Rep. Walz discusses health care reform at Netroots Minnesota. Photo: Paul Schmelzer, MnIndy

“If my vote sends me back to Mankato West to teach geography, so be it,” said Rep. Tim Walz Saturday of the House health care reform bill. “Not getting health care care reform passed is what will send me back.” According to a new survey, he may be right on that last part. Public Policy Polling released results of a survey Monday that found that Democrats may face electoral consequences if they don’t get health care reform passed.

The PPP survey (pdf) asked who participants would vote for, Democrat or Republican, if the congressional election were held today. By a margin of 46 to 38, respondents preferred Democrats, but when asked who they’d vote for if Congress fails to pass a health care reform bill, the results were dead even: 40 percent to 40 percent. When asked how they’d vote if a health care plan was passed that included a public option, Democrats’ margin improved, to 46-41.

“Clearly Democrats need to pass a health care bill if they want to do well at the polls next year,” said Dean Debnam, President of Public Policy Polling, in a release Monday. “But they don’t need to take an all or nothing approach.  Allowing the status quo to remain rather than accepting a bill without a public option would be a poor decision politically.”

As Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com puts it, for Dems it’s “damned if they do; damnder if they don’t”:

I don’t particularly expect a boost in the Democrats’ numbers if they pass a health care bill: the plan, after all, has become somewhat unpopular. Their numbers might even get a little worse. But I’d expect a larger drop in their numbers if they fail to pass health care..

…Both polling and common sense would seem to dictate that the best way for Democrats to cut their losses would be to pass a health care bill — particularly one with a public option — and then move on to debating financial regulation and a jobs program, where public sentiment should be more on their side. They should probably not expect to gain ground if they pass health care — but they’re likely to lose more if they don’t.

PPP’s phone survey of 1,066 registered voters has a margin of error is +/-3.0%

Norm and Laurie Coleman at a 2008 campaign event (Paul Demko)

Norm Coleman is facing massive legal bills.

The former senator took another substantial financial hit yesterday when the three-judge panel presiding over the U.S. Senate contest ruled that Al Franken won the election. The judges also ordered Coleman to pay for court costs accrued during the trial. While this does not include attorney’s fees, it does cover administrative expenses such as witness transportation and copy costs. Given that the seven-week case included 19,000 pages of legal pleadings, 1,717 individual exhibits, and testimony from 142 witnesses, it would seem that such costs could be substantial.

In addition, as indicated in a March 2 ruling, Coleman will be responsible for some of Franken’s legal bills. This punishment stems from Coleman’s lawyers failure to properly disclose contacts with a potential trial witness. It’s impossible to say exactly what the financial damage will turn out to be. Marc Elias, Franken’s lead recount attorney, declined to speculate on how much money this might entail during a conference call with reporters Tuesday afternoon.

Coleman has had a team of high-profile lawyers on retainer for months to fight the U.S. Senate contest. Determining exactly how much this litigation will ultimately cost is impossible at this point. But Nate Silver recently estimated the damage to be around $145,000 per week. (Coleman’s first quarter FEC report, which should shed some light on the matter, is due tomorrow.)

What’s more, Coleman faces seemingly substantial legal bills stemming from a pair of lawsuits related to his relationship with longtime associate Nasser Kazeminy. The former senator said back in December that he would ask the the Federal Election Commission whether he could utilize his campaign funds to cover attorney’s fees related to allegations that Kazeminy attempted to funnel $75,000 to the then-sitting senator. But according to FEC records, Coleman never followed through on seeking what’s known as an “advisory opinion.”

Roll Call (subscription only) recently attempted to get an explanation from the Coleman campaign as to why they failed to seek FEC clearance for using campaign funds to pay his legal bills. But repeated phone calls and emails were ignored.

Coleman is under no obligation to seek explicit permission for the fundraising scheme, but legislators often seek guidance from the agency in controversial matters. Last week, for instance, Rep. Elton Gallegly, asked the FEC to clarify whether he could use campaign funds to upgrade the security system on his Southern California home. The reason: a stalker was harassing his wife after an altercation on the campaign trail.

