The Al Franken Senate campaign: How to sit still in the polls — and win

(Photo by Aaron Landry/flickr)

In politics as in the intensive care unit, a flat line is usually a sign that something bad is happening. At the moment, however, I’m looking at the essentially flat — actually slightly declining — arc of Al Franken’s polling performance in the Minnesota US Senate race, and that line describes a very different story: the transformation of Franken from also-ran to frontrunner without ever budging more than a couple of points in poll standings.

Let’s pause to remember how completely implausible this seemed a few months ago. Throughout the spring and early summer, it was impossible to find a pundit or political pro in Minnesota who gave Franken any chance of winning this race. It wasn’t that Sen. Norm Coleman seemed particularly formidable; as the longtime ally of a president who garnered some of his lowest approval ratings in Coleman’s own state, the incumbent seemed ripe for picking off. But precarious as Coleman’s position may have been, the Franken campaign seemed infinitely weaker. The Coleman campaign spent weeks playing rope-a-dope with Franken over his tax payment snafu and a piece of sex satire he wrote for Playboy.

Political analyst David Schultz talked about the Franken campaign’s paralysis numerous times in the Schultz Report audiocast here at MnIndy. Back in March, Schultz noted that

“[T]he Franken campaign is resting on several assumptions that may not pan out. One is their belief that … the Republicans and Coleman have already thrown out all the trash [about Franken] — they’ve already thrown all the bad stuff against our candidate already, and we’ve weathered them, so we don’t have to worry about that. Second, they say that Franken has tremendous support from labor unions and they’re going to help deliver us on election day. Third, they seem to believe there won’t be any problem in terms of capturing suburban soccer-mom votes, which are really critical for success.

“They’ve said, well, those issues just aren’t going to be important about our candidate. I just don’t think that’s realistic.”

In April, U of M political scientist Larry Jacobs added this salvo: “They don’t have a professional seasoned campaign manager and the result is they’re making rookie mistakes. They should have scrubbed Franken, they should have known this beforehand and they should be doing a lot of other fairly plain vanilla, sort of professional activities to set up the campaign…. What’s going on in the Franken campaign is unnerving. Anyone who is a professional, watching this race, it is alarming. This is just not the way a top-flight, top national race ought to be run.”

Since then, two developments have reshaped the race and Franken’s part in it. In May, the campaign finally brought on a real campaign manager in Stephanie Schriock, who had managed challenger Jon Tester’s winning bid for US Senate in Montana in 2006. The Franken operation stopped being entirely reactive. It built a sturdy, coherent media/advertising presence. But as you can see in this snapshot from Pollster.com, none of this boosted Franken’s standing in the polls; it mainly served to stop the hemorrhaging and stabilize a race that was threatening to turn into a Coleman rout — a considerable accomplishment even if it’s invisible in the poll track.

Second, Dean Barkley entered the race on the filing deadline of July 15 after a coy-to-the-end Jesse Ventura declined to jump in. At the time, there was once again near-absolute agreement among professional observers that this would finish off Franken in short order because Barkley would split the anti-Coleman vote and drive Franken’s numbers even lower.

It looked like a reasonable bet. But pretty much the opposite has occurred: Franken has held steady in the polls, typically scoring in the 38-43 range, while Norm Coleman has dropped from the low 50s to around 40 (and even lower in some recent surveys).

No one professes to understand this except Dean Barkley. In mid-September, he told MPR’s Mark Zdechlik that polls indicating he was drawing about equally from Franken and Coleman’s bases were wrong:  “Based upon my experience at the State Fair, I had two or three to one people who came up who said they were going to support me because of my fiscal position,” said Barkley. “Those are Coleman supporters. I was surprised at that ratio, and you know I was there for all 12 straight days, and I talked to thousands of people, so my sampling was bigger than yours.”

If it’s true that Barkley is hurting Coleman much more than Franken — and that’s practically the only way I can see to interpret the trend in the top-line survey numbers — then there is a sense in which Barkley is actually splitting the anti-Franken vote. That is to say, he’s nabbing the people who did not much like Coleman but found migrating to Franken even more unpalatable.

“That sounds reasonable,” says veteran DFL strategist and communications specialist John Wodele, who this year is working on the suddenly front-and-center campaign of Michele Bachmann challenger Elwyn Tinklenberg. But, Wodele cautions, “There’s no way of knowing exactly what’s going on there without seeing those polls each campaign has been doing. They know what’s happening, and they’ll be targeting their messages accordingly in the last 10 days or so of this campaign, trying to win away some of those Barkley voters.

“That race is really hard to figure,” Wodele continues. “People don’t really know that much about Dean Barkley. They have this vague notion of him as an associate of Jesse Ventura’s. If there’s more information through earned media about Barkley in the last 10 days — and depending on whether it’s positive or negative — that could really affect whether those Barkley voters stay with him.

“Both [Coleman and Franken's] campaigns are going to be going after those independent Barkley voters. They have an idea what they have to say to get them from Dean to them. There’ll probably be some movement there before Election Day.”