Campaign Diaries

Mark your calendars, as Tuesday will be an important day in the Senate battle. It looks like the already entertaining Minnesota race could get even more chaotic, as former wrestler and former Governor Jesse Ventura is nearing a decision on whether he will jump in the race.

The filing deadline is next Tuesday but Ventura attracted attention today because of an interview on NPR in which he seemed to suggest he had decided in favor of running. Within a few hours and following the first wave of stories trumpeting his statements, Ventura backtracked and insisted he had not yet decided: “I said ultimately, it will come down to whether I want to change my lifestyle and go to that lifestyle or not.”

If he were to enter, Ventura would almost certainly have to run as the Independence Party candidate. To run as unaffiliated, he would have to collect 2,000 signatures by Tuesday — and he has not started that process yet. It is difficult to know how his entrance would impact the race, though it would certainly change the dynamics of the Franken-Coleman duo quite dramatically. This was confirmed by Rasmussen’s most recent Senate poll:

• In a two-way race, Franken is only behind 48% to 45%.
• But in a three-way race, Coleman gets 39% to Franken’s 32% and Ventura’s 24%

The Al Franken campaign has had a rocky few months. The former comedian was hit by allegations that he had failed to properly pay taxes and by the GOP’s unearthing old columns and skits Franken wrote. A number of polls taken in the past few weeks show Senator Norm Coleman leading comfortably: Quinnipiac and SUSA both find him to be leading by double-digits — making the 3% margin in the Rasmussen poll a relief for the Democrat.

So could Ventura win the election? He prevailed in the 1998 gubernatorial race, coming just ahead of… Norm Coleman. But his favorability rating is very low, at 36% — though that could be less of a problem in a three-way race than it would be in a head-to-head match-up.

The most likely scenario is that Ventura would divide up the anti-incumbent vote, helping Coleman remain on top. After all, an important reason Democrats have had such an advantage in 2006 and now in 2008 is that independents are behaving as Democrats — particularly in blue-leaning states like Minnesota. With Ventura on the ballot, Coleman’s chances of weathering a Democratic tsunami would be much stronger.

But Ventura could make things tougher to predict if he directs most of his criticism against Coleman. On NPR, he offered as a main motivation for running Coleman’s support of the Iraq War. “It angers me,” he said. And he blasted the Republican incumbent:

The guy has not had a job in the private sector his entire adult life. He’s been collecting government checks since the day he got out of law school and went to work for the attorney general’s office. So when Norm Coleman tells people in the private sector he feels their pain, how? He’s never been in it. At least Al Franken knows what the private sector is. I would like to send him out and get a real job in the private sector.

However, confirming that he would not try to boost one candidate over another, he also hit Franken, referencing the tax controversy:

He hasn’t lived here in 30 years, and he’s only coming back to Minnesota for the convenience of his own political agenda. Why didn’t he run in the states he was living in? Clearly, for being a Harvard graduate, he’s not too smart on taxes, is he? Everybody laughs, saying I came from wrestling. But at least I knew when I wrestled in 40 states, I had to pay taxes in those 40 states. You just have to do the paperwork. I find it unbelievable that someone who could go to Harvard didn’t know that or let it slip. Blaming his accountant is worse, because now he’s turning into a politician. He’s not accepting responsibility for his actions.

Ventura’s message is clear: Coleman and Franken have nothing to do with the average Minnesotan, whereas Ventura is a down-to-earth common-sense guy who escapes politicalese. And add to that the fact that, well, he is strong. The former Governor told NRP this morning: “All you Minnesotans take a good hard look at all three of us. And you decide: if you were in a dark alley which one of the three of us would you want with you?” Can that argument get him to 34%?

Another race in which we are waiting for the filing deadine is LA-06: Don Cazayoux’s victory in the May special election was very suspenseful and the GOP has been eyeing the race ever since. But two things need to happen for their take-over efforts to be truly credible: (1) the deeply flawed Woody Jenkins has to not be the Republican nominee and (2) Democratic state Rep. Michael Jackson has to follow through on his threats to run as an independent in the fall.

The first of these conditions was fulfilled today when Jenkins announced he would not run again, making state Sen. Cassidy the presumptive Republican nominee — boosting the GOP’s chances. So what will Jackson choose to do? Will he run — and will he qualify for the ballot? The answer will come Friday, which is the filing deadline.