Just about 24 hours after the polls opened in Minnesota and more than 3 million people had cast their ballots, a picture of who will control the levers of power at the Minnesota Capitol in January began to emerge but remains somewhat blurry.
This much is known: Tim Walz will return to St. Paul as governor. He will preside over a divided legislature.
Whether Republicans in the Minnesota House will share power with the DFL (where each caucus would hold 67 of 134 seats), or will have a razor thin majority of one or two (recount dependent) seats has not yet been cemented.
Nevertheless, Republicans were declaring victory when it came to Minnesota’s legislative landscape around the same time Tuesday night that it became clear Donald Trump would return to the White House as president.
As midnight approached on Tuesday, Republican House Minority Leader Lisa Demuth announced to a still energized crowd at the GOP election night watch party that the House GOP had broken the “Democrat trifecta and restored balance to Minnesota.”
Heading into Election Day, Democrats held a 70-64 majority over Republicans in the House, and a 34-33 margin in the Senate. They needed a net gain of four seats to gain the majority. Right now it appears they will gain three, which means the DFL cannot pass any bills out of the House over the next two sessions without Republican support.
Pledge to ‘hold Gov. Walz accountable’
“We need to hold Gov. Walz accountable when he comes back to return as governor, we need to hold a little bit more accountability where there has been none,” Demuth told supporters still gathered at the Radisson Blu Mall of America in Bloomington as media outlets began calling the presidential race in Pennsylvania for Republican Donald Trump and predicting he would reach the required 270 electoral votes return to the White House.
Demuth’s public comments came as the Minnesota Secretary of State election tallies showed Republican “pickups” in three pivotal swing districts scattered across Greater Minnesota.
Two of those GOP victories occurred in districts, 7B (on the Iron Range) and 26A (Winona), that had been held by Democrats for years until Tuesday night. The other Republican pickup occurred in House District 18A, a southern Minnesota swing seat that has flipped between parties in recent election cycles.
18A straddles Blue Earth and Nicollet counties in southern Minnesota and was the first big race called for Republicans just after 10 p.m. First-time legislative candidate Erica Schwartz unseated DFL incumbent Jeff Brand by 3.4 percent. Schwartz, a mother and small business owner who operates an independent grocery store with her husband in the city of Nicollet, told supporters late last night that she was “deeply honored for your trust to serve as your next State Representative. To those who didn’t vote for me: I promise to work tirelessly to earn your trust and support these next two years.”
The second GOP pickup was one of the most closely watched races in the state, where riverboat captain Aaron Repinski defeated DFL activist Sarah Kruger by nearly 6 percentage points in House District 26A. That Winona-based legislative seat had been held by moderate Democrat Gene Pelowski for nearly 40 years before he announced earlier this year he was retiring from elected office.
Maybe the most highly anticipated Republican “pickup” came to fruition on the Iron Range, where Cal Warwas defeated DFL challenger Lorrie Janatopoulos in House District 7B by nearly 13 percent.
Warwas, a longtime miner and steel union member, began campaigning more than one year ago against incumbent Democrat Dave Lislegard. But as money and attention started flowing to the race, Lislegard announced in June that he was no longer running for reelection. The DFL drafted a former Walz administration staffer and progressive activist in Janatopoulos, who underperformed waning expectations in a district that many pundits had predicted would finally tilt in Republicans’ favor.
“The voters have spoken, and we’ve held all of our seats and picked up a minimum of three more, flipping Democrat-held seats in the Iron Range, Winona and St. Peter,” Demuth said in a public statement late on Tuesday night.
St. Cloud, Shakopee seats likely to see recount
On Wednesday afternoon Demuth and other GOP leaders held a media availability where they explained the tenuous situation involving two other seats that the Secretary of State is now showing Republican challengers lost by just a few dozen votes.
Alpha News reported that at one point in the night the House District 54A race between Republican Aaron Paul and DFL incumbent Brad Take showed Paul was up 8,281 votes to Tabke’s 7,921 with 100 percent of the precincts reported. Then, the MNSOS website totals for the race were wiped out to temporarily to show zero results. A while later, the Secretary of State reported Tabke had earned 10,954 votes to Paul’s 10,941 votes, a 13-vote margin.
A similar situation took place in House District 14B in St. Cloud, where Republican challenger Sue Ek briefly appeared she had finished with four more votