Dean Barkley was born in the small central Minnesota town of Annandale, where his parents owned the local furniture store. He worked there throughout his youth and ran the store for a time after his father suffered a heart attack. Barkley attended the University of Minnesota where he earned both a bachelor's degree and a law degree.

Beginning in 1992, Barkley made three unsuccessful third-party bids -- for Congress in 1992, and for the U.S. Senate in 1994 and 1996. In 1998 he urged former professional wrestler Jesse Ventura to run for governor of Minnesota, and served as campaign manager guiding Ventura to his surprise victory. He went on to serve in Ventura's Cabinet.

When Democratic Sen. Paul Wellstone died in a plane crash in 2002, Ventura appointed Barkley to fill the remaining 62 days on Wellstone's term. Since that time, Barkley has practiced law, worked several jobs and managed writer and singer Kinky Friedman's unsuccessful independent 2006 bid for governor of Texas.

After Ventura opted not to run for U.S. Senate in Minnesota in 2008, Barkley announced he would run in Ventura's place. In September of 2008, he won the Independence Party primary and will face Republican Norm Coleman and Democrat Al Franken in the November election.

Barkley is divorced and has two children.

As a student at the University of Minnesota, Dean Barkley first got interested in politics because of his opposition to the Vietnam War. He volunteered for the 1972 presidential campaign of Democrat George McGovern, and worked for other Democratic candidates until 1980 when the presidential campaign of John Anderson ignited his interest in third-party politics.

Anderson's loss turned Barkley off politics for the whole next decade, but the candidacy of Ross Perot in 1992 revived his interest and he decided to run for Congress that year as an independent. He made subsequent runs for the U.S. Senate in 1994 and 1996, failing to win but registering better-than-average showings for a third-party candidate.

During his 1996 campaign Barkley first met former pro wrestler Jesse Ventura, a Minneapolis native who at the time was serving as the mayor of Brooklyn Park, a large Minneapolis suburb. Seeing Ventura's popularity at a campaign event, Barkley urged him to run for governor as an independent in 1998. Ventura agreed, Barkley served as his campaign manager, and Ventura's historic victory made headlines around the world. His success fostered the birth of Minnesota's Independence Party, which still retains major-party status in the state; Barkley has been one of its most faithful tenders.

Barkley served as director of planning for the state during Ventura's administration. Ventura decided in the summer of 2002 that he wouldn't run for a second term, and Barkley was preparing to return to private life when, just two weeks before the '02 election, Democratic U.S. Senator Paul Wellstone was killed in a plane crash in northern Minnesota. Ventura appointed Barkley to fill out the remaining few weeks of Wellstone's term, and for 62 days Barkley was the junior senator from Minnesota. He did manage to rack up several accomplishments in a short time, most notably passage of a permanent memorial to Wellstone.

Barkley returned to Minnesota at the beginning of 2003, after which he bounced through a series of jobs most notably as a bus driver for a company that provided transportation to senior citizens. In 2006, he served as campaign manager for Kinky Friedman, the musician and mystery novelist who mounted a Ventura-like bid for governor of Texas (Friedman, however, lost).

In the summer of 2008, Ventura resurfaced in Minnesota and demonstrated his effortless flair for generating headlines by publicly toying with running for U.S. Senate against his old nemesis, Republican Norm Coleman, and the Democratic challenger, former "Saturday Night Live" comedian Al Franken. Barkley was frequently at Ventura's side, urging him to run. Ventura ultimately deferred, after which Barkley announced he would make his fourth run for public office and try to regain the Senate seat he held for two months and two days.

Much like Ventura, Barkley argues that the two-party system has consistently favored special interests and powerful donors over the concerns of everyday voters. Barkley lacks the millions of dollars in campaign cash that Coleman and Franken have raised for their respective candidacies, but has expressed a hope that his participation in candidate debates will give him a boost.

