Minnesota Follies

Recommended reading for today: a good piece on the the failure of Minnesota Democrats to win any of the contested congressional races in Tuesday's election (assuming Al Franken is unable to overtake Norm Coleman in the Senate race when all is said and done). While the article is short, and it kind of gets side-tracked with less important subsidiary issues, its main point is totally on the money: Democrats in Minnesota missed at least two tremendous opportunities this year to win seats because the Democrat-Farmer-Labor Party (DFL) nominated flawed candidates.

I wanted to add a couple thoughts. While I think that Democrats did miss opportunities to win the Second, Third and Sixth Districts this year, and perhaps even the Coleman Senate seat (depending on how the recount goes), the reasons for the misses are different. In the Third, I agree completely with the author that the DFL's decision to nominate a political novice cost them the seat. When Ashwin Madia basically sealed the nomination at the party's convention in March, it demonstrated the silly behavior of party activists who ignored Madia's liabilities as a general election candidate.

On the other races, I would not say that the state party's mistakes were the key reason behind the losses. In the Second District, Democrats did not really put much effort into taking out Rep. John Kline, but they lost for different reasons in the Third. It was more a question of poor recruitment and execution, which are more common and excusable, then plainly bad strategic moves. The nominee, Steve Sarvi, had no money, and the DCCC refused to drop anything into the district. In the Sixth, Dems did fail to take out Michele Bachmann in the wake of her foolish Hardball comments, but that was a district that was never really on anyone's radar anyway. The conservatism of the district made it unappealing to national Democrats with many better races to invest in, so the party just kind of ignored it. Sure, it got close in the end, but it wouldn't have if not for Bachmann's comments. Besides, with two weeks to go, the party and its nominee spent millions here. Therefore, their close loss notwithstanding, this was a contest that should have been close at all.

Finally, the case of the Senate race was the result of poor movement by the DFL, but really the greatest obstacle was that Al Franken got into the contest very early, and his ability to raise enormous money scared off a lot of potential nominees who would have been better than him. The DFL (not to mention the DSCC) likely could have done more to get a more electable candidate into the primary, but Franken's millions were a big deterrent to their initial efforts. They were almost stuck with Franken at the start.

Nevertheless, this is a good piece and kind of illustrates why the Democratic losses in Minnesota this week were so brutal. In terms of Franken, I am going to write some posts on why he was such a bad candidate, focusing in particular on the results and exit polling data.