Free Republic

The GOP shortlist now looks much different than it did even a week ago. Former state Sen. Ted Daley, an accountant and West Point grad who served in the Gulf and Iraq wars, is widely considered the party’s most credible candidate at this point. He was elected to the Senate in 2010, but lost re-election in 2012. Calling him “squeaky clean,” the state GOP operative said that Daley’s military service casts him “in the Kline mold.” Kline served 25 years in the Marines. And while Daley’s “very conservative,” a GOP operative who works on House races added, “he’s not a...

ABC News has declared Democratic Sen. Al Franken beat out Republican Mike McFadden for a seat in the U.S. Senate. Franken's big advantages in money and name recognition made him the favorite against McFadden. The former "Saturday Night Live" star was seen as a big target for Republicans after he won in 2008 by recount, but this cycle's race never appeared close and Republican-aligned groups invested their millions elsewhere.

Live from Minnesota, it’s Democratic Senator Al Franken’s bid for reelection, and he’s got an eight-point lead over Republican challenger Mike McFadden.

While incumbent Minnesota Sen. Al Franken (D) has a comfortable lead in opinion polls, some are wondering if his relatively muted response to ISIS actively recruiting soldiers from Minnesota will come back to haunt him in November.Minnesota has been a hotbed for ISIS recruitment, with over a dozen residents of the Twin Cities traveling to the Middle East to fight for the Islamic State. Two have been killed. Mike McFadden, the Republican candidate for Franken's seat, has jumped on the issue of ISIS in Minneapolis by portraying Franken as ineffectively combating the terror threat.More from ABC: Hours after the release...

Sen. Al Franken’s Republican challenger made a case for a power shift, bashing Democrats’ regulatory and education policies. Mike McFadden, seen as having an uphill battle, said Americans are hungry for new leadership. “Minnesota is the Land of 10,000 Lakes. But when it comes to the challenges working families are facing, all we get from Democrats is 10,000 excuses. “November presents a tremendous opportunity for America to elect new leaders, with the vision to turn our country around, and get us back onto the path of growth and prosperity.” McFadden said the Obama administration and congressional Democrats have presided over...

Here in Minnesota, where we managed to elect Jesse Ventura as Governor and Al Franken to the US Senate within a decade of each other, the state Republican Party held its convention this past weekend. Minnesota has a caucus-plus-primary system, in which the two parties attempt to settle its nominations with convention endorsements for state-wide offices. Often, the fight continues through to a late-season primary, drawing resources away from the general-election campaign. Democrats hold all of the state-wide offices, including Franken as the incumbent Senator and Mark Dayton as Governor, so their nominations have long been settled.Republicans batted .500 on...

Minnesota’s Senate race isn’t one of the best chances for Republicans to pick up a seat, but a new poll shows that it’s a possibility. A new Suffolk University poll finds Democratic incumbent Al Franken leading all four, relatively unknown Republican candidates, but he fails to pick up majority support from voters. In four head-to-head match-ups with declared Republican candidates, Franken gets roughly 44 percent support to the Republicans’ 29 percent. While his lead is in the double digits, the gap falls within the percentage of Minnesotans who say they remain undecided on who to support. Nearly one-fifth, or 19...

You’re probably sourly amused at all the signalling done in these paragraphs: A new Minnesota poll, commissioned by a partisan group, finds that Democratic U.S. Sen. Al Franken is “potentially vulnerable” as he mounts his bid for re-election. It found that Franken has a 3 percentage lead over Republican Julianne Ortman and a 6 percentage point lead over Republican Mike McFadden. The poll was conducted by Magellan Strategies for American Encore, a group connected to the Koch Brothers that is already running television ads bashing Franken. It included 1,081 likely Minnesota voters in late March. …because you probably also suspect...