MinnLawyer Blog

Minnesota Lawyer is a nonpartisan newspaper, so our posts here are fairly apolitical. Yet there are certain topics you cannot broach without pressing somebody’s political hot button. A case in point is Coleman v. Franken. Last week I put up a pretty innocuous post dissecting some of the legalities of the Minnesota Supreme Court decision, and received the following “response” comment:

You are just as complicate in the Voter Fraud against Norm Coleman, as Mark Ritchie & ACORN is, by not denouncing the fraud that went on with dead voters, fradulant [sic] ballots, & Ritchie stacking the State Canvassaing [sic] Board against Coeman [sic], all the other garbage that transpired.

But, you got your liberal candidate, didn’t you. A joke & embarrassament [sic] to the state of Minnesota. You must be proud of yourselves.

Hmmm. Now I could point out the fact that Coleman’s legal team acknowledged the fairness of the recount process and disclaimed any assertions of fraud in how the tallies were handled, but I don’t suspect there is anything I could say that would placate the commenter. The one part of the comment that intrigued me was the idea that the media, in this era of what many believe is of fast declining influence, would somehow be powerful enough to help determine the course of a senatorial recount. In that sense, it’s a pretty high compliment from our conspiracy-minded commenter.

The comment did put me in mind of blogging about a topic that occurred to me before, but I never got around to. My colleague, Sarah Janecek over at Politics in Minnesota, has argued the unsigned editorial has lost its relevancy. (See “R.I.P.: The Political Impact of the Newspaper Institutional Editorial,” July 10, 2008 PIM). Perhaps I am just having more trouble giving up the ghost than Sarah, but I think newspaper editorials retain at least a little oomph, albeit greatly reduced from newspapers’ heyday. So why do I bring this up?

One of the big surprises at the tail end of the 2008 U.S. Senate race in Minnesota was that the Star Tribune chose to endorse for U.S. Senate Republican Norm Coleman rather than DFLer Al Franken. This was an extremely tight race replete with negative ads of both candidates. There were plenty of voters still on the fence about whether or not to vote for Franken when the Strib issued its endorsement of Coleman. If you were a DFLer having difficulty voting for Franken after seeing him portrayed as too divisive and partisan figure to be fit for the U.S. Senate, might not the fact that the state’s largest newspaper — despite its left-leaning editorial reputation — had chosen to go with the Republican candidate have swayed you? Keep in mind Franken won by just 312 votes. Even if just a few hundred of the hundreds of thousands of readers were tipped to the Coleman side by the Strib’s editorial, that could have cut the already razor-thin margin between the candidates in half, making the recount even trickier than it otherwise would have been. (The closer the margin, the less the room for error.)

It’s impossible to say with any degree of accuracy whether the Strib actually was to any degree a player in what became quite likely its biggest political story of the year. This debate would, of course, be much more interesting if the election had gone the other way (i.e. if Coleman had won by a few hundred votes after getting the Strib endorsement). However, in such a close race, it’s intriguing to think about the “what ifs.” Had the Strib endorsed Franken rather than Coleman, what would that final vote tally have been? If the answer is “about the same,” it may indeed be time to give up the ghost on newspaper editorial endorsements.