It's political for sure. But some of it may have to do with Minnesota politics. The Democratic Party governor Dayton now gets to pick someone to fill the vacancy. He will probably pick his lieutenant governor Tina Smith, creating a vacancy there. That vacancy apparently is automatically filled by the leader of the state House. Problem there is that she is a Republican. And the state House is Republican by only one vote. Her 'promotion' would put them into a tie until a special election, which could go either way. There is a scramble within Minnesota politics about this and both sides stand to lose or gain. If Tina Smith goes to Washington, she will be a reliable leftist in the Franken tradition, another partisan, and I'm sorry to say probably one more swamp dweller in a town filled with swap dwellers of two parties.
I'm sure Al Franken, one of the most partisan politicians around, will try to take down who he can on the way out the door. He did telegraph this in comments about Trump and Moore. Now I personally think Trump should not have been elected, was and is unfit, is probably guilty of as much as Franken. I didn't vote for him (nor for Hillary) and left the party he now heads simply because it's his party now. It's not what it was two years ago. Maybe Franken can take Trump down. The good part of that would be that Mike Pence might be an honorable president. We need one of those again some day.