Campaign Diaries

[I apologize for the delay in assessing yesterday's events in Minnesota. I have been working on my first 2010 Senate rankings, which should hopefully come out in the days ahead if I get Internet access during a trip to Canada. So this is your last opportunity to lobby for a race being in one category or another. I am particularly perplexed by Louisiana!]

For the first time since November 4th, Al Franken now sits on top in Minnesota’s Senate recount - and by no small margin: He stretched out his lead to 251 votes thanks to the Coleman challenges’ abysmally low rate of success for the second day in the row.

Of 852 ballots challenged by the Coleman camp, 687 (81%) were attributed to Franken and only 36 to Coleman. 129 were put in the “no vote” category, which makes it difficult to know whether they were upheld or rejected challenges.

By comparison, 60% of the ballots challenged by Franken were attributed to Coleman, and Franken’s rate of success hovered around 30% - a much better figure than that of his opponent. This simply means that far more of Coleman’s challenges were frivolous, and this discrepancy alone explains how Franken managed to net 614 votes on Thursday and Friday alone.

Franken’s lead is very provisional because more about 5,000 withdrawn challenges have not yet been processed by election officials. Franken has withdrawn hundreds more challenges than his opponent, which means that Coleman stands to gain a significant amount of vote once this (uncontroversial) process is sorted through.

That said, there are two pieces of good news for Franken in this latest count. First, The Star Tribune is projecting that Franken’s lead will stand at 78 votes once all withdrawn ballots are processed. This projection is worthwhile because it is based on The Star Tribune’s review of all these ballots. [Update: The Franken campaign has issued a press release claiming that it will ahead by 35-50 vote once withdrawn challenges are allocated, a closer count than the Star Tribune's.]

Second, it is impossible to overstate the symbolic importance of Franken having such a solid lead heading into the week-end. In 2000, Al Gore’s main handicap was that he looked like a loser trying to overturn the result and he was thus subjected to a great deal of public pressure that influenced his team’s decision-making.

No matter who will be ahead after withdrawn ballots are processed, the perception of Franken position will be very different now that he has been ahead at some point during the recount process. Simply put, Franken can no longer be Gored.

Of course, there are many different issues that will play out after the withdrawn ballots are processed:

1. The Coleman campaign is sure to contest the result of the Minneapolis precinct that lost 133 ballots; that one precinct is the only one in the state that is using its November 4th count rather than its recounted tally and Franken stands to lose 46 votes if a court overturns that.
2. The 1,600 improperly rejected absentee ballots could dramatically alter the margin of the race once they are counted - and the state Supreme Court’s ruling made it pretty clear that they should be. They are expected to prove a bigger boost to Franken, but this is naturally all speculation - and this process will not sort itself out until the end of December. It is very likely that these absentee ballots will find themselves dragged to court for the second time.
3. The state Supreme Court agreed to hear a second lawsuit by Norm Coleman yesterday. The GOP is alleging that as many as 150 ballots might have been counted twice based on a complex issue involving missing original ballots and it is demanding that those ballots be thrown out. The canvassing board ruled it did not have the jurisdiction to take such a decision but invited the Coleman camp to try its luck in court. Republicans estimate that Franken could lose up to 50 votes based on this issue.

Needless to say, for just one or two of these issues to be resolved in favor of Coleman could erase all of Franken’s advantage: The Star Tribune’s estimate of a 78-vote Franken lead is smaller than what Franken stands to lose if courts throw out duplicate ballots and Minneapolis’s missing ballots. If the Franken’s campaign count of a 35-50 vote lead is correct, they could be at the mercy of those 46 Minneapolis votes.

This is a war of inches, and every single individual ballot could be decisive.