My Day in SD32

Bullet points before the jump.

• Holy Madia!
• Terri Bonoff is one of the most improved speakers I’ve seen.
• DFL’ers on the march.

First things first: I went to 32 today to help a buddy run subcaucus numbers for Ash Madia. MNPublius isn’t going to endorse a candidate for the Third Congressional District because there are three great candidates for the seat. My interest in Ash comes from two places; I’m the former chair of the Minnesota Young DFL and I’m really excited about this great young candidate who is running a viable campaign for Congress, secondly my oldest and best friend in the DFL asked me if I could come on out and help him, and as long as it doesn’t involve getting arrested (and sometime even if it does) if a friend asks I’ll be there. I’m not sold completely on Madia because I don’t need to be (I’m not a delegate in the 3rd) and because I’d be happy to volunteer for any of the three candidates — I’m going to continue to preach the good news about the great candidates we’ve got in the third, all of them.

Matt and Zack aren’t supporting any candidate in the third, and I probably put them in a less than ideal position by helping out with the Madia campaign, but that’s why I’m the edgy one.

Finally make sure that you check out our running coverage of todays conventions here.

All of this and a lot more after the jump.

Holy Madia!: Out of 350 (+/-) delegates at least 140 were wearing t-shirts ID’ing them as Ash suporters. The campaign ran out of tshirts to give out and that dominance continued throughout the day with Ash winning 11.5 delegates (when I left that number was a little fuzzy with one delegate being a lean/soft Madia delegate but both campaigns agree that’s the breakdown). This fight seems to be breaking down into a Madia/Bonoff fight and Madia is running possibly the best campaign I have ever seen from a first time candidate at any level.

Terri Bonoff Has Found Her Voice (no, really): I last saw Senator Bonoff speak back in the very end of November, and her improvement as a speaker in the last three months is simply amazing. With her short speech to the delegates right at the beginning I saw an electric speaker. I don’t know if it was the fact that it was her first convention of the day and she just got her Starbucks buzz, or if she’s made that much progress but she was on fire. In the technical side of public speaking she projected amazingly well, hit every note she needed to, it’s was convincing, it was compelling really really impressive.

Senator Bonoff had a great group of folks working for her at the convention — we’re all big fans of her staff (as we’ve said before) and they’re going to be ready for the convention. Also, I saw for the first time a bio video that her campaign made that I was really impressed with so it’s for you perusal below.

DFL’ers on the March: One of the most interesting things about today’s convention was that in 2004 the entire senate district caucused in the room we were holding the convention in. The amazing turnout from caucuses have rolled over into the rest of the party process — the DFL’ers in the room were excited and they were motivated. We’ve got a lot of work this fall, but if the participation and effort we’ve seen so far is any indication we’re going to have a fall worth remembering as this invigorated bunch of DFL’ers march on to victory. 32 is a difficult district for Dems to win in, but with the right combination at the top of the ticket and two candidates on their second go-round running for the state house (Grace Baltich and Lee Carlson) we could see some upsets come November.

Also I put this post below our CD 3 round up, because that is the straight dope.