jennings“Should Norm Coleman Concede?” asks the Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza today in his blog, The Fix. Cillizza recommends the former senator look to Florida for a lesson, and he doesn’t mean Bush vs. Gore. Instead, Cillizza says, Democrat Christine Jennings’ declining political fortunes after a drawn-out dispute over a close congressional election suggests that quitting now might be the better part of valor for Coleman.

Writes Cillizza:

One need only look to Florida for a cautionary tale in pushing a race too far/long. In 2006, Democrat Christine Jennings came up just a few hundreds votes short against Rep. Vern Buchanan (R) in the 13th district. Democrats quickly noted that there were 18,000 so-called “undervotes” (where a vote was cast for other offices but not the congressional race) and Jennings exhausted her legal options in a back and forth that spanned well into 2007.

By the time she prepared to run again in 2008, voters seemed to be over Jennings — having been exposed to her on and off for the last several years. Despite President Obama’s strong showing in Florida, Buchanan crushed Jennings by 18 points.

Some interesting details he doesn’t mention:

  • Like Coleman, Jennings is a convert to her party. She’s a banker who used to be a Republican. Coleman switched from Democrat to Republican while serving as St. Paul’s mayor.
  • Voters’ failure to carefully complete their ballots was blamed for Jennings’ low-triple-digit loss in 2006. Coleman suffered when various voter errors kept many ballots out of reconsideration by Minnesota’s election contest court, in a ruling issued Tuesday.
  • The seat Jennings tried twice to gain was vacated by former Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, a key figure in the 2000 Bush v. Gore dispute. Another key figure in that titanic electoral struggle, Bush attorney Ben Ginsberg, is now Coleman’s attorney.