. Franken is only winning 51% of Minnesotans who are concerned that the country is off-track and Barkley is a major reason that the Democrat is not getting even more disaffected Minnesotans — he is drawing 9% of these voters. A similar story is evident with regard to Minnesotans who disapprove of Coleman and Bush: Barkley is diverting 9% of these critics — voters that might otherwise support Franken.”

Lots of variables remain in the race — will Obama run away with Minnesota or will it be as close as in last couple of elections? If Pawlenty ends up on the Republican ticket would it help Coleman? What will the impact of the RNC in St. Paul be on Minnesota public opinion — positive attention to the state, or an unwelcome collection of right wing nuts messing up traffic and hanging out in the airport men’s room?

Some folks have been saying this race is lost — if this poll is on target, it is clear that attitude is premature. This shows all signs of being a close one.

 

Cross-posted at Election Inspection

 Before looking at whether or not the Democrats can expect to get the magic sixty, lets review the seats which have the potential to flip, starting from the ones most likely to flip to the ones least likely to flip (anything not listed here means that we consider the seats to be completely safe). (Note, these are all Election Inspection's ratings) 

Solid Democratic (Pick-up)

• Virginia (Warner)
• New Mexico (Domenici)

• Sununu (New Hampshire)
• Landrieu (Lousiana)
• Colorado (Allard)
• Stevens (Alaska)

Leans Republican

• Smith (Oregon)
• Coleman (Minnesota)
• Collins (Maine)
• Wicker (Mississippi-B)
• McConnell (Kentucky)

Likely Republican (Open Seat retention)

• Idaho (Craig)

Possible Darkhorse Races (Republican Incumbent)

• Dole (North Carolina)
• Cornyn (Texas)
• Inhofe (Oklahoma)
• Roberts (Kansas)

First of all, I think we can safely assume that Democrats will win in New Mexico and Virginia, so we can start off with a net gain of two seats for the Democrats. So, to start off with in the second session, the Democrats are basically guaranteed to start from a vantage point of 50 seats. With the way the Leans Democratic races have been playing out (including the newly added AK-Sen), I'm pretty confident that the Democrats will win at least three and probably all four (Pollster shows Democrats leading by at least 5 points in Colorado, New Hampshire, and Alaska) and while it seems like it's close in Louisiana, with the exception of Zogby, Landrieu has shown to have a consistent lead of no less than 3 points (with the most recent Rasmussen poll giving Landrieu a 5 point edge). So, we'll give the Democrats three more seats and put them up to 53 seats (by the way, this doesn't include Bernie Sanders and Joe Lieberman who caucus with the Democrats). Alright, so the score now should be at Democrats 53 guaranteed seats and Republicans with 34 guaranteed seats. Now then, let's assume that Republicans win all of the seats which I consider to be either Likely or a potential Dark-horse (which, realistically, is more likely to happen than not), Republicans will have 38 seats (from now on, I'm going to consider Sanders to be a Democrat, for the purposes of voting, which gives the Democrats 54 seats and I'm going to consider Lieberman a wild-card as far as voting in concerned since, even though Lieberman has taken a more Conservative position on several issues, he is still considered to be more likely to support Democratic domestic agendas than Republican ones). So we have a score of 54-39-1, which means that for Democrats to win a filibuster-proof Senate which doesn't rely on Lieberman, they'll have to win 6 additional seats on top of the 5 which I'm projecting for them to win already, now how realistic a shot to Democrats have at this? 

I believe that more likely than not, Democrats will win in Louisiana, so we'll give the Democrats that extra seat which puts the score at 55-39-1 (5 undecided). I also think that Republicans should win in Kentucky. so the score now stands at 55-40-1 (4 undecided), which also basically eliminates any reasonable possibility of Democrats getting to the magic 60 number without Lieberman (which, might not be as bad as people think). So, that means that whether or not the Democrats can get to a filibuster proof senate rests on Minnesota, Maine, Oregon, and Mississippi-B. Mississippi-B and Oregon look to be within striking distance but Maine and Minnesota, seem to be moving away from us, so right now, I'd say that, at most, Democrats will probably end up with 57 seats (including Sanders) Republicans with 42 seats, and Joe Lieberman as a wild-card in the Senate.

