CQ Today Online News

July 20, 2008

By Marie Horrigan, CQ Staff

Just a few months ago, Al Franken had plenty of reasons to smile about his chances of unseating Minnesota’s Republican Sen. Norm Coleman .

Minnesotans oppose the war — and the president — that Coleman supported. Franken was doing his homework: he had entered the race early and was running a strong grass-roots campaign focused on local organizing and smaller-venue events.

And, in early June, he secured the DFL nomination at the state convention on the first ballot.

But costly mistakes in the campaign of former Saturday Night Live writer are now imperiling his chances of winning.

Poll trends in the past several weeks indicate that Coleman has increased his lead over Franken. Although the numbers have fluctuated, four of the last five polls show Coleman ahead of Franken - three by more than 10 points. So now, CQ Politics is changing the rating on the race to Leans Republican from No Clear Favorite.

Lawrence Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, says that Franken now finds himself tied with Coleman among women voters, union members and Twin Cities residents. “Clearly there’s been some damage. What the polls are showing is that the kind of coalition a Democrat needs to win just is not forming.”

Franken has “really been unable to get on track where he’s got a consistent message with regards to what he stands for that’s credible, and a line of attack on the incumbent,” Jacobs said. “Again and again in this race Franken’s on the defensive.”

Franken has struggled with issues related to his late payment of taxes in 17 states that dated back to 2003-2006 as well as some of his more controversial work during his career as a satirist, including a piece titled “Porn-O-Rama” that was published in Playboy in 2000. These problems have created an odd situation “where the challenger is the one who’s being challenged,” Jacobs said.

The issues over taxes and Franken’s writings “have really stuck with voters, I think,” said Steven Schier, a political scientist at Carleton College. And now, Franken has drawn a primary challenge from Priscilla Lord Faris, the daughter of well-known Minnesota Democrat Miles Lord, a retired federal judge.

“She’s not going to be well-funded, but the fact that she would run in and of itself tells you that Al Franken is facing some difficulties,” Schier said.

“I don’t know that I’d say that he has stumbled, but there have been off-message problems for the campaign,” said Democratic analyst Wy Spano. “I don’t know that he necessarily created them, but nonetheless they got there.”

Franken spokeswoman Jess McIntosh said the campaign hit “a rough patch” but that the past six weeks had been “really solid.”

“I think we’ve moved on and I think the voters have really moved on too. We’re in two wars, in a recession and everywhere we go every corner of the state we have exactly the same conversations. Minnesotans want to know what you are going to do in Washington to make their lives better,” she said.

The campaign is now focusing on offense, McIntosh said. For example, in June Coleman said he would vote again to authorize the war in Iraq given what he knew on the time.

“We were on that statement within hours and spent the week talking about it,” McIntosh said.

Luke Friedrich, a spokesman for the Coleman campaign, said there was a “very clear contrast” between Franken and Coleman in the Senate race. “We’ve expected that this would be a close race all along but overall I think Minnesotans have responded very positively to Sen. Coleman’s 30 year record of getting things done,” he said.

One problem for Franken, analyst Shier said, is that the core Democratic activists who participated in the party’s caucus system are not representative of the general population.

“Doing well with a group of party activists in March in a church basement is a lot different than all Minnesotans voting on Election Day,” he said.

The campaign will likely be the most high-profile and most expensive Senate race in the country. The candidates appear well matched financially for the general election. As of the beginning of July, Coleman reported raising $2.4 million in the second quarter of 2008 with $7.2 million on hand by June 30, while Franken reported raising $2.3 million for the quarter with $4.2 million on hand.

Both candidates rely heavily on out-of-state contributors. Franken reported that fewer than 18,000 of the 104,000 individual donors to his campaign — just 17 percent — were Minnesotans. Coleman did not release comparable data for the 2nd quarter but as of March 31, 60 percent of his money came from out of state.

Coleman, meanwhile, reported raising $1.8 million — 21 percent of his total receipts — from campaign committees and political action committees by the end of March. Franken’s campaign is quick to say he has refused most political action committee money.

“We don’t take PAC money from oil companies, from insurance, from drug companies, so we’ve got to balance that money out somewhere and I tend to think that the Joneses in Wisconsin have more Minnesotan values than Halliburton,” McIntosh said.

The Republican National Convention is scheduled for Sept. 1-4 in Minneapolis-St. Paul, but the onslaught of party faithful is likely to be more of a liability for Coleman than anything else.

“Coleman frankly at this point is in a pretty strong position, so I think the strategy for Coleman is not to let the [Republican] convention hurt him,” Jacobs said. Coleman is positioning himself as a pragmatic independent.

Former Gov. Jesse Ventura’s announcement last week he would not enter the Senate race was a major boon for Franken, who needs to consolidate the anti-incumbent vote to win the election, Jacobs said.

But when Ventura announced he would not run, he sounded a note of caution. He said that recent polls indicated he stood to win a quarter of the vote, putting him second in a three-way match-up behind Coleman. That, he said, indicated Democrats faced a tough race despite a favorable political climate.

“I think that bodes very badly for the Democrats in the fact that you have an unpopular president, you even have a more unpopular Congress and you have a senator who’s in lockstep with this president. … I don’t see how Al Franken could possibly win because he should be leading in the polls now, not trailing me. And I’m not even a candidate,” Ventura said. The poll actually put Franken one point ahead in a three-way race.

With Ventura out of the race, one of his appointees as governor, Dean Barkley, filed for the Independence Party just under the deadline Tuesday. Ventura appointed Barkley to serve out the remaining weeks of Minnesota Democrat Paul Wellstone’s term after the incumbent died in a 2002 plane crash.

The party already endorsed farmer Stephen Williams at its June 21 state convention. With multiple entrants for the Independence Party line, the candidates will face off in the Sept. 9 primary.