The Partisan Chaos Unfolding in Minnesota
Democrats are scuffling to control the two houses of the state legislature — with a majority in neither.
By Dan McLaughlin
National Review
With Donald Trump hitting Washington like a typhoon, it’s tempting to think that the 2024 election is over
Americans went to the polls nearly three months ago, and unusually for our era, the presidential election was settled on Election Night and conceded the following day. But in two states, Minnesota and North Carolina, the election is still unresolved. In both states, bids for unified partisan control have been regularly frustrated in recent years, in spite of the Republican tilt of North Carolina and the Democratic-Farmer-Labor (DFL) tilt of Minnesota. Today, let’s look at Minnesota, where a giant mess has landed in the lap of Governor Tim Walz after he returned from his brief and unsuccessful tour of the national stage.
The State Senate
The state legislature in Minnesota has followed a winding path. Consider the state senate, which is elected for four-year terms but under state law must reset every time there’s a reapportionment (hence why elections were held in both 2020 and 2022):
Republicans won a 34–33 majority in 2016 while the DFL won a narrow statewide popular-vote majority, 50.1 percent to 49 percent. In 2020, the DFL again won the state senate popular vote by a slim 49.8 percent to 48.4 percent margin, and again Republicans held a 34–33 majority. [In 2022], the vote was very marginally more favorable to the DFL, 50.7 percent to 48.6 percent, and that resulted in a 34–33 DFL majority.
Ballotpedia summarizes the chain of maneuvers that followed the 2020 election:
On November 12, 2020, the Senate voted 63-4 to make Sen. David Tomassoni (DFL) the Senate President. Majority Leader Paul Gazelka, (R) told Minnesota Public Radio that the appointment was made in case President-elect Joe Biden (D) was to appoint U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D) to his cabinet. If Klobuchar were to leave the Senate, state political observers expect Gov. Tim Walz (D) to nominate Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan (D). Following Flanagan’s appointment, the Senate President would automatically assume the office of lieutenant governor.
Republicans won a one-seat majority in the 2020 elections. In a normal scenario where the majority party selects one of its members to be Senate President, the above chain of succession would produce a deadlock in the chamber and the potential for a Democratic candidate to win the seat in a special election, flipping the chamber’s majority.
“We’re going to take preemptive steps to make sure we don’t have to go through that fiasco again,” Gazelka told MPR, referring to events triggered by the 2018 resignation of U.S. Sen. Al Franken (D). Following Franken’s resignation, Gov. Mark Dayton (D) appointed Lt. Gov. Tina Smith (D) to the seat, prompting Senate President Michelle Fischbach’s (R) succession to lieutenant governor. Fischbach initially refused to take the new role and only did so after a court ruled she had to.
It didn’t end there:
On November 18, 2020, Tomassoni and Sen. Thomas Bakk (DFL) announced the formation of the Independent Caucus. The pair said that the move would allow them to chair committees and better serve their districts along with the chamber’s Republican majority . . . Bakk previously served as the leader of the DFL caucus from 2012 to 2020. In a statement, Bakk said: “I’m very disappointed by the extreme partisanship going on nationally and right here in Minnesota. Both political parties are to blame” . . . Republicans held a 34-31 edge over Democrats when the legislature convened on January 4, 2021.
The dissidents only lasted one session; Tomassoni died in office and Bakk didn’t run for reelection. In 2022, when Democrats won their own one-seat, 34–33 majority in the state senate to go with a 70–64 majority in the state house (which is elected every two years), Tim Walz and the DFL in both houses decided to go hog-wild with leftism. As progressive as much of Minnesota is, its voters can be pushed too far, as was illustrated in 2021 when the Minneapolis electorate routed the “Defund the Police” people off its city council.
At the moment, with no election having intervened, the DFL majority in the state senate is down to a 33–33 tie, after Kari Dziedzic — who began the 2023 session as the majority leader — died of ovarian cancer on December 27, 2024. A special election to replace her will be held on January 28, pitting DFL Medtronic executive Doron Clark against Republican software engineer Abigail Wolters, the winners of a January 14 primary. While special elections can be unpredictable, the DFL will likely win. Still, nothing can happen in the state senate until then. In Minnesota, there is no tiebreaking vote for the lieutenant governor, so a 33–33 chamber is controlled by nobody.
