Today I had the opportunity to speak with Dean Barkley, the Independence Party candidate who received 15% of the vote in the Minnesota Senate race, and he confirmed to me that if there is indeed a new election — an idea that Norm Coleman has been floating — he will be a candidate.
Barkley doesn’t think a do-over will actually happen — nor does he think it should happen — and he traces the Coleman rhetoric to one reason. “Well that’s probably because they’re coming to the realization that they’re gonna lose. It’s that simple,” said Barkley. “He’s lost some pretty significant motions and decisions in court the last week, and I think he’s coming to the realization that he’s not gonna prevail in the finality. So obviously if you don’t want to lose, you’re gonna do everything you can to muddy up the waters.”
But if it does happen, Barkley is in. “I wouldn’t mind having another shot at the apple — bring it on,” Barkley told me. “If it was a do-over with everybody, not just Coleman and Franken. They seem to think they’re the only two people with a stake in the outcome.”
He added: “I might win it this time, after the behavior of those two.”
Barkley also rejected the suggestion that he would be any kind of spoiler in the race. If anything, he’s met a lot of voters who have told him if they could do it again, they’d have picked him.
“I think I would win,” he said. “And then we can have the argument, how many votes did Coleman or Franken take from me. The notion that I take votes for them, they don’t own any votes. That whole assumption is ridiculous. It epitomizes the whole two-party arrogance, that they own the whole election cycle.”
Barkley’s own high vote total came in part from the sheer negativity between the two major candidates, and the last few months haven’t exactly been positive. There hasn’t been any recent polling out there of what a do-over would be like for Franken, Coleman and Barkley, which would give us an idea of how this whole dispute has affected the candidates’ reputations and popular appeal. And it would very interesting to see some.
