Ventura was elected in a three-way race, when former St. Paul Major and Democrat-turned-RINO Norm Coleman couldn't manage to get people excited enough about him to give him a large margin of victory over the Democrat he should have beat like a baby seal, Hubert "Skippy" Humphrey III. (Yeah, the son of LBJ's vice-president.)
This time around, Minnesota elected Senator Al "F***wit" Franken because Senator Norm Coleman managed to show his true RINO colors again by voting for the first $800+ billion bailout bill just a month before the election, over the strong objections of his constituents, which p.o.'d conservatives enough to make large numbers of them defect and vote for Ventura protege and political advisor Dean Barkley, who talked a very good Libertarian line. So this time in the three-way race, the Democrat came up the winner.
The problem in this election wasn't that Minnesotans are morons who like Franken. The problem was that RINO Norm Coleman went out of his way to p.o. conservatives just before the election.