Frostbite Falls wants a recount.

What is wrong with Minnesota?

Paul Wellstone must be turning over in his grave!

I don't know what's going on here. My state sometimes confuses me.

Nothing wrong with MN. That was Franken's race to lose.

I am now fervently hoping that I filled in my absentee ballot correctly (I am sure I did) and that it hasn't yet been counted...

O.T.: Could someone at TPM please track down this woman and get some post-election comments from her?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VeGPzk8Oca8

The recount could be good for Franken. Officials will now verify and count provisional ballots which could swing the votes to Franken since the most provisional ballots will be from the bigger cities which Franken carried.

I am in TX and knew there was little chance to put a Democrat in the senate so I also gave $$ to Franken knowing he had a good chance of unseating Coleman. I have been watching this race closely!

Two causes led to this result here in Minnesota:

1) Franken is a flawed candidate. I think he'd make a great senator, but his past left open a remarkable number of avenues for attacks from Coleman.

2) Yet another third party candidate has derailed a statewide race for a Democrat (a DFLer here in MN). In this case it was Barkley taking in over 15% of the votes. Our governor, and short list candidate for veep, Tim Pawlenty, won twice without getting 50% of the vote in either election because of third party candidates. And 10 years ago, laughingstock Jesse Ventura "shocked the world" by winning the gubernatorial election as a third party candidate.

What we really need here is legislation that requires a run-off election for statewide office when no candidate gets over 50% of the vote.

And before everyone gets too down on Minnesota, just remember that we were the only state in the country that had the sense not to go for Reagan in 1984.

Last night, as a friend and I were celebrating Obama's victory, he admitted to me that he had voted for Barkley. He said, "I just really hate Al Franken and I couldn't vote for him." I was completely dumbstruck. Minnesotans are a frikkin' strange breed.

Final tally (this is from the Strib website, now showing 100% of precincts reporting) has Coleman's margin down to 600 votes.

And I agree with Mousegirl, that Franken should do well with provisional ballots - don't have the details, but it's a safe bet these are skewed towards first-time voters, and Minnesota had the same Dem edge in new registrations that we've seen elsewhere this year.

But measure this tiny difference against the 463,000 votes cast for a no-hope third candidate! I think the real problem here is that so many Minnesotans (and I speak as a native son) want to be simon-pure in their voting, and have a liking for doomed but noble candidates. Fie on them.

Late update. With all precincts reporting Coleman leads Franken by 571 total votes. This is less that 3-hundredths of a percent of all votes cast.

We Minnesotans are in DIRE need of some sort of "strict majority" voting system.

The problem is NOT in the structure of our elections or in our election laws. Third parties have as much right to participate in the process as everyone else. And don't forget that when Ventura won, he BEAT Norm Coleman, which derailed Norm's White House ambitions---yes, Norm from the moment you first met him always gave off the odor of obsessive ambition---he had the Presidency as his goal from the get-go.

And thanks to Jesse Ventura, Norm was knocked to the sidelines from 1998 to 2002. Then what happened? Paul Wellstone probably would have won in 2002. Tragedy struck.

And there is the key. It was the fascist media---the Limbaughs, O'Reillys, Hannitys, and their local counterparts---who lied, distorted, and exploited the memorial service held for Paul and the other crash victims. Parts of the memorial were unwisely turned into expressions of resentment against the vicious attacks on Wellstone, and into a call for people to finish Paul's work by electing his ballot stand-in, Walter Mondale.

The right-wing corporate media monopoly grabbed this and began screaming. Their faux indignation and their outright lies made AL FRANKEN, a friend of the Wellstone family, so mad that he wrote a book, "LIES AND THE LYING LIARS WHO TELL THEM", a heart-felt, searing follow-up to his previous bestseller, "Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot."

Well, with George W. Bush at his side, Norm rode that manufactured indignation to the Senate in 2002.

