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A little more inside baseball: Dahlberg screwed up royally by agreeing to suspend voting at 2:00 a.m. and continue at 9 a.m. That allowed McFadden to send out buses to pick up delegates who skipped Friday's event (for work or other reasons). I had heard two CDCs marvel at all of the new voters Saturday morning, then heard someone affiliated with Dahlberg's campaign say that there were 700 new voters that morning. Dahlberg went from being ahead 54% - 44% on the 7th ballot with 1186 people voting to only 49.3% to 49.2% with 1937 voting on the 8th ballot. From there, momentum clearly on McFadden's side. If Dahlberg had gone one more ballot, he might have crept up to 56%, which probably would have been enough to get him over the hump on the next vote.

Not a huge fan of McFadden, Dahlberg, or Ortman, but the latter two had major potential skeletons for Franken to exploit (divorce/credit card issue for Dahlberg, potential mention on Brodkorb "cheater's list" for Ortman). Don't know if any exist for McFadden; I know people were digging hard.

Seifert, being from rural Minnesota, is supposedly the only Republican who could reach outstate voters. Don't know if I buy that. If Johnson runs more ads like his hilarious ad comparing Dayton's policies to a student driver, he'll have a real shot. Seifert will be tough in the primary; Honour's wasting his money.