Eric “Big E” Pusey of the Minnesota “Progressive” Project has the wonks disease, and he’s got it bad.

He’s all atwitter about the current bit of conventional wisdom – that Tom Horner of the Ventura “Independence” Party is going to soak enough votes away from Emmer to tip the election.

Yesterday, the Independence Party nominated former Republican Tom Horner as their MN-GOV candidate. Horner’s entrance into this race makes it far more likely that a DFLer will win in November.

But for Jesse Ventura, the “Indpendence” party – which has its roots in Ross Perot’s “Reform” Party, although Ventura pretty well roto-rooted any Perot connection when he took over the Minnesota chapter – has been nothing but a spoiler, with varying success.  It’s likely Tim Penny soaked away the votes that might have put Roger Moe in office eight years ago; for that, we owe Penny our thanks.  The brittle, petulant Dean Barkley likely made the Franken/Coleman race as close as it was. 

And…:

In 2006, Peter Hutchinson won the IP endorsement and split the moderates with liberal tendencies away from DFLer Mike Hatch, but Horner will have little appeal to these voters. No, Horner will be peeling away moderate conservatives who cannot stomach Tom Emmer’s far right agenda.

That depends on a couple of big “ifs”.

First, Horner (and the DFL wonks that will be providing most of his PR “oomph”, to the extent that he has any) will have to convince “moderate Republicans” that Emmer is “far right”.  He’s not.  He states a pretty solid meat and potatoes pro-growth case;  he’s not even campaigning on social issues at all, except by example.

Horner will have to convince people in a very Reagan-y year to vote for another Arne Carlson. 

And he’ll have to do it with very little money. Although the IP has managed to maintain its grip on major-party status by the barest of margins (with attendant waste of state campaign funds going to their little vanity exercise), that’s about it.  There’s no big push for Horner anywhere (but the DFL); there’s no “Hornmentum”.

This also makes the road for Margaret Anderson-Kelliher easier if she ends up winning the August DFL primary.  Instead of needing to make sure a moderate candidate with liberal tendencies (like Hutchinson) doesn’t peel away her voters, she needs to focus on higher turnout in key DFL areas.

While in the meantime Emmer builds up votes on his home turf – the “Key MNGOP areas of everywhere but Minneapolis, Saint Paul and Duluth” – and Horner builds up his home turf…

…oh, wait.  He has none. 

Let’s get serious here.  Any “moderate” “Republican” who is wobbly on Emmer (and we’re not talking Seifert people, here; we’re talking the party’s less-and-less consequential Arne Carlson/Dave Durenberger wing) is probably every big as fair game for a DFLer to pick off as the underfunded, under-charisma’d, under-interesting Horner.

But we’ll see, soon enough.

Suffice to say that if Emmer wins, I’m going to have a huge “conventional wisdom” bonfire this November.

UPDATE:  The more I think about this, the more wrong Pusey’s “conventional wisdom” seems. 

Kelliher, Dayton and Entenza are all farther to the left than Emmer is, especially when you consider that the “Center” has displaced to the right since 2008.  I think it’s distinctly possible that Horner could leach more votes from the DFL. 

That is, of course, based on a couple of assumptions:

1. Emmer continues to run his current cool, calm, collected campaign.  I believe that the wave of provocations – the ugly racist heckling at the May Day and Cinco De Mayo parades, Kelliher’s alleged chanting “KKK Go Away”, and so on – are attempts to try to break Emmer’s cool, to try get him to lose his purported short temper.   It’s not going to work; Seifert’s people tried and failed to get him off the high road, it’s for damn sure the DFL can’t. 
2. The DFL nominates a DFLer.

I am not a betting man – but if I were, I’d say we have another log of conventional wisdom for the bonfire.