On Friday, Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer’s campaign sent out a three-exclamation-point press release headlined: “Thanks to you, this is now a two person race!!!”

The release claimed that Nelson-Pallmeyer had “surpassed Mike Ciresi in delegate support.” It cited a local DFL convention Duluth, and gave the delegate-selection results as Nelson-Pallmeyer 10, Al Franken 10 and Ciresi 2.

The DFL doesn’t track delegates at this stage of the U.S. Senate race — between the precinct caucuses and the state endorsing convention in June — so there’s no way to measure delegates statewide. But anecdotal reports were confirming the essence of Nelson-Pallmeyer’s point: Ciresi was struggling.

This afternoon, Ciresi abandoned the race, issuing a press release that barely addressed why he made the decision. This passage was the only comment on that point: “In my judgment, continuing the endorsement race would only lead to an unnecessary floor fight. It is time to step aside.”

Now, it really is a two-person race. (There are a couple other candidates who aren’t a factor).

Franken clearly is — and always has been — the frontrunner. He has raised $5.2 million for his campaign, compared with $284,000 for Nelson-Pallmeyer. Franken has already run television commercials, and he enjoys high name recognition by virtue of his celebrity status. However, he also has a high unfavorable rating.

Nelson-Pallmeyer was a late entrant, only announcing his candidacy in October. He has run an energetic campaign, has impressed debate audiences and can point to a passionate group of supporters.

Usually, when it comes to describing a candidate’s supporters, “passionate” is code for “small.”

Is that the case with Nelson-Pallmeyer?

Compared to Franken, Nelson-Pallmeyer certainly lacks the nationwide network of financial contributors. Closer to home, Nelson-Pallmeyer is coming up short in key union endorsements, compared with Franken, who has the backing of labor groups ranging from teachers to public employees to steelworkers to teamsters.

We’ve seen in the past, though, that Minnesota’s process of selecting convention delegates through the precinct caucus system opens the door wide open to the right grassroots candidate.

Is Nelson-Pallmeyer that candidate?

A new poll shows Sen. Norm Coleman in a dead heat with Al Franken and Mike Ciresi, the two leading Democratic candidates.

Here’s the poll, taken by SurveyUSA for Roll Call, a Capitol Hill newspaper.

The poll has Coleman at 46 percent when matched against Franken, who has 45 percent. Against Ciresi, Coleman gets 44 percent and Ciresi gets 44 percent.

Other hightlights:

The favorable ratings for all three candidates are low. Coleman’s favorable and unfavorable ratings are about even; Franken’s unfavorables are much higher than his favorables; and Ciresi is still struggling to make himself known.

The gender gap is significant. Coleman runs 11 points better among men than among women vs. Franken. And Coleman runs 15 points better among men than women vs. Ciresi.

Here’s a look back at the Star Tribune’s Minnesota Poll taken in September, which included Coleman job approval and candidate image questions, but no horse-race questions.

We’ve posted a new Pig’s Eye Podcast this morning, which you can listen to here.

Bachmann on Election Night

In this podcast, we discuss:

Mike Ciresi escalating his criticism of Al Franken for being a late convert to opposing the Iraq war. You can read Pat Lopez’s story about this change of tone in the U.S. Senate race here. And you can join a discussion on the issue at The Big Question blog here.

Whether Michele Bachmann made a strategic error by asking TV stations to pull an ad critical of her over the children’s health insurance program. Here’s Kevin Diaz’s story about the flap. Also, there’s been a lively discussion in a posting I did on the controversy last week, asking whether the ad was fair or not. Here’s the post.

Iowa Republicans’ decision to move their caucuses up to Jan. 3, when voters will have barely recovered from New Years Eve celebrations, and when the campaigns will have to find a way to get people’s attention during the holiday season. Here’s our story when the new date was announced.

Al Franken had some good news to report Thursday. So how did he get the word out?

YouTube.

Al Franken

We’ve seen politicians routinely announce their candidacies on YouTube, instead of at a speech/press conference on the lawn in front of their humble childhood home. We’ve seen them use YouTube to tap into popular culture, as Hillary Rodham Clinton did with her search for a campaign theme song. And we’ve seen Mike Gravel take this rock and toss — well, you tell me what that one’s about. Whatever it is, it’s here.