Norm Coleman was born in the New York City borough of Brooklyn and lives in St. Paul, Minn. He received his bachelor's degree from Hofstra University on Long Island, where he led protests against the Vietnam War as a long-haired student senate president.

After graduation, he worked briefly for New York City Mayor John Lindsay and then earned his law degree from the University of Iowa. That led to a job with the attorney general's office in Minnesota, where he worked for 17 years.

In 1993, he won the St. Paul mayor's race as a Democrat, but by 1997, he left the party and won re-election as a Republican.

As mayor, Coleman was credited with helping to revitalize the city. During his eight-year tenure, the city attracted a National Hockey League team, the Minnesota Wild, and did not raise taxes.

He lost the governor's race to independent candidate Jesse Ventura in 1998 but was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2002.

He and his wife, Laurie, have two children.

Norm Coleman, a handpicked candidate who helped the Republicans take control of the U.S. Senate, has set an active pace during his first term. He defeated former Vice President Walter Mondale in 2002 and quickly went to work investing his political capital.

Coleman started a leadership PAC to help fellow Republican candidates. In 2004, he ran for the chairmanship of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, but lost by one vote to Republican Sen. Elizabeth Dole.

During the 2004 presidential election, Coleman went on the offensive against Democratic nominee John Kerry, telling reporters on calls organized by the Bush campaign that Kerry was a flip-flopper. Democrats retorted that Coleman, a former Democrat, was in no position to make that accusation.

Some critics complained that Coleman, who campaigned on a promise of changing the tone in Washington, had been far more partisan than advertised. Coleman moderated his positions after the 2004 presidential election, voting against Bush's proposed budget cuts to Medicaid and the Community Development Block Grant program. He has also consistently voted against efforts to allow drilling in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Prior to 2007, Coleman was chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which he has used to generate national exposure for himself. Coleman used the panel to mount a high-profile investigation into mismanagement of the U.N. oil-for-food program, and called on U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan to resign. Coleman has also investigated port security, the recording industry's crusade against people who download music from the Internet, the safety of imported drugs, government contractors who owe unpaid federal taxes, and the unscrupulous business practices of some credit counseling agencies.

Coleman angered Minnesota sugar beet farmers in 2005 by voting in favor of the Central American Free Trade Agreement. The sugar growers opposed the deal because of concerns about the impact of cheap sugar imports on the domestic sugar market. Coleman won a commitment from the Department of Agriculture to keep excess imported sugar out of the U.S. through the end of 2007, either by converting excess sugar into ethanol or compensating exporting countries for not sending sugar here.

In March 2006, Coleman raised eyebrows by publicly calling on Bush to put in a new team at the White House. Two weeks later, Bush announced that he had accepted the resignation of his chief of staff, Andy Card, who was replaced by budget director Joshua Bolten.

After Republicans lost their congressional majorities in 2006, Coleman looked ahead to his own 2008 reelection and began to more aggressively highlight the bipartisan aspects of his record as well as the work of his senatorial office on behalf of constituents.

The American Conservative Union gave Coleman's Senate voting record an 64 rating out of 100 in 2007, while the liberal Americans for Democratic Action gave him 50 out of 100.

Al Franken was born in New York City and moved with his family to Albert Lea, Minn., at age four. A few years later, the Frankens moved to the Minneapolis suburb of St. Louis Park. Al Franken received a bachelor's degree from Harvard University, and after college continued to hone a comedy act he'd been developing for a number of years with a childhood friend, Tom Davis.

Franken and Davis were noticed by Lorne Michaels, who hired them as writers for the first season of "Saturday Night Live." Franken would go on to write and perform for the show from 1975-80 and again from 1985-1995.

In 1996, Franken published "Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot and Other Observations." That launched a second career as a liberal satirist and pundit that saw him publish several subsequent books and for several years host a daily show on the liberal Air America Radio network.

