Minnesota along with six other states (Delaware, New Hampshire, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont and Wisconsin) held their primary elections yesterday to choose the party candidates that will show up on the ballot in the November election. This was the last multi-state primary day before the November elections.
Al Franken, formerly of “Saturday Night Live” fame, easily won the nomination from the Minnesota Democratic party to challenge Republican incumbent Norm Coleman in the fall.
What is interesting to note about the Minnesota primary in particular was the relative turnout of Democrats to that of the Republicans. Almost twice as many Democrats voted relative to the Republicans in the Senatorial race. Norm Coleman won the Republican nomination but still lost almost 9% of the vote to Jack Shepard a fugitive expatriate living in Italy. So 9% of the Republican party in Minnesota decided they would rather vote for a fugitive that doesn’t even live in the United States than to vote for the incumbent Norm Coleman.
Al Franken won a tough last minute challenge by Priscilla Lord Faris, a personal injury lawyer and daughter of Miles Lord a well respected former state attorney general. Despite this serious challenge Al Franken still received more than 65% of the vote and Priscilla Lord Faris received 29% of the vote on the Democratic side.
The final vote tallies in Figure 1 (below) show that Al Franken received 34,000 more votes than Norm Coleman and Priscilla Lord Faris, even though she was a distant second to Al Franken, still almost got as many votes as did Norm Coleman.
In the district by district elections in Minnesota for U.S. House of Representatives Democrats also fared much better than their Republican counterparts on a per vote basis (Figure 2). Both Ashwin Madia and incumbent Tim Walz won their Democratic nominations unopposed and received more votes than the Republican nominees.
Only incumbent Michelle Bachman was able to win more votes (18991) on a per vote basis than the Democratic challenger El Tinklenberg (17399) in the heavily Republican 6th District of Minnesota. The very popular incumbent Democrat Keith Ellison was also easily nominated in the heavily Democratic 5th district which includes most of metro Minneapolis.
In terms of name recognition Al Franken still has a big advantage over Norm Coleman and has been running at about a 2:1 advantage (Figure 3).
Considering how much of Norm Coleman's war chest comes from Big Oil and Big Pharma, Al will still need a grass-roots effort to help him win back Paul Wellstone's Senate seat and turn Minnesota Blue again.
