Photo: Minnesota Independent

Michele Bachmann represents the most Republican-friendly congressional district in Minnesota. John McCain carried the area by eight percentage points in 2008 — the largest spread in the state. Two years earlier Gov. Tim Pawlenty swamped DFLer Mike Hatch by nearly 20 points in the 6th Congressional District. The Cook Partisan Voting Index gives the GOP a seven-point advantage in the area.

But despite this political makeup, Bachmann’s flamboyant personality and penchant for controversy make the race something of a political wild card.

In recent weeks Bachmann has continued to draw national headlines for her often daffy pronouncements. She derided a proposed expansion of Americorps as “politically correct re-education camps” and called on Minnesotans to become “armed and dangerous” in resisting President Obama’s energy policies. Her recent antics once again have Democrats salivating at the prospect of knocking off Bachmann.

At the top of the list of possible contenders for 2010 is her 2008 DFL opponent Elwyn Tinklenberg. The former state transportation commissioner, who lost to Bachmann by three percentage points, is all but declaring himself a candidate.

“I continue to be concerned about many of the things that Rep. Bachmann is saying and espousing, and kind of the approach she has taken on so many of the issues,” Tinklenberg says. “I think people in the Sixth District are the real losers in all of this, and I think that’s unfortunate.”

Tinklenberg has been testing the waters for a 2010 campaign both in Minnesota and Washington. He’s been courting the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) and national labor unions whose financial support would be key if he decides to take another run at the post. Tinklenberg has also kept his name in the mix by doling out contributions to other Democrats and sponsoring the DFL’s Hubert H. Humphrey Day dinner.

He would have an advantage with the groundwork he has laid over the last four years, but not everyone is enthusiastic about the prospect of another shot for the former mayor of Blaine. There’s been considerable grumbling about the effectiveness of the campaign he ran two years ago. Most notably, political observers question why Tinklenberg ended the race with nearly $500,000 still sitting in the bank.

“They ran a piss-poor campaign,” says one veteran DFL insider, who didn’t want to be named criticizing a member of his own party. “They were trying to bio Elwyn two weeks out. You want to establish your identity before the media market gets so cluttered.”

Tinklenberg says the money simply arrived too late to spend it all effectively. “By the time that money started pouring into our campaign, a lot of the media time had already been purchased,” he notes. “There just wasn’t a lot of room left to buy a lot of media.”

That leftover war chest would have at least given Tinklenberg a head start on the money hunt for 2010, but most of it’s since been spent. Last month the campaign cut two $125,000 checks to the DCCC. At the end of March, Tinklenberg’s campaign coffers were down to roughly $180,000.

Tinklenberg acknowledges that the campaign could have done a more effective job with advertising and that get-out-the-vote efforts in Anoka and Wright counties were insufficient. He’s been getting an earful from DFL operatives about what the campaign could have done better as he contemplates another run.

“They are willing to be brutally honest and that’s what we need,” he says. “There’s no room left for being naïve. This is a tough district, and we know we have to have the very best approach if we were to decide to do it again.”

Tinklenberg says he will make the call by July. “I think if someone’s going to run an effective campaign they would need to start by the beginning of the third quarter of this year and start raising money aggressively,” he says.

Clark a contender?

While Tinklenberg seems the most likely to take a run at Bachmann, other names are being floated as possible contenders. At the top of the list: state Sen. Tarryl Clark. The Assistant Majority Leader is seen as a rising star in DFL circles and is frequently mentioned as a possible 2010 gubernatorial contender. But with a bloated crop of candidates eyeing the Governor’s mansion, Clark may find the 6th Congressional District race more enticing.

“If Tarryl would run she would take the endorsement in a heartbeat,” says the same DFL insider.

Clark didn’t return calls from MnIndy seeking comment. Any future political plans are likely on hold until the end of the legislative session. Clark’s stock might not be as high after grappling with the state’s nearly $5 billion budget deficit.

Nancy Schumaker, chair of the DFL in the Sixth Congressional District, says three possible candidates have emerged for the post, but she’s not offering names. “I do not have permission to release their names,” she says. “Right now it’s just conversations.”

The DCCC maintains that whoever ultimately emerges as the party’s candidate, it’s eager to wage a vigorous campaign against Bachmann.

“Instead of addressing the needs of the people she represents, the Congresswoman focuses her efforts on promoting far right-wing ideology and pursuing extremist rhetoric,” says Gabby Adler, Midwest Regional Press Secretary for the DCCC, in a statement to MnIndy.

“The people of the Sixth District are fed up with Congresswoman Bachmann, and we expect a strong challenger to emerge who will reflect the voters’ values and fight to protect jobs, reduce home foreclosures and promote local economic growth by promoting small business development.”

But reality may be different from the fiery rhetoric. The vast gains for House Democrats in the last two election cycles mean that the party will be defending a lot of seats in GOP-friendly areas. Couple that with the fact that historically the party controlling Congress and the White House has lost seats in the first election following a presidential campaign, and it seems likely that Democrats will utilize the bulk of their resources to defend the seats they already have.

“It’s way too early to know what seats the DCCC will target,” notes Nathan Gonzales, Political Editor of the Rothenberg Political Report. “But they will be forced to focus a lot more on defending their own seats this cycle, rather than knocking off Republican incumbents.”

Bachmann may be a figure of ridicule in liberal circles, but she’s proven herself a formidable political force in the conservative Sixth Congressional District.

“Despite all of the Democratic money and rhetoric, and even her own missteps, she keeps winning,” Gonzales adds. “Democrats love to hate Michele Bachmann, but they can’t seem to figure out how to defeat her.”

(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.”

But three other more costly contests — for U.S. president, senate and house (3rd District) — are already consuming $29.7 million of Twin Cities TV. What’s left for El?

I caught up with Tinklenberg campaign spokesperson John Wodele by phone on Monday morning while he was at WCCO-TV buying $182,000 of ads to be broadcast through Nov. 4. Yes, WCCO had ad time to sell, he said — “but it wasn’t always at the lowest rate.” (Aren’t political candidates supposed to receive the lowest rates? “It’s complicated,” Wodele said.) Wodele, a media consultant by trade who said he isn’t usually the one to buy media, was confident the Tinklenberg campaign would be able to buy what it needs, and he promised, “We’re going to increase this substantially over the next 24–48 hours.” He called such lavish outlays for TV a “luxury” the campaign hasn’t been able to afford — until now.