Flipping Senate

Franken gets serious about flipping Senate to Democrats

After romping to reelection, he's using his celebrity to raise big bucks for Democratic candidates.

By Burgess Everett

On a recent October afternoon, Democratic Sen. Al Franken mistakenly ambled toward the Mansfield Room, where the party in control — namely Republicans — meets weekly to hash out strategy.

“I keep thinking we’re in the majority,” the second-term Franken chuckled to a colleague as he changed course to the smaller Lyndon Baines Johnson Room.

Now the comedian turned senator, whose party lost control of the Senate to Republicans last year, is embarking on a yearlong campaign to help Democrats win it back and ensure that Senate races aren’t a forgotten undercard to the presidential contest. And after years of keeping a low profile on Capitol Hill, he’s actually happy to talk about it.

In a rare interview in his Capitol office, the Minnesotan described his most ambitious effort yet to help elect Democrats in his more than six years in Washington. Franken is using his celebrity to help raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for Democratic candidates, and Democrats are relying on him to play an outsize role, alongside high-profile senators like Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker, to pick up the five seats the party needs to flip the Senate in 2016.

“The Republicans don’t share our basic values about where economic growth comes from,” Franken said. “I have nothing personally against my Republican colleagues other than their views on how the country works.”

The task is urgent: If Hillary Clinton becomes president, Franken said, the difference between a Democratic Senate and two more years of Mitch McConnell would be enormous. If Clinton wins, her early legislative agenda, as well as the fate of her Cabinet choices and potentially a Supreme Court nomination, hinges on which party controls the Senate.

Plus, Democrats believe 2016 — with a favorable map and a boost from Clinton’s turnout machine — is probably their only shot to take back the Senate until 2020. In 2018, the Senate election landscape will tilt the other way, putting a slate of moderate Democrats on defense.

“It’s absolutely crucial that we take the majority. Because we’re not going to have that chance in ’18,” Franken said.

For Franken and 21 other Senate Democrats elected during Barack Obama’s presidency who had served only in the majority, 2015 has been a difficult transition. The Senate Republican minority stymied much of the Obama agenda during Franken’s first six years in Washington, with some high-profile exceptions like health care and financial reform. But Democrats were able to use their majority to confirm progressive nominees and defend Obamacare from GOP efforts to undermine or scuttle it.

Franken said he’s not motivated by personal disdain for McConnell (R-Ky.), whom the Democrat calls “an adult.” But the Senate majority leader hasn’t come calling to discuss their shared priorities either, Franken said, like repealing a medical device tax in Obamacare.

Franken, of course, has a well-earned reputation as a partisan warrior, supporting Democratic presidential candidates like Al Gore and John Kerry long before he even ran for election. He started a political action committee a decade ago, dubbed Midwest Values PAC, which has raised and spent more than $5 million for Democrats, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Franken has connections from his status as a celebrity that are now paying off. In 2006, Franken traveled to Afghanistan with the United Services Organization and met a young soldier named Jason Kander, who is now challenging Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.).

The two chatted about the encounter during a recent fundraiser Franken held for Kander and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee in California.

Still, Kander, who split with Franken and other Democrats on the president’s nuclear deal with Iran, played down the importance of support from national Democrats.

“Obviously, there are people around the country who want to see a change in Washington,” Kander said in an interview.

His comments reflect the fact that in a conservative-leaning state like Missouri, being directly connected to Franken could be as much a liability as a benefit. And Republicans are eager to make the connection.

“It says a lot about Democrats that they want to use Washington insiders to promote their struggling campaigns,” said National Republican Senatorial Committee spokeswoman Andrea Bozek.

But the cash more than compensates for any criticism. This year alone, Franken has spread his star status around, raising money for safe incumbent Patty Murray of Washington, choosing sides in contested primaries by supporting Tammy Duckworth in Illinois and Ted Strickland in Ohio, and clocking four events for Catherine Cortez Masto in the swing state of Nevada.

Franken is looking to replicate or surpass his performance in 2012, when he helped expand the party’s liberal wing by working for Democratic Sens. Warren of Massachusetts, Chris Murphy of Connecticut and Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin. Democrats are relying on Franken, Warren and Booker to be both show horses and workhorses: to remind voters that the Senate races may not draw the attention of Clinton’s presidential bid but are still critically important and to simultaneously raise gobs of money for Democratic candidates.

“He’s become a serious senator. But he still has that celebrity aura. So he’s a draw,” said Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), who stands to become majority leader if Democrats win the Senate.

Franken’s uptick in electioneering for the party comes as he’s free from the restraints of being up for reelection himself. Fundraising statistics show Franken’s Midwest Values PAC raises far more money when he is not encumbered by his own campaign. In 2014, Franken thrashed Republican challenger Mike McFadden by 10 points, but he also had less time to help his colleagues, and the PAC brought in a fraction what it did during the 2010 and 2012 election cycles.

Many Democratic Party leaders and strategists attributed the loss of the Senate last year to a Republican-friendly map. But Franken is the uncommon Democrat who still believes the party could have done better and smarts at a GOP strategy that painted Democrats as soft on the border, terrorism and even infectious disease.

“That was a shame that happened … we should have been able to pick up more seats,” Franken said.

Then he can’t help himself: “ISIS terrorists coming over the Mexican border infected with Ebola was the issue. And I was to blame for all of them.”

Franken, 64, flashes his humor at times in a one-on-one setting, but it’s a side that few in Washington see. In the Senate he trudges through the hallways in a workmanlike manner and avoids holding court with reporters; his aides keep handy a list of all the times a profile of him has carried a headline containing the words: “No joke.”

He’s a known policy wonk on issues ranging from nuclear weapon storage to technology regulation. On politics, he’s still relatively restrained, hitting Republicans for fearing primary challenges over climate change policy but generally keeping his criticism of the GOP low-key.

There were hopes among reporters that he would loosen up after winning reelection, but Franken continues to bat away spontaneous interviews in the Capitol, which Booker and Warren have also spurned.

“The drive-by interview, I don’t like that,” Franken said. “I just know that if [reporters] ask me, they’re new.”