U.S. Senate candidates pleased with caucuses, but results are unclear

Not surprisingly, each of the campaigns for the DFL U.S. Senate candidates says it's pleased with the results of Tuesday's caucuses.

It's difficult to tell for sure what the results were, however, since party officials decided not to take a straw vote in the U.S. Senate race this year.

DFL leaders wanted "to make certain that the presidential process went smoothly ... and to do it justice, just to focus on that" rather than taking a vote on the Senate race as well, said associate state DFL chair Donna Cassutt.

So it's not possible to know beyond anecdotal reports exactly how the candidates -- Mike Ciresi, Al Franken, Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer and Dick Franson -- fared in the first test of strength leading up to the June 6-8 state endorsing convention in Rochester. (Another DFL candidate, Darryl Stanton, entered the Senate race this week.)

Two years ago, when there was no presidential contest, the DFL held straw votes at party caucuses for both governor and U.S. senator. Mike Hatch topped a four-person gubernatorial field, while Amy Klobuchar scored a resounding victory in the Senate vote. Both went on to win the party's endorsement.

With or without a straw poll, the work of the Senate campaigns boiled down to the same thing Tuesday: Turn out as many supporters as possible to elect a pool of delegates from which delegates to the state convention eventually will be chosen.

DeAmo Murphy, political director for the Nelson-Pallmeyer campaign, said that field reports he received made him "very comfortable" with the numbers who turned out throughout the state.

As proof of Franken's success, campaign staffers on Thursday released the results of straw polls they said were conducted by caucus participants at 38 metro-area and 12 outstate precincts. Most of the figures showed impressive support for Franken.

Franken spokesman Andy Barr said that "ecstatic" describes how campaign officials feel about caucus night. "We won't have any comprehensive sense of how we did, but we matched delegate slates with lists of people we'd identified as supporters, and we also got wind of these straw polls," he said, which he acknowledged were unscientific.

Leslie Sandberg, a spokeswoman for the Ciresi camp, pointed out that the straw polls weren't conducted by the party, only by caucus members, and that the numbers hadn't been verified. In any event, they represent a tiny fraction of the state's 4,000 precincts, she said.

"Every campaign had many supporters in many places, and we're going to keep going forward," she said. "I wouldn't read too much into tea leaves or straw poll results."

DFL officials said that individual caucuses were free to poll attendees on Senate candidates but didn't have to.