Doesn't look like we're going to get our filibuster-proof majority this time around, but we'll do well enough that it's possible we can set 2010 up to get there.

Whatever the make-up of the 111th Congress, no one will be able to say that Democrats didn’t try everything in their power to reach a 60-seat majority. As of the spring of 2008, there already were eight highly competitive seats that no one would be surprised to see turn-over: With Virginia and New Mexico all but lost for Republicans (and Senator Ensign acknowledging just as much), the GOP is in grave danger in New Hampshire, Colorado, Alaska, Mississippi, Oregon and Minnesota. On the other hand, Republican attempts to go on the offensive have been disastrous, with only Louisiana looking competitive.

Among these nine initial seats – eight of which are held by Republicans – the rating of four has changed this month. New Mexico has moved from lean Democrat to likely Democrat, Colorado from toss-up to lean Democrat, and Oregon from lean Republican to toss-up. Only Minnesota has moved in the opposite direction, from toss-up to Lean Republican.

9 competitive seats is already a large number – comparable to the field of play two years ago. But with 2008 shaping up to be as good a Democratic year as 2006, the DSCC is aware that it has to do the most of this opportunity and is eager to put even more seats in play. As a result, we have seen a lot  of actions since my previous Senate rankings in the second and third-tier of GOP-held seats: In North Carolina, strong polling by Kay Hagan forced Elizabeth Dole to air a round of advertisements, but the DSCC has reserved up to $6 million of air time in the fall. This race is the most likely candidate to join the “initial nine.”

In Maine, Democrats have still not been able to tie Susan Collins to her party label, but the $5 million the DSCC is budgeting for the fall campaign is a huge amount of money for this inexpensive state. In Kentucky, Bruce Lunsford’s primary victory certainly exasperated progressives, but the first slate of polls suggests all hope is not lost for Democrats. As for Texas, Kansas and even Idaho, Democrats would need titanic shifts that for now remain unimaginable, but the mere fact that these races are being discussed is horrendous news for the GOP.

Will Democrats be able to go beyond eight serious targets and seriously contest one of these long-shot races? How close will they come to a sweep of their initial eight targets and will they save Louisiana? These are the obvious questions to ask out of these new rankings and I will be closely monitoring any signs of further shifts in the electoral map. More precise questions that will come to determine the make-up of the next Senate include: Will John Sununu be able to take advantage of McCain’s good name in New Hampshire to appeal to independents? How much will Obama boost black turnout in Louisiana and in Mississippi? Will Al Franken be able to put his personal controversies behind him? And is the Maine electorate already over Bush?

The full new rankings are available here, with this accompanying map:

Outlook: Democratic pick-up a net 5-9 Senate seats.

Prediction: Democrats pick-up a net 7 seats, for a 58-42 majority.

Likely Takeover (2 Republican seats, 0 Democratic seat)

1. Virginia (Open seat; Previous Ranking: 1)

It is hard to believe that Jim Gilmore’s situation has worsened over the past two months given how much of an underdog the former Republican Governor was to start with. It is never a good sign when a presumptive nominee wins his party’s nod with 50.3% of the vote, but that is what happened to Gilmore at his party’s nominating convention. As if this proof of an unenergized conservative base was not enough, the state GOP’s moderate wing is also backing away from Gilmore: incumbent Senator John Warner, the Republican whom Gilmore is seeking to replace, is refusing to endorse his own party’s nominee! The only hope for Republicans to retain this seat is for Barack Obama to tap Mark Warner as his running-mate. Warner might very well have been the favorite in the veepstakes… if he were not favored to win this Senate race.