In January, Alliance for a Better Minnesota filed a complaint with the FEC arguing that Coleman’s use of campaign funds to pay legal bills unrelated to election matters ran afoul of the agency’s rules. While the FEC acknowledged receiving the complaint, there has been no further communication on the matter, according to Denise Cardinal, executive director of the liberal advocacy group.

The allegations contained in the pair of lawsuits are still very much alive. A second person involved in the matter recently provided sworn testimony that Kazeminy ordered $75,000 funneled to a Minneapolis insurance firm where Coleman’s wife works. While Coleman is not a party to the cases, the Federal Bureau of Investigation reportedly is also looking into the allegations. The former senator recently refused to answer when asked if he’d been interviewed by the law enforcement agency. Coleman has hired Doug Kelley to represent him in the matter, while his wife has tapped Earl Gray to watch out for her interests. Both are former federal prosecutors turned high-profile defense attorneys. They undoubtedly also charge a pretty penny for their services.

It remains a mystery why Coleman failed to get approval from the FEC to cover these bills with campaign funds. But if the agency ultimately determines that Coleman must pay for the attorneys’ fees himself, it would certainly add to his personal financial troubles.

Rick Hasen, a professor at Loyola Law School, lauds the the “careful, unanimous” ruling of the three-judge panel on his blog. “It makes findings of fact and conclusions of law that on first read appear reasonable and conservative,” Hasen writes. “The opinion considers the major arguments made by Coleman and rejects them in a detailed and measured way. It is the kind of opinion that is unlikely to be disturbed on appeal by either the Minnesota Supreme Court or the United States Supreme Court.”

Nate Silver, over at FiveThirtyEight, declares that Coleman’s prospects for prevailing have now reached “Calista Flockhart territory.” Silver also comes up with an estimate for how much the former senator might be spending to keep the legal fight going. His (admittedly imprecise) conclusion: $145,000 per week.

While the numbers guru figures Coleman’s odds of prevailing in the courts are incredibly slim, he also doesn’t see too many other options for the Republican politically. “His best bet might be to wait until 2014, when Franken would be up for re-election, but six years is a lifetime in politics,” Silver concludes. “Although Coleman’s chances of prevailing in his legal case are not very strong, they may be better than his next-best alternatives.”

NBC News’ First Read blog is equally dismissive of Coleman’s prospects. “We’ll say it again: The question increasingly is no longer whether Al Franken will be the next U.S. senator from Minnesota; it’s when he’ll be the next senator.”

Not surprisingly, Tim Kaine, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, called on Coleman to concede.
“Enough is enough,” Kaine said in a statement. “It is time for Norm Coleman to concede and for Al Franken to be sworn in as the next U.S. Senator from Minnesota. The voters of Minnesota months ago elected Al Franken to the Senate — and during every step in the legal process that judgment has been confirmed.”

Slightly less predictable was the reaction of MSNBC host Joe Scarborough. “When are the Republicans gonna give up the ghost on this?” Scarborough asked on today’s edition of “Morning Joe.” “Norm, I like you. You lost. Can we seat a senator so Amy [Klobuchar] doesn’t have to do the job of two senators. … It is seriously not fair to constituents in Minnesota to drag this out any longer. It’s over, Norm.”

Here’s the video of Scarborough:

Norm Coleman (WDCpix)

It worked for Rep. Michele Bachmann. In 2006, the Stillwater Republican told worshipers at her church that “Twenty-two months ago, [God] called me to run for United States Congress.” She was elected — and then re-elected. On Friday, former Sen. Norm Coleman made similar statements about his own calling to be back in the Senate.

Coleman, who is Jewish, told nationally syndicated conservative radio host Mike Gallagher that he knows “God wants me to serve,” according to Smart Politics.

But for local, presumably more centrist audiences, he gave a godless version the same day. “I’ve been blessed to serve,” he told Minnesota Public Radio’s Tom Crann. “I want to continue to serve.”

Perhaps it’s a sign that Coleman’s hoping for some divine intervention in his Senate contest. Early last week, Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight said that the chances of a win based on another look at rejected absentee ballots is unlikely.

