In Minnesota, a Battle Without End for a Senate Seat

Norm Coleman spends his days in the quiet living room of his small house here, thumbing through stacks of legal papers. His United States Senate staff and offices vanished at the start of the year, as did his salary, so Mr. Coleman works part-time as a consultant to the Republican Jewish Coalition. He has learned to ignore the big “Franken” signs on his neighbors’ yards that taunt him when he walks out his door, a daily reminder of his five-month battle with Al Franken over the Senate seat Mr. Coleman, a Republican, won in 2002 and neither quite retained nor lost in November. Mr. Coleman said he begins each day with ritual Jewish morning prayer to help him though these trying times.

Mr. Franken, a Democrat, works out of his downtown townhouse across the river in Minneapolis, keeping an uncharacteristically, though calculated, low profile. He has studied the experiences of other celebrities who have gone to the Senate — Bill Bradley and Hillary Rodham Clinton — and said he used this time to speak to Mrs. Clinton and her first chief of staff, Tamera Luzzatto.

“It’s something I’ve given a lot of thought to,” he said in an interview. “That’s why I’ve been sort of keeping my head down in this period and trying to do the work. I’ve been trying to do mainly Minnesota media and turn down requests for national media, especially national TV.”

Mr. Franken and Mr. Coleman are caught in a political twilight, players in a race that will not end. A three-judge panel declared Mr. Franken the winner on Monday by 312 votes out of roughly 3 million cast, after a seven-week trial, but Mr. Coleman promptly announced that he would appeal to the state’s highest court, raising the prospect that Minnesota will not get its second senator until the Congressional recess begins this summer.