2. New Mexico (Open; Last ranking: 2 and lean take-over)

Three giants of New Mexico politics entered this race after Senator Domenici announced his retirement back in October. The political career of one of them has already been cut short: Rep. Heather Wilson lost a heated and narrow GOP primary to Rep. Steve Pearce, leaving him in a difficult match-up against Democratic Rep. Tom Udall. Pearce is much more conservative than Wilson, making it more difficult for him to appeal to independents in this blue-leaning year, but Wilson had her own ethical issues.

This is an open seat in a swing-state in a Democratic year — that by itself is a recipe for success Democrats, just as it was in Minnesota in 2006. In a very similar situation, Amy Klochubar opened a large lead against Rep. Kennedy in what was supposed to be a competitive open seat. Now, Udall is leading Pearce by 2:1 in recent polls and has 6 times more cash on hand than his Republican rival. That means Pearce is dependent on the help of the NRSC, help that is unlikely to come. In mid-June, Sen. Ensign, the NRSC chairman, implied that his committee was giving up on the Virginia and New Mexico races. That just about seals the deal in this race.

Lean Takeover (2 R, 0 D)

3. New Hampshire (Incumbent: John Sununu; Last ranking: 3)

The parallels between this race and Pennsylvania’s 2006 Senate race continue. Despite predictions that the race is bound to tighten and that John Sununu is too good a politician to go down without a fight, polls are showing no sign of a competitive race – with the latest numbers finding Shaheen leading by 22%. But Republicans are hoping that the more accurate parallel for the Sununu-Shaheen race will be North Carolina’s 2004 race, when Rep. Burr had stockpiled his cash to launch an ad blitzkrieg starting in September and had turned a consistent deficit into a narrow victory on Election Day. Now, it is Sununu who is saving up for a big push in the fall; as of the end of the second quarter, he has $5 million in the bank versus $2 million for Jeanne Shaheen. Will a late wave of advertisements be enough?

4. Colorado (Open; Last Ranking: 4 and toss-up)

For the first time since the November rankings, Colorado is not rated a “toss-up.” As had been expected from the day the match-up between Mark Udall and Bob Schaffer was set up, the Democrat has pull ahead and is now consistently ahead by 9-10% in recent polls. A combination of factors explains why Udall finally jumped up to his first lead. First, this year’s Democratic bent gives Democrats an edge in any open seat race that should have been tight. Second, Bob Schaffer had a bad few months, in particular over stories broken by the Denver Post about his association with convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Third, Udall fundraising advantage has allowed his campaign to spend more aggressively on ads. Udall outspent Shaffer 3:1 in the second quarter, and the DSCC jumped in with an attack ad of its own.

Meanwhile, we are starting to get a better idea of the campaign arguments Udall and Schaffer will use in the months ahead, and the first debate that opposed the two men in mid-July set some battle lines: Energy is already a hot topic in the campaign, with the two candidates exchanging barbs on the subject and Udall has devoted the entirety of one of his first ads to energy. Schaffer is determined to paint Udall as weak and unable to make much of a decision, while Udall is casting himself as a bipartisan with a commitment to consensus. It does look like Mark Udall is running as more of a moderate than his cousin Tom in New Mexico; beyond his insistence on bipartisanship, Mark voted for the FISA bill and Tom voted against it.

Toss-up (3 R, 1 D)

5. Alaska (Incumbent: Ted Stevens; Last Ranking: 5)

Ted Stevens is suffering from the corruption scandal that has ensnared him and the state’s Republican Party and it is even affecting his fundraising abilities, as Mark Begich outraised the entrenched incumbent in the second quarter. Contrary to Rep. Young in the at-large House race, Stevens does not face a credible primary challenge, a relief for Democrats as the state’s red leaning would kick in to help a Republican not plagued by ethical controversies.

