Somebody, please explain Minnesota to me

Posted July 15th, 2008 at 10:49 AM in Politics

Jesse “The Body” Ventura, a.k.a. “Former Governor Jesse Ventura,” pretended to consider a run for Senate in Minnesota this year, ending rumors only a short time before the filing deadline passed. Preposterous as it may be, it actually looked like he could affect the race between Republican Sen. Norm Coleman and Democrat Al Franken, even if he would not probably win it. Whom he would be a spoiler for remains a difficult question to answer. As Rasmussen (um…) reports:

If Ventura had entered the race, he would have started with 22% support from Minnesota voters. Coleman earned 36% of the vote in a three-way race and Franken attracted 34%.

Stunning. Ventura was a relatively mediocre governor by his own admission. He was a professional wrestler with little interest in the day to day minutia of running a state, from what I’ve gathered. Local media hated him, and he hates them. It just wasn’t meant to be. And yet, had he run, he could well have drastically changed the electoral strategies of both major parties in Minnesota, an important swing state.

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