The real problem is not our election laws, I repeat. Minnesota has had a long tradition of third party politics--usually radical parties. In fact, the Democrats in Minnesota TO THIS DAY are still called the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party to reflect the fact that the party was created by a merger of the Farmer-Labor Party and the Democratic Party in 1944 (at the behest of FDR.)

The real problem is the corporate right-wing media monopoly. We need radio stations to combat the ultra-right talkers who poison the minds of so many Minnesotans (and Americans.) Those professional liars are where the danger and the problem is. They have a captive audience of commuters twice a day, five days a week. There is only ONE progressive radio station in the whole state, and it has a really weak signal.

The cure for the ills of democracy is said to be more democracy, not less democracy. Third parties serve the function of introducing new ideas into the two-party-dominated, winner-take-all electoral arena. Without new ideas, both big parties fight for the center and stagnation sets in.

And the solution to third-party perturbations is always the same---one or both of the big parties steals the platform of the minor party, and thus absorbs their voters.

The vote for Barkley and other Independence Party candidates was a protest vote, and came from erstwhile supporters of both GOP and DFL. The protest was partly against the negative advertising used in the Senate race. Coleman ran the most vicious, lying smear campaign I have seen in my life---and I have been watching Thug smear campaigns since 1962. Joe McCarthy would have been proud of Norm Coleman . . . whose Senate position, by the way, was the same as McCarthy's--chair of the permanent subcommittee on investigations.

But the public doesn't have the perception and political savvy, usually, to detect that one side's ads are far nastier and dishonest than the others. Then additionally, the entire state is dominated by fascist talk-radio, picking up and echoing the Coleman attacks, and you find the second piece of the puzzle---voters' minds being poisoned against Al. He was called a pornographer, repeatedly ad nauseum. His statements on political positions were wrenched more out-of-context than was done to Obama's casual "spread the wealth" remark, if you can imagine that.

Re-writing the laws won't solve the problem. Only getting more articulate liberal voices into the public arena will do it. The internet BEGINS to help. But radio, because of our commuter life-patterns, remains the key. Minnesota's Independence Party attracts voters who are "turned off" by their perceptions of the major parties--it doesn't really have an ideological platform [originally it was part of Ross Perot's campaign.]

Voters for Barkley made statements like "I really hate Al Franken," without knowing why. The why is simply that the right-wing talkers, having been so brilliantly skewered by Al in his books, used their monopoly of the air waves to poison the voters' beliefs.

Finally, give the devil his due, as the saying goes. Norm Coleman is simply the smartest, slickest, most adroit politician to appear in Minnesota since the late Hubert Horatio Humphrey. Norm's soul is corrupt, but he is as talented as they come, in pure political terms. He began as a Democrat--groomed and promoted by some of the state's leading Democrats, who saw his potential. He was Bill Clinton's campaign manager here. He was twice elected Mayor of a Democratic city, St. Paul,--the second time, AFTER he had turned his coat and joined the Republicans.

Al Franken is brilliant, compassionate, and selfless. He'd have been a fitting inheritor to Paul Wellstone's seat. But he didn't set out to be a politician; he went into a line of work--comedy--as unsuitable for a future candidate as, say, professional wrestling. Jesse the Body won for several reasons: He had personal charisma--which Al does not. He had been Mayor of a suburb--Al had no similar credential. And the two major candidates DIDN'T TAKE HIM SERIOUSLY--unlike the case with Al.

Sorry for the lengthy post-mortem. This was a political tragedy. As for Bachmann, her district was always intended for a Republican.

Note-- it looks like Oregon's senatorial phony also squeaked through. Lies and lying liars.

There's good news here, by the way. Without a doubt, Norm Coleman is one of the most servile, toadying sycophants in Washington, so he'll likely suck up to Obama in order to further his own career. I don't think ol' Norm is going to be much of a problem. He used to be a "Democrat", after all. Look for Coleman to get way out in front on the whole bipartisanship thing. Whatever gets you into office (and keeps you there).

Norm the Towelboy