The DFL’s position is even more tenuous given the bizarre saga of Nicole Mitchell. Mitchell, a former Weather Channel meteorologist, faces felony first-degree burglary charges after being arrested, dressed all in black, in the basement of her widowed stepmother’s home. With just a one-vote majority, Democrats needed Mitchell’s support for their orgy of leftism, so while Mitchell was stripped of her committee assignments, the DFL resisted Republican efforts to oust her until the 2024 legislative session was over.
After that, they did an about-face. Walz and other Democrats (including the DFL state party chair) began calling on Mitchell to step down. But they had no leverage, and so she has stayed. Her trial date was set for January 27, which technically was before the state senate could actually do anything without a majority party. But the state house has already arrived (more on that below) and her attorneys cited a provision of the state constitution saying that “no cause or proceeding, civil or criminal . . . shall be tried or heard during a session of the legislature” if the member of legislature is an attorney, party or witness. So, last week, the judge ordered her trial now cannot start until 60 days after the scheduled May 19 end of the legislative session. The alleged burglar will be the margin of any DFL majority for the whole session.
With those stakes, stay tuned for Republicans to raise further efforts to expel Mitchell from the state senate.
The Mad House
While Walz was gallivanting about the national stage, his party did poorly at the polls back home, carrying the statewide popular vote by a hair — 49.95 percent to 49.48 percent — down from a 50.9 percent-to-48.3 percent majority in 2022. The result, once all the disputed races were called, was a 67–67 tie in the state house, thanks to the DFL winning three of the four races decided by less than a point, and five of the seven races decided by less than two points. That’s when things really got wild.
Republicans challenged the outcomes of two state house races. In one, District 40B, a judge ruled on December 20 that Curtis Johnson, who won his district easily, was disqualified because he didn’t live in the district:
His opponent, Republican Paul Wikstrom, found Johnson was still living in Little Canada in the months leading up to the event. Johnson had signed a lease at a Roseville apartment complex earlier in the year, but Wikstrom’s campaign built a body of evidence suggesting he had never moved in. Investigators took photos of Johnson’s car, a blue Mitsubishi, consistently parked in the driveway of the home he and his wife own in Little Canada.
Based on testimony from Johnson and witnesses who had surveilled Johnson’s whereabouts, District Judge Leonardo Castro found Johnson “spent scant time” at the Roseville apartment until Oct. 15. State law requires candidates to reside in the district they represent for at least six months before the general election.
Meanwhile, in District 54A, DFL incumbent Brad Tabke was declared the winner by just 14 votes. But election officials, who had a very poor year in Minnesota in 2024, threw 20 ballots in the trash without counting them. Republicans argued that a new election was required because the number of mishandled and irreparably lost ballots exceeded Tabke’s margin of victory, such that it was impossible to determine the winner with certainty. When the case went to trial, Tabke tracked down six voters whose ballots had been lost who swore under oath that they’d voted for him. Paul found six on his side as well, but a judge concluded that Tabke’s witnesses proved that he had enough votes to win if the votes had been counted properly, upholding the election results.
Walz called a special election in District 40B to coincide with the special election for the state senate, but on January 17, the Minnesota Supreme Court ruled that he had called the election prematurely, and it ordered the voting stopped even though early voting was underway.
So, armed with 67–66 majority while waiting for the open district to be resolved, Minnesota house Republicans gathered on January 14 and elected their speaker, Lisa Demuth. But wait, there’s more! The DFL boycotted the session and insisted that this denied the Republicans a quorum in which to operate. Now, both parties in different states have used the tactic of walkouts to thwart the operation of a state legislature, and both have been flagrantly hypocritical about the merits of doing so, as have the Democrats’ cheerleaders in the media. Just last year, in Oregon, the state supreme court upheld a law banning nearly the entirety of the Republican caucus in the state senate from running for reelection over walkouts.
In Minnesota, the walkout worked. Democratic secretary of state Steve Simon (whose office oversaw the botched elections) backed up their position. Friday, the Minnesota Supreme Court ruled that 68 state representatives are required for a quorum. The DFL wants Republicans to agree to seat Tabke. In the meantime, the court decision has undone everything the state house had done in the past two weeks.
So much for Minnesota Nice.