Begich has been at worst tied with Stevens for months now. He went up on TV in early July, with one ad introducing himself and the other devoted to energy issues (with a joint pledge to develop alternative energies and to fight to “open ANWR”). Perhaps boosted by his increased media exposure and his advertisement efforts, Begich has jumped to a 9% lead in the latest poll, though we will naturally need confirmation of that number before drawing any conclusion.

The Democrat’s efforts will be boosted by those of the Obama campaign, which has unexpectedly decided to make Alaska into a battleground state at the presidential level. Alaska polls have shown a tight presidential race, a sharp departure from past cycles in which Bush crushed his opponents by more than 20%. That means that  contrary to Knowles in the 2004 Senate race, Begich will not have to swim counter-current and that he might benefit from Obama’s organizational efforts.

6. Mississippi (Incumbent: Roger Wicker; Last Ranking: 8 )

Ronnie Musgrove and Roger Wicker were once roommates, but they are quickly becoming bitter rivals. Polls confirm that the race is a pure toss-up. The Republican incumbent has a clear advantage on the financial front ($3 million of cash on hand versus less than $800K for Musgrove at the end of the second quarter), but the DSCC has already rushed in to help Musgrove respond to Wicker’s ads, demonstrating how seriously it took this contest. The DSCC’s move triggered further controversy: Republicans are charging that the ads break campaign finance rules. Democrats answered by filing their own complaint about Wicker’s fundraising.

It is true that Musgrove would have had a better chance had this special election been held in March, as it should have. Now, Wicker has more time to introduce himself to voters and blunt Musgrove’s high name recognition; the GOP believes November’s turnout will be more uniform than it was in MS-01 in May and that a more conservative electorate will give Wicker victory. But Democrats remain confident: First, there will be no party labels next to the candidates’ names. Second, this is one down-the-ballot race in which the Obama candidacy could have a very clear effect: If there is a significant boost in black turnout, it could prove all Musgrove needs to pick-up this seat. The African-American vote is more than ever the key metric of this senatorial race, and one polls are unlikely to capture accurately.

7. Louisiana (Incumbent: Mary Landrieu; Last Ranking: 6)

Not much has changed in this race since the end of May. For one, Louisiana remains the one credible pick-up opportunity for Republicans, and as such will remain a high priority for the NRSC. Second, the two candidates remain on par financially, with Kennedy keeping up with Landrieu’s fundraising for the second quarter in a row, though the incumbent retains a 2:1 advantage in the cash on hand department. As for polls, they show  Landrieu ahead but the race has tightened a bit, with the  Democrat ahead mid-single digits and under 50% in a number of recent polls. This is one state in which the presidential race is likely to help the Republican, as Louisiana is not a state Obama will do much of a dent. He might increase black turnout a bit, but the African-American vote’s decrease since Katrina will be an advantage to Kennedy. One strong argument Democrats hold is statements made by Kennedy in 2004 when he was running as a Democrat for Senate.

8. Oregon (Incumbent: Gordon Smith; Last Ranking: 9 and lean retention)

Democrats have targeted Gordon Smith since the very first days of the cycle. But a disappointing recruitment process followed by primary difficulties for Jeff Merkley made Democrats anxious that they could be wasting an opportunity here. Since the May 20th primary, however, Merkley has grown stronger and is consistently polling within a few points of Smith. In fact, Merkley led in a poll for the first time just a few days ago. News that Merkley had outraised Smith in the second quarter hardened his position as a strong challenger.

Smith has been aware of the target he has on his back and has been preparing since the start of the cycle. Despite being distanced in second quarter fundraising, he still has a 8:1 in cash on hand and so much of Merkley’s money was spent in the primary that his campaign is now in financial difficulty. Furthermore, Smith has been rapidly moving to the center, aware that he is at danger of becoming this cycle’s Lincoln Chaffee: a Republican incumbent in a Democratic state who drowns in the blue tsunami, heightened by the probability that Obama scores a large victory in Oregon.

