“She’s not super charismatic. But she’s a hard worker and has good ethics.”
So said Brenda Natala, a St. Paul resident, who attended a packed-to-the-gills DFL election party at the Intercontinental Hotel in downtown St. Paul Tuesday night.
Natala was characterizing Sen. Amy Klobuchar, whom Minnesotans elected governor over Republican nominee Lisa Demuth, the outgoing Minnesota Speaker of the House.
Klobuchar will be the first female governor in Minnesota’s 168-year history.
In a night when Democrats won shocking victories across the country – “Unfortunately, if Texas goes Democrat, we aren’t going to prevail in Minnesota,” noted defeated GOP nominee for Secretary of State Tad Jude – Klobuchar’s was seemingly preordained.
She entered the race shortly after Gov. Tim Walz opted in January not to run for a third term.
Klobuchar ran a centrist campaign, but her victory speech noted the objectives of the DFL Legislature – passing a ban on assault weapons and providing a check on federal immigration enforcement agents. With Republican stalwarts like Sen. Jim Abeler knocked out of the Legislature, the DFL is expected to control not just the governor’s office next year but also the House and the Senate.
Demuth blamed the national Democratic dominance on her loss.
“This wasn’t our year,” she told the Republican faithful at a Bloomington hotel by the Mall of America. “This wasn’t a year for a lot of places across this country.”
Demuth never figured out how to reconcile President Donald Trump’s sagging popularity with his still extant hold on Republican Party activists. She unartfully dodged press questions about Trump – neither condemning nor condoning him with the exception of speaking out against the war in Iran.
That tension held at the Bloomington Doubletree Tuesday night as dozens of attendees wore Make America Great Again hats and spoke in reverential terms about the president. The crowd progressively thinned out during the night as nearly every race went Democratic.
At the DFL party, meanwhile, Klobuchar was seen as a dependable pillar in the foundation of Democratic dominance. One partygoer after another called Klobuchar “hard working.”
Jim Harkness, a St. Paul resident, gave this descriptor twice while also alluding to Klobuchar’s extraordinary ability among Democrats to connect to rural voters.
“I’m excited for Amy Klobuchar,” said Alyssa Greene, a Minneapolis resident. “I’m glad she stepped up. I think a lot of people trust her.”
Greene said Klobuchar’s victory was “pivotal” in protecting reproductive rights and potentially expanding access to healthcare.
Klobuchar and Demuth each had substantial legislative records for voters to scrutinize and a reputation for representing the moderate wing of their respective political party.
But the similarities ended there.
Klobuchar is a Yale- and University of Chicago-educated lawyer who has spent 28 years in the state spotlight as Hennepin County district attorney and then U.S. senator. She has written two memoirs and faced national scrutiny over the treatment of her staff during a brief bid for president in 2020.
During her campaign, Klobuchar held few press conferences and granted even fewer interviews. But she did provide fairly detailed proposals for what she would like to do as governor – including using a hodgepodge of federal and state programs to build 100,000 new housing units across Minnesota.
Demuth grew up poor and shuttled between Paynesville, Minneapolis and Bloomington during childhood. She briefly left Minnesota after high school and later returned to Paynesville, where she met her husband and found community at the Assembly of God pentecostal church.
Demuth entered public life at age 40 in 2007, successfully running for her local school board. She came out of nowhere after the 2022 election to become House Republican leader. Demuth was known to outsource her leadership duties – showing deference to veteran committee chairs like Rep. Paul Torkelson, R-Hanska.
Demuth held a press conference a week during the campaign, mostly to retread her talking points on fraud. Besides fraud, she gave a menu of tax cut proposals and squeezed every last ounce out of two incidents and one purportedly averted incident involving violence by Somali teenagers.
Casting aside her prior restraint on racially coded language, Demuth warned in debates and TV ads about the scourge of “Somali gangs.”
While Klobuchar is a political Goliath who comfortably led in the polls, there was suspense heading into election night, if only because Demuth had clearly won the framing of the race: Fraud, fraud and more fraud.
Either expanding her appeal to those in the political middle, expressing her sincere beliefs or some combination thereof, Klobuchar too focused on social services fraud during the Gov. Tim Walz administration. She even pitched her own public safety plan after the aforementioned two incidents involving Somali teenagers.
Gun control and the deaths, detentions and deportations from Operation Metro Surge – the main focus of DFL legislative leaders the past year – received about as much attention as tort reform and stem cell research in the candidate’s respective campaigns.
Cleo Krejci contributed to this story.
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