Mike Ciresi

U.S. Rep. Betty McCollum is backing former state Sen. Steve Kelley for governor, according to Kelley, who formally announced his candidacy Monday.

Over the weekend Mike Ciresi took Norm Coleman’s bait and told the Star Tribune he would have whooped Coleman by double-digits. (Coleman said last week that “any Democrat other than Al Franken would have been elected.”) The other also-ran in the race to be the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party’s 2005 U.S. Senate candidate takes a different tack. To the question “Would you have won?” Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer tells the Minnesota Independent: “I don’t know.”

Nine Minnesotans made Forbes’ richest Americans list this year. Most of them are peeling off small-fractions of their wealth to support political parties and candidates for national office–shoveling a total of $245,000 into the game since Election Day 2006. A little number crunching turns up a few surprises, like conservative broadcasting magnate Stanley Hubbard giving more to Senator Amy Klobuchar than he did to Norm Coleman.

Minnesota’s top 100 political donors have pitched in a collective $4.1 million to federal candidates since the start of 2007. That’s around $40,000 per family. In this week’s installment of The Crunch, we look at donors ranked 21st through 30th — a field that includes Vance Opperman, dubbed in 1998 “the most powerful man you’ve never heard of,” who, with his wife, comes in at number 27; gay marriage foe Robert Cummins (#21); and, Minnesota’s 24th most generous giver, Timberwolves owner Glen Taylor and his wife, who’ve contributed nearly $50,000 to state and federal GOP candidates and causes this cycle.

There were no surprise nominations from the convention floor this morning. Most notably, the name Mike Ciresi was not uttered by any delegates. That means the endorsement battle will come down to Al Franken and Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer (unless Mr. No Endorsement shows up).

Among the primary gripes about Al Franken’s candidacy in the long lead up [...]

In October, Barb Olsen drove from her Duluth home to Augsburg College in order to watch Al Franken speak at a forum. She was extremely excited about the radio host and satirist’s then-fledgling senatorial campaign.

“I listened to Al Franken for all the years that he was on Air America,” says Olsen, a veteran Democratic Party [...]

Speculation has been rampant since the Al Franken campaign’s latest imbroglio broke that Mike Ciresi will climb back into the race. While Ciresi has been quiet in the last 24 hours (he didn’t return a call from Minnesota Monitor seeking comment), he’s certainly left the door open. “I continue to watch the race with intense [...]

Everyone who has seen Rep. Betty McCollum’s comments from yesterday — reported this morning at the Star Tribune, Pioneer Press, AP and Politico — already knows that May 29 was another red-letter day in the Al Franken for Senate campaign, and that the red was once again Al’s blood. Referring to a January 2000 Franken [...]

In politics there are races that someone wins and races that someone manages not to lose for the simple reason that not everyone can lose. The Minnesota US Senate contest is shaping up to be one of the latter. In one corner there is the not-very-popular, Bush-associated Republican officeholder with job approval ratings in the [...]

In this week’s Schultz Report, we discuss increasingly heated rumors that the turmoil surrounding tax-troubled, poll-challenged US Senate candidate Al Franken has some Minnesota Democrats weighing last-minute runs against Franken in this fall’s primary. Schultz names three names that are on a lot of observers’ lips in recent days: Mike Ciresi, who suspended his own [...]