Smith’s solution has been to throw his party label overboard and run as a consensus candidate ready to embrace both side. And he is going very far in that direction. Not only did he run an ad featuring a Democratic state representative and a state Senator endorsing him, but he followed that up with a spot embracing… Barack Obama, in a desperate-seeming effort to show his willingness to work across the aisle. This strategy does not come without risk: Smith, after all, is supporting John McCain and his positioning could confuse voters. And it will make Smith that much more vulnerable to Obama campaigning on Merkley’s side (the Illinois Senator wasted no time issuing a statement reiterating his support for Merkley).

Lean Retention (2 R, 0 D)

9. Minnesota (Incumbent: Norm Coleman; Last Ranking: 7 and toss-up)

This is the first time in six Senate rankings that Minnesota is not rated as a toss-up. After a wild two months in which Al Franken was undermined by a succession of controversies, polls have clearly shifted away from the former comedian. Except for Rasmussen, which continues to show a toss-up race, other pollsters (including SUSA and Quinnipiac) find Coleman leading by double-digits.

Facing a shrewd incumbent with the reputation of a solid campaigner, Franken had no room for error. Yet, his campaign started tanking with revelations of Franken’s tax problems and with the controversy over his 2000 allegedly-pornographic essay in Playboy; this led a Democratic congresswoman state that she was not sure she could support Franken’s campaign and led Planned Parenthood to blast Franken’s “misogynist remarks.” Next came another firestorm over a rape joke Franken helped write on SNL in 1995. Now, the Coleman campaign is airing a personal attack ad blasting Franken for not paying taxes and writing “juicy porn.”

Franken and Coleman’s strategies are clear. The Democrat wants to make this a referendum about the incumbent and about the Republican Party. Franken denounces the “Bush-Coleman recession” and emphasizes Coleman’s proximity to his party’s leadership. The Republican wants to make this a referendum about what he believes is Franken’s polarizing persona. Whoever manages to frame the debate best is likely to win the election – and both candidates have millions of dollars in the bank to define their opponent.

As if all of this agitation was not sufficient, there was the Jesse Ventura question mark. The former Governor only announced he would not run for Senate on July 14th, and his decision was a relief for Franken’s campaign who had far more to lose from a Ventura candidacy. Now, Franken faces trouble within the DFL. Despite some intra-party rumblings back in May, Franken easily won the DFL’s endorsement. Yet, a well-connected attorney recently announced she would run against Franken in the Democratic primary. She is unlikely to threaten Franken’s nomination, but her late run could prevent the former comedian from turning his attention to Coleman.

10. North Carolina (Incumbent: Elizabeth Dole; Last Ranking: 10)

Minnesota concludes the list of the eight obvious Democratic targets. The DSCC has been looking for more seats to contest, and has made a clear choice that North Carolina has the most potential. Chuck Schumer has been including the state in the list of top targets for many weeks now and the DSCC has reserved up air time for up to $6 million in advertising starting mid-September. Think about that number for a minute: Democrats are committing to invest $6 million in their 9th target in a Republican-leaning state in a presidential year. What better sign of confidence could the DSCC send?

Yet, Republicans have reason to feel confident about this race as well. As of my last rankings, a

series of polls had just found Kay Hagan enjoying a stunning post-primary bounce to almost tie Elizabeth Dole. But the Republican incumbent then unleashed a big advertisement campaign. Combined with the fading of Hagan’s primary victory bounce, Dole has recovered a low-double digit  lead in all institutes, including SUSA, Rasmussen, PPP and Civitas.

But it is too late for Dole to make herself look strong. She still hovers around the 50% threshold of vulnerability, and the quick drop in her numbers in May shows that her support is weak. And Hagan will benefit from the Obama campaign’s decision to contest North Carolina, particularly since the McCain campaign is doing little to counter. It will help Hagan overcome North Carolina red leaning and it will allow her to rely on Obama’s turnout efforts. North Carolina might look less promising for Democrats than it did late May, but it retains unexpected potential.

Rankings continue here.