Update: Apparently a Huffington Post link to this Smart Politics post overloaded the site’s server; here’s Google’s cache of the page [screengrab].

Related: Video: Burris’ backing from God recalls Bachmann’s, Palin’s

But the mere fact that this many ballots are still in the mix doesn’t necessarily bode well for Coleman’s prospects of closing the 225 vote lead that Franken currently holds. Numbers guru Nate Silver offers an entertaining explanation at FiveThirtyEight for why the 4,800 ballots might not be that significant:

Don’t be impressed, in other words, by the sheer number of ballots under review. If you ask a girl out, and she turns you down the first three times, you don’t really improve your odds of success by asking her out another 30 times. (You may, however, increase your odds of getting a slap in the face or a restraining order).

The Coleman campaign, from what best I can tell, appears to be asking for a review of essentially every absentee ballot that they believe is more likely to contain a Coleman vote than a Franken vote. But these ballots have already been evaluated once, twice, and in some cases three times, and at each stage they have been determined to have been rejected properly. As we learned during the recount phase of the process, when the Coleman campaign challenged more ballots than Franken but had fewer successful challenges, it’s not the denominator that counts but the numerator, and I would guess that Franken has about has many successes from his list of 770 as Coleman does from his 4,800

Yesterday it was disclosed that 133 fewer ballots were tabulated in precinct 1 of Ward 3 during the recount than on election day. There were 2,028 votes recorded during the initial count, but only 1,896 ballots were included in the recount. The change resulted in a loss of 36 votes for Al Franken in the heavily Democratic precinct.

Elections director Cindy Reichert initially had a seemingly logical explanation for the discrepancy: ballots that included a write-in candidate were mistakenly fed through the machines twice during the initial count.

But there’s a rather serious flaw in this explanation: the numbers don’t add up. The voter roster for precinct 1 of Ward 3 includes 1,047 registered voters, 932 additional voters who registered in person on Election Day, 35 absentee ballots that were received by the city and 15 absentee ballots that were received by the county. That’s a total of 2,029 voters — or just one off the number of ballots recorded on election day. By contrast the recount tally is 133 ballots shy of the number of voters indicated on the roster. (Nate Silver has an excellent analysis of the situation at FiveThirtyEight.)

Reichert has since backed off from the double-counting of write-in ballots explanation. “We don’t know what happened,” she told the Star Tribune. “It looks like that wasn’t valid speculation.”

So the question remains: what happened to the ballots?

The State Canvassing Board will play the role of decider.

What seemed a far-fetched math geek dream this morning came true tonight: On Day Three of Minnesota’s U.S. Senate recount, the Al Franken and Norm Coleman campaigns again increased the number of challenged ballots by more than 40 percent over the previous day. In fact, both campaigns increased their challenged-ballot total by 48 percent.

Ballots that failed to satisfy Coleman’s crew today numbered 404, for a three-day total of 778. Franken’s forces found 387 ballots questionable, for a grand total (so far) of 747.

That makes a combined total of 1,525 challenged ballots with only 60 percent of ballots recounted statewide — already surpassing the 1,500 mark which Secretary of State Mark Ritchie predicted only yesterday would be the number of challenged ballots from the entire recount that the State Canvassing Board would have to review. It’s a number that represents an arms race of ballot-attrition that both Coleman and Franken’s camp condemned today — even as their campaigns ramped up the rejections.

It’s also a number that already dwarves by a factor of 13 the dwindling gap between Franken and Coleman, which now stands at 115. Unless the margin takes a giant leap over the remainder of the recount, the Canvassing Board looks to be the decider in Minnesota’s senate-election drama.

And the Minnesota Independent — which dared to predict in a headline this morning that the challenged-ballot stack could reach 2,500 — turns out to have sharper number-radar than even fivethirtyeight.com’s Nate Silver, who yesterday guesstimated 1,800.

But not to get too high on our high horse, we note that Silver is now looking closely at the number of challenges per 10,000 votes and finding that the Franken campaign on Day Three challenged 7.5 ballots per 10,000, while Coleman’s figures was 7.2, Both numbers represent a doubling of challenge rates from the first two days, Silver says.

