Deputy Sec. of State on not voting for Franken: ‘No misgivings whatsoever’

You’d think a Minnesota Democrat who voted for someone other than Al Franken for U.S. Senate might have second thoughts after five months of electoral agony — especially if that voter saw the effects of Franken’s near-tie with Republican Norm Coleman up close.

“I have no misgivings whatsoever,” says Deputy Secretary of State Jim Gelbmann, who helped lead the recount work and testified for days at the election contest trial.

Gelbmann is in the spotlight again today, counting ballots as the trial reaches a finale with the three-judge panel examining as many as 400 votes that Coleman hopes, likely in vain, will erase Franken’s 225-vote recount lead.

Gelbmann, who managed Mark Dayton’s successful 2000 campaign for U.S. Senate and then headed the Democrat’s Minnesota office for six years, did not cast his ballot for Al Franken last November. Instead, he voted for Independence Party candidate Dean Barkley.

“I was very annoyed and disgusted at how both candidates [Franken and Coleman] handled the campaign, with very little focus on the issues and very much on personal attacks,” Gelbmann says.

“It was a protest vote,” he acknowledges. “But it wasn’t just a protest vote.”

Gelbmann almost achieved poster-child status for Democrats who didn’t vote for Franken when he was on the witness stand in the election contest trial in January. But an objection from Coleman’s lawyers kept him from testifying to that fact.

Barkley would make a good senator, Gelbmann says. That’s one thing Barkley and Coleman have that Franken doesn’t: experience serving in the U.S. Senate. Gov. Jesse Ventura appointed Barkley to fill out the remainder of Paul Wellstone’s term after the Democrat’s untimely death in 2002.

But Gelbmann has a personal connection that distinguishes him from the average Democratic voter. He and Barkley know each other from the late 1990s, when both worked on the third floor of the state government’s Centennial Office Building — Gelbmann as director of the Minnesota Board of Government Innovation and Cooperation, and Barkley heading up the state Office of Strategic and Long-range Planning for Ventura.

Still, Gelbmann’s ticket-splitting raises the question of what role DFL voters played in setting the stage for Minnesota’s recount drama. Franken drew plenty of criticism for shortcomings as a candidate, and political observers say Democrats who didn’t vote for him don’t have to take the blame for Franken’s post-election ordeal.

Longtime DFL activist Arvonne Fraser notes that “party loyalty isn’t what it used to be.” In her view, Franken is a “very smart guy and a very hard worker” but endorsement and primary battles “didn’t help him at all [with DFL voters].”

Eric Ostermeier, a political scientist who writes the University of Minnesota’s Smart Politics blog, found Franken’s showing to be fourth-worst in DFL Party history. In an e-mail to MnIndy, he cast GOP voters as the main actors in November’s electoral drama:

The party-loyalty angle I guess would be this: the question is probably not so much why did DFLers split their ticket (as Franken carried most of them), but rather why were Republicans less likely to defect and vote for Franken, when they were willing to defect and vote for Obama and DFL US and State House candidates.

University of Minnesota history professor Hy Berman agrees. “I would guess that very few Republicans voted for Franken.” But Berman adds: “The fact is that core DFLers did vote for Franken.”

He ascribes the 10-percentage point gap between Franken’s result in Minnesota and Barack Obama’s to two factors: Franken’s negatives as a candidate and “the existence of a Barkley.”

“Franken being a flawed candidate had nothing to do with the campaign he ran but who he is,” Berman says.