MTed, by agreement of all parties (ie the Coleman camp, the Wellstone camp, and the Mondale camp), that Minneapolis Star Tribune poll you are citing was a joke, and should never have been published as a legitimate poll. It was done on the fly, with dubious polling methods, by the major Minnesota daily who endorsed Mondale. By the time the two legitimate polls were published on Friday, showing Coleman and Mondale in a statistical dead heat with the edge going to Coleman, all the Minnesota pundits and pols agreed the Strib poll was just plain a bad poll.

BTW--the polls published on Friday were completed by Wednesday, and so didn't reflect much if any signifcant Republican outrage data, except the Republican outrage which would have existed whether Kahn had spoken or not. Sorry that information never made it into the national press. It might have made a difference for Mondale if it had actually. It might have galvanized those Democrats and independents who were totally disgusted with both Ventura and Republicans, and wanted to vote for Wellstone to begin with, like my 18 year old first time voter kid. And there were a lot of them, MTed. They were the Wellstone army, the young and idealistic, who were locked out of the mainstream DFL party in Minnesota by the Mondale/Humphrey Democrats. If you are looking to scapegoat somebody in Minnesota for the loss of the US senate, blame the Wellstone army of loyalists.

The DFL party in Minnesota didn't do badly at all in many local races. Democrats didn't vote against Mondale in this election, and neither did independents. What won the race for Coleman was Republican money, an exteremely effective negative/attack ad campaign against Wellstone prior to his death, and the too short to be effective (and virtually nonexistent) Mondale campaign.

The most recent results I've seen of the race (this morning's paper) had Coleman at 50%, Mondale at 46%, and the Independence Party candidate (Ventura's party) at 2%. That is right where the Wellstone/Coleman numbers had been for the last six months. I do believe that Wellstone's army not coming out in the hoped for by the Mondale camp numbers did make a difference. But that was because those were the core Wellstone loyalists, who didn't want to support Mondale period, not because of what Kahn said at the memorial. The Wellstone loyalists have continued to support Kahn. Over 6700 of them wrote in Wellstone, which is what my first time voting kid did. Many of them, like me, likely didn't vote in the US senate race.

But Kahn being the cause of the Democrats losing control of the US senate? Well, that's a red herring if ever there was one.