Franken moved back to Minnesota in 2005 where he became an active fund raiser and campaigner for Democratic candidates in the state. In early 2007, he stepped down from his radio job and announced he would seek the Democratic-Farmer-Labor endorsement to run for U.S. Senate the following year. Franken clinched the DFL endorsement in June 2008 and is running against incumbent Republican Sen. Norm Coleman in November.

He and his wife, Franni, have two children.

Al Franken achieved renown for his years on "Saturday Night Live," where he famously declared the 1980s "the Al Franken Decade," impersonated various political figures and created the obsequious self-help guru Stuart Smalley ("I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and doggone it, people like me!").

While he'd long had a hand in crafting SNL's political satire, it was when Franken left the show for good in 1995 that he took his career in a more overtly political direction. In 1996 he published "Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot and Other Observations," a humor-laced broadside against the right-wing radio host, Newt Gingrich and the Contract With America, and the conservative movement in general. The book rose to the top of the New York Times Bestseller List, and gave Franken the opportunity to spread his progressive message on cable shows and the lecture circuit.

Franken went on to write several more books including "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them," and "The Truth (with Jokes)." He continued to make forays into filmed entertainment, writing the movies "When a Man Loves a Woman" and "Stuart Saves His Family" and co-creating and starring in the sitcom "LateLine," a satire of the TV news business that ran for a year on NBC.

Still, by the dawn of the Bush administration Franken had re-oriented his career almost entirely to politics. "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right," published in 2003, skewered various Fox News personalities, particularly Bill O'Reilly. Fox News sued Franken for copyright infringement over his use of the term "Fair and Balanced," and he would later claim the ensuing controversy helped his book sales. The incident sparked an ongoing feud between Franken and O'Reilly.

In 2004, Franken began hosting a daily radio show on the fledgling Air America Radio network, intended as a liberal alternative to the success of Limbaugh and other conservative talkers. While he continued to employ his trademark sense of humor, Franken also interviewed a wide array of politicians, journalists and academics; the war in Iraq was a frequent topic.

Though he had not lived in Minnesota full-time since graduating high school, Franken in the 1990s struck up a friendship with Sen. Paul Wellstone, the state's famously liberal senator. Wellstone was killed in a plane crash just weeks before he was to face Republican Norm Coleman in 2002, a race Coleman went on to win against last-minute replacement Walter Mondale. Not long afterward, Franken began to hint that he might be interested in moving back to Minnesota and running against Coleman in 2008.

He finally did move back to Minnesota in 2005, where he continued to broadcast his radio show and amassed enormous good will among local Democratic candidates and activists by raising millions of dollars on their behalf during the 2006 election cycle. In the spring of 2007, Franken announced on the last broadcast of his radio show that he would indeed seek Minnesota's Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party endorsement to run against Coleman.

Immediately upon Franken's entrance into the race, state Republican officials and conservative bloggers began publicizing years of sometimes off-color or tasteless jokes that Franken made throughout his career as a comedian and writer -- building an argument that he was temperamentally unfit to be a member of the U.S. Senate. Those criticisms culminated in the late spring of 2008, when they aired an excerpt from a 13-year-old magazine article about "Saturday Night Live" that quoted Franken making a joking reference to rape while brainstorming a comedy sketch.

Around the same time, Franken was forced to acknowledge that he had failed to properly pay taxes in a number of states where he had earned incomes going back several years. Despite several weeks of terrible press, Franken captured the Democratic-Farmer-Labor endorsement at the party's state convention in early June, and went on to easily win the party primary in September.

Franken has argued that his years as a satirist have given him a talent for noticing and exposing political hypocrisy. His campaign has mixed economic populism with harsh criticisms of the Bush administration, particularly over its handling of the war in Iraq. Franken has attempted to paint his opponent, Coleman, as too closely tied to special interests and uninterested in representing the needs of ordinary Minnesotans. Both candidates have shown a talent for raising large sums of money, which they've spent on dozens of TV ads talking up their own candidacies while mercilessly bashing their opponent. It's certain to be the most expensive campaign in Minnesota history.