Minnesota, it's a Franken!

[blue fluff]

Wall Street Journal

The 'Absentee' Senator
Franken wins by changing the rules.

The Minnesota Supreme Court yesterday declared Democrat Al Franken the winner of last year's disputed Senate race, and Republican incumbent Norm Coleman's gracious concession at least spares the state any further legal combat. The unfortunate lesson is that you don't need to win the vote on Election Day as long as your lawyers are creative enough to have enough new or disqualified ballots counted after the fact.

Mr. Franken trailed Mr. Coleman by 725 votes after the initial count on election night, and 215 after the first canvass. The Democrat's strategy from the start was to manipulate the recount in a way that would discover votes that could add to his total. The Franken legal team swarmed the recount, aggressively demanding that votes that had been disqualified be added to his count, while others be denied for Mr. Coleman.

But the team's real goldmine were absentee ballots, thousands of which the Franken team claimed had been mistakenly rejected. While Mr. Coleman's lawyers demanded a uniform standard for how counties should re-evaluate these rejected ballots, the Franken team ginned up an additional 1,350 absentees from Franken-leaning counties. By the time this treasure hunt ended, Mr. Franken was 312 votes up, and Mr. Coleman was left to file legal briefs.

What Mr. Franken understood was that courts would later be loathe to overrule decisions made by the canvassing board, however arbitrary those decisions were. He was right. The three-judge panel overseeing the Coleman legal challenge, and the Supreme Court that reviewed the panel's findings, in essence found that Mr. Coleman hadn't demonstrated a willful or malicious attempt on behalf of officials to deny him the election. And so they refused to reopen what had become a forbidding tangle of irregularities. Mr. Coleman didn't lose the election. He lost the fight to stop the state canvassing board from changing the vote-counting rules after the fact.

This is now the second time Republicans have been beaten in this kind of legal street fight. In 2004, Dino Rossi was ahead in the election-night count for Washington Governor against Democrat Christine Gregoire. Ms. Gregoire's team demanded the right to rifle through a list of provisional votes that hadn't been counted, setting off a hunt for "new" Gregoire votes. By the third recount, she'd discovered enough to win. This was the model for the Franken team.

Mr. Franken now goes to the Senate having effectively stolen an election. If the GOP hopes to avoid repeats, it should learn from Minnesota that modern elections don't end when voters cast their ballots. They only end after the lawyers count them.
Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page A11
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124640687950076679.html

 

[blue fluff]

Franken’s initial approval rating: right where he left off

posted at 2:20 pm on August 17, 2009 by Ed Morrissey

"When politicians first take office, they usually ride on a bubble of good will among their constituents. Consider it the triumph of hope over experience; after an election, most people hope they will do well even if they didn’t support the winner in the election. With that in mind, Eric Ostermeier looks at Al Franken’s initial job-approval ratings after a month in office, and finds that bubble missing entirely:

A newly released SurveyUSA poll conducted only two weeks into Franken’s tenure finds Minnesotans unsurprisingly divided about how he is conducting himself as their Senator in Washington. The poll finds 43 percent of Gopher State adults approving of his job performance and 45 percent disapproving.

A recent Smart Politics analysis of Franken’s colleague Amy Klobuchar found her approval ratings approaching a career low at 54 percent in July. Overall, many Democratic and Republican Senators have seen their approval ratings take a hit this year in light of the nation’s economic and budget troubles.

Still, Franken begins his second month in office with one of the worst net approval ratings among newly elected members to the Senate in recent years. … Franken’s low approval rating should not surprise political observers as the DFLer only received 42 percent of the vote last fall - virtually identical to the percentage of those now approving of his job performance (43 percent).

Not only did Franken fail to gain any traction in that first month, the poll surveyed Minnesota adults, not registered voters or likely voters. That should have given Franken the best opportunity to gain approval points. Instead, he looks like a flop across the board.

* Age demographics - Oddly, Franken does better among older voters than younger. A majority of 35-49 year olds disapprove of Franken, 50%-37%, and the 18-34 demo disapproves 49%-43%. He gets plurality support in the two age demos 50 and above, but not majorities.
* Own or rent? It makes almost no difference. Homeowners slightly disapprove 43%-42%, while renters slightly approve, 47%-46%.
* Students disapprove, 49%-46%, while part-time workers approve 57%-33%, and retirees 46%-40%. Homemakers disapprove by a wide margin, 56%-35%.

The lesson here is that Franken is an extraordinarily weak incumbent even before he’s cast enough votes to alienate his constituents. If the GOP can make 2014 a two-candidate race, Franken should be easy to beat.


http://hotair.com/archives/2009/08/17/frankens-initial-approval-rating-right-where-he-left-off/

 

[framus]

Need donations!

Was just giving some thought as to why we have such degenerate politicians. I suppose it all starts with the constituents and why they whiff so bad when they elect such idiots.
In Michigan for the last 30 or so years it's been primarilly liberals who have dug a hole sooo deep and mucked things up so badly that they'll never get out and just lately we have a Senator from that state proclaiming that her chief worry is global warming? What about your people Missy? What about their homes that (in Detroit) are only worth $7500.00? It would be easier to just let your constituents know just how much you are into the greenies for.

The Californians have a whole heard of pointy-headed liberal morons. Pelosi (IMHO) leads the pack, how can anyone be so stupid to elect the botox bag? Then there's Boxer,Feinstein,Sanchez,Gavin Newsome the mayor of San Francisco gets honorable mention and for that matter Swartzenegger. How can the population be that stupid? Where am I going with this?

Next election cycle if say Pelosi or someone like her gets re-elected I say we buy each and everyone of her constituents a Pelosi "BIB". A bib with her likeness on it along with a big steamer. That way all the drooling and dribbling liberal morons not get any on the rest of us....or at the very least San Francisco's large homeless and vagrent populations can use them for sanitary porposes. The distribution of the bibs would be simple, just find 10 guys with trucks and drive like crazy through town hucking them off the back. Gonna need some funding though...any ideas?