And now they’re using YouTube to make news, as Franken did by announcing his third-quarter fundraising totals, which exceeded Sen. Norm Coleman’s collections. As the Franken campaign announced on its website: “We released our numbers a little differently this time around — check out our Q3 video to see how well Al did…” Franken’s video is here. And our Washington correspondent Kevin Diaz’s story is here.

So it’s time to take a quick accounting of how the 2008 U.S. Senate candidates are doing on YouTube by looking at the activity on their channels. (Note: Spellings are as their channels appear on YouTube. Numbers are as of 6 p.m. Thursday.)

ciresiforsenate
Joined: May 2007
Last time logged in: 1 month ago
Videos posted: 32
Most viewed video: 494 views
Subscribers to his channel: 7
Channel views: 562
His channel is here.

ColemanforSenate
Joined: April 2007
Last time logged in: 3 weeks ago
Videos posted: 4
Most viewed video: 494 views (Yes, the exact same number as Ciresi.)
Subscribers to his channel: 19
Channel views: 913
His channel is here.

FrankenForSenate
Joined: February 2007
Last time logged in: Thursday morning
Videos posted: 16
Most viewed video: 164,360 views
Subscribers to his channel: 544
Channel views: 7,432
His channel is here.

Two other candidates, Democrats Jim Cohen and Dick Franson don’t have YouTube channels.

How do you rate the candidates in their use of YouTube? Aside from the numbers, which candidate has the best videos? Which of their videos are your favorites?

Today we launch this new website devoted to all things political. We invite you to explore – and then let us know what you think.

A highlight of our coverage today is the 2008 U.S. Senate race in Minnesota. You’ve probably already seen the Minnesota Poll results here showing that Sen. Norm Coleman and his leading Democratic opponents — Mike Ciresi and Al Franken — all have a lot of work ahead of them to win over voters.

Sen. Norm Coleman

Al Franken

Mike Ciresi

And don’t miss the rest of the Senate race coverage, including:
–Our story about yesterday’s debate among the Democratic Senate candidates, here.
–Our video of the debate, here.
–D.J. Tice’s thoughts on the poll here, in his Big Question blog.

We’ll also be discussing the Senate poll results on today’s Pig’s Eye Podcast. That’s a weekly show about Minnesota politics that we’ll be recording and posting by mid-morning every Monday. (How quickly we get the posting up depends on how many of our mistakes Producer Jenni Pinkley has to edit out.) The show will be posted here.

By the way, if you’re not up on your Pig’s Eye lore, listen to our very first show — a rehearsal, as it were, which we’ve saved here. It provides a bit of Pig’s Eye history.

Let me point out a few other things to get you started:

Candidate pages: We’ve created separate pages for all the presidential and Minnesota U.S. Senate candidates. You’ll find a wealth of breaking news, bloggers’ comments, the latest pronouncements directly from the candidates and a record of how they’ve voted and what they’ve said on the key issues.

For the presidential candidates, we’re starting with Iraq, Immigration and Terrorism — and we’ll be adding more to that list soon, as well as posting the same issues for the Senate candidates. You can find the presidential candidate pages here and the Senate candidate pages here.

Campaign finance: Find out which Minnesotans are giving to the presidential candidates, and find out where the Senate candidates are getting their money. You’ll find the look-up box on the Home page as well as on the presidential and the Senate race pages, or you can use the advanced contributor search here.

Blogs: We’ve added two new blogs to go along with the Big Question. The Prez Fight will focus on the presidential race, with special emphasis on the Republican National Convention heading out way next summer. And my McMemo blog will direct you to the latest and the best political content on Politically Connected and elsewhere.

There’s a lot more on the site, but this should be plenty to get you started today.

Our goal is to provide you with a motherlode of political content from Minnesota and elsewhere, so you can spend less time searching — and more time reading, watching and debating.

We invite you to dig in get familiar with the site. This is just the first phase. Soon, we’ll be adding and planning more content and features. So please, give us feedback below. We welcome your reaction to the site as it is now, and your suggestions on what else you’d like to see.

Hope you enjoy getting Politically Connected.

Dennis J. McGrath
Editor
Politically Connected