And for the record Guest JH, the final tally in the election (with over 75% voter turnout), was split down the middle along partisan party lines: Coleman too 49% and Mondale 47%.

The third parties weren't a factor in Minnesota Senate race, but there is no question that the Green candidate and Jesse Ventura's reactionary Independence party got enough votes from a wildly unpopular party machine Democrat, to put right wing Republican Pawlenty into office.

The lesson in the governors race wasn't that we should lock out the third parties. The lesson is, the Democrats have to run strong, viable candidates, instead of the party hacks who can amass the most money and wield the most power within the party. The lost to Ventura doing it in 1998, and to Pawlenty doing the same damn thing all over again in 2002. So know we are stuck with a draconian right wing Republican ideologue for governor, who is doing a tremendous amount of damage to the state--he picked up where Ventura left off running Minnesota into the ditch, and managed to get his vehicle moving enough to drive us right into the swamp.