Hope for Johnson?

While you still sense that Lucy's gonna pull the football away from Charlie Brown, things are tightening up in the governor's race:

The final KSTP/SurveyUSA poll in 2014 has familiar names on top of both the Minnesota governor's and Senate races, but the leads for Mark Dayton and Al Franken are the smallest they've been since the general election campaign began in August.

In the governor's race, incumbent Democrat Mark Dayton still leads Republican Jeff Johnson 47 percent to 42 percent. Hannah Nicollet of the Independence Party is at 2 percent tied with Libertarian candidate Chris Holbrook. Another 6 percent are either undecided or support other candidates. Dayton lead by 12 points a month ago and five points two weeks ago.

The key number is the top line -- if this poll is accurate, Dayton can't get to 50% and is, in fact, well short of 50%. A few guesses regarding what is happening:

• Johnson's primary task in this campaign has been to demonstrate that he is a viable alternative to Dayton. He's done that with ease. He comes across as serious and sensible and the extremist tags that the DFL and its bobos have tried to foist on Johnson ring false. 
• Dayton is shaky in a lot of ways. I posted a somewhat snarky post over the weekend that compared Dayton to the character Foster Brooks played on Dean Martin roasts in the 1970s. You have to be a certain age to get the joke, but the reason the joke works is because Dayton's behavior in office has ranged from erratic to incoherent. He's been well protected by his praetorian guard, but the evidence has leaked out here and there.
• We won't know if this is true until after the election, but I think that selecting Tina Flint Smith is going to hurt Dayton. While the Esme Murphys and John Cromans of the world aren't particularly interested in telling you that Smith is a former grandee of Planned Parenthood, you can be sure that the pro-life community in this state knows full well about her resume and has shared that knowledge. And since Dayton's health has been questionable, the prospect of having a less glitzy version of Wendy Davis in the governor's chair is probably going to be a factor in the final result.
• I don't know Hannah Nicollet. From what I've been able to observe, she's a likable candidate and could have a future if she plays her cards correctly. In this cycle, she and the IP are probably doomed, though. While the definition of a major party, at least in Minnesota, is a party that gets 5% of the vote, the IP has not realy been a major party since 1998, in the sense of the term that matters -- a party that can win elections. Jesse Ventura has been gone for over a decade now.

As for Al Franken, he's probably safe, since the polling shows he has 51% support. The good news is that Franken will likely be a minority member of the senate and will actually have to build a record in his next term, because he won't have Harry Reid killing bills that come to the Senate from the GOP House. And since his party won't be in control, there's a good chance that Franken won't be able to resist stepping to the microphones to weigh in. My favorite part of Franken's campaign has been the assertion that he's "kept his head down." Well Al, it'll all be different next year. Let your freak flag fly.