Obama, Romney win MN caucuses; other races provide drama, quotes

A headline like that simply doesn’t do justice to what happened in Minnesota yesterday.

DFL officials were projecting extremely heavy turnout, possibly topping 120,000 votes. Barack Obama beat that total himself, and handily at that.

In a stunning victory, the Illinois senator beat his counterpart Hillary Clinton (D-NY) handily. As of this morning, 81 percent of the votes had been tallied, and Obama led Clinton 67 percent to 32 percent, garnering over 135,000 votes so far. DFL Caucus turnout was immense, with lines of cars stretching for miles as voters tried in vain to make it to their caucus locations in time to vote. In just one example of the tremendous DFL turnout, State Rep. Jeremy Kalin wrote in an e-mail to supporters: “In 2004, I was astonished when 362 people came to DFL precinct caucuses. This year, we nearly quadrupled that result — 1,272 citizens caucused as Democrats in Chisago County tonight — almost twice the turnout of the GOP!”

On the Republican side, turnout was comparatively light, but former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney scored an important win, scoring 42 percent against 22 percent for Arizona senator John McCain, 20 percent for former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, and 15 percent for Congressman Ron Paul.

What does it all mean?

Obviously, the win for Obama is a big one. As in several other caucus states that voted tonight, he won everywhere across the state, leaving little room for Hillary Clinton to garner delegates in pockets of strong support (as Obama did in Nevada, where he lost the popular vote but actually won more delegate commitments than Clinton). As a result, the vast majority of Minnesota’s 88 Democratic National Convention delegates will be committed to Obama on the first ballot.

On the GOP side, Romney’s win represents a breath of relief for a campaign that was seen as reeling from a lack of relevance to the GOP nomination, and will no doubt provide more support for Romney to continue in the race. But John McCain won other more populous states by considerable margins, having threaded the needle of conservative opposition to his candidacy. Those conservative votes seem to have been split among Romney, Huckabee, and Paul in other states, and the post-mortem will no doubt show interesting trends in the Minnesota Republican electorate’s thoughts on the race.

Candidates in races lower on the ballot took the opportunity to declare the night a win for themselves as well. Al Franken appeared to have a good night in the precincts where straw polls were conducted on the U.S. Senate race, and staffer Andy Barr dropped by my table at the DFL Caucus Night Party to say “We had 2,600 precincts with precinct captains there to represent our campaign, and we’re just now hearing back from them, but we couldn’t be happier with tonight, not just for our campaign, but for this party.” Barr would later drop a quip about Republican senator Norm Coleman’s inability to endorse a winning Republican presidential candidate — Coleman had previously endorsed Rudy Giuliani, and shifted to John McCain once Giuliani departed from the race. Franken and his DFL rivals, attorney Mike Ciresi and activist/professor Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer, all spoke before the DFL Caucus Night party, and each had plenty of voices in their organized cheering-and-sign-shaking sections.

3rd district congressional candidate Terri Bonoff’s campaign said “unofficial results showed her with a commanding lead in named delegates from tonight’s caucuses,” though it is difficult to know how accurate those numbers are without seeing the lists the campaign is using. Let the spinfests in CD3 and CD6 begin — now that delegates to Senate District conventions have been selected, Bonoff, Ashwin Madia, and Jim Hovland (as well as Bob Olson and El Tinklenberg in their 6th district face-off) can start jousting over who’s leading in delegate support. At any given time, all five candidates could be leading in their respective races. Until the Senate District conventions are all complete in those races, good luck trying to sort out exactly what the campaigns are trying to tell us.