Note: The figures in this post are based on the Secretary of State’s official statistics that were released at 8 p.m. Friday. The Star Tribune has been compiling its own totals which differ from the state’s because they include later and in some cases different information. On Friday the Franken campaign claimed its gap with Coleman stood at fewer than 100 votes, counting election officials’ initial decisions on ballots that were later challenged.

(Minnesota Secretary of State Mark Ritchie predicts 1,500 challenged ballots, and fivethirtyeight.com’s Nate Silver estimates roughly 1,800. But since every campaign challenger at every recount site represents an independent variable, I think my guess is as good as theirs.)

More complicated math, working with the rate of increase rather than the hard-number jump, suggests the combined total could hit 2,518. That’s if each campaign were to continue to become increasingly picky over the next two days — at the same percentage rate of increase they showed from Day One to Day Two.

For Franken, the day-over-day increase so far is 42 percent, which if repeated on Day Three and Day Four of a projected four-day recount, would lead to a total of 1,233 challenges.

For Coleman, who had a 44 percent increase from Day One to Day Two, the grand total would be 1,285 challenged ballots, if he were to keep increasing his challenged ballots by 44 percent each day. Drilling down, that means he would challenge 373 on Day Three. And on Day Four, Coleman’s daily challenged ballot count would be – hold on to your hat, Nate Silver! – 538.

If, over the long run, we expect Franken to win 51% of corrected ballots, his odds of winning the recount may be quite strong — in fact, he may be the prohibitive favorite depending on the number of recounted ballots.

UPDATE: Silver has already revisited this in a new post. His adjusted take on the situation: 

I hesitate to say this, but I think the evidence points on balance toward Franken being a slight favorite to win the recount.

UPDATE: In yet another installment, Silver says what we already knew: It’s a tie. 

 It is very, very close. 

A lot rides on the margin between Franken and Coleman staying small when votes are certified today, and on the belief, buttressed by exit polls, that under-counted ballots will break for Franken. Yet when he appeared Nov. 3 on MSNBC’s “Countdown with Keith Olbermann,” Silver didn’t put much stock in exit poll data:

Olbermann: Nate, when the exit polls leak out tomorrow … is there anything that you actually want to look at, anything that’s an actual valid indicator, or should you just throw them out as they come in?
Silver: No, totally throw them out. These things are not anything they’re cracked up to be. They’ve had a Democratic lean for years and years.

Silver may have been dissing exit polls’ utility in predicting election results, however, not in conducting after-the-fact demographic analysis.

In any case, it’s the kind of in-depth analysis Silver lavished only on select candidate preference polls during the heat of the campaign season. Now that it’s all over but the counting in a few places like Minnesota, the former baseball stats geek is apparently able and willing to turn his full mental powers on an individual non-presidential race to produce an at-length interpretation that leaves his readers’ heads spinning. “Swear to God, Nate, you’ve broken my brain with this one,” writes one. ”My goodness Nate — do you ever sleep? You need to get out more,” advises another. Adds someone named Bob: “Your sadistical analsis [sic] leaves me stunned.”

Some of the reasons (there are 10 in all):

1. Exit polls have a much larger intrinsic margin for error than regular polls. This is because of what are known as cluster sampling techniques. Exit polls are not conducted at all precincts, but only at some fraction thereof. Although these precincts are selected at random and are supposed to be reflective of their states as a whole, this introduces another opportunity for error to occur (say, for instance, that a particular precinct has been canvassed especially heavily by one of the campaigns). This makes the margins for error somewhere between 50-90% higher than they would be for comparable telephone surveys.

2. Exit polls have consistently overstated the Democratic share of the vote. Many of you will recall this happening in 2004, when leaked exit polls suggested that John Kerry would have a much better day than he actually had. But this phenomenon was hardly unique to 2004. In 2000, for instance, exit polls had Al Gore winning states like Alabama and Georgia (!). If you go back and watch The War Room, you’ll find George Stephanopolous and James Carville gloating over exit polls showing Bill Clinton winning states like Indiana and Texas, which of course he did not win.

3. Exit polls were particularly bad in this year’s primaries. They overstated Barack Obama’s performance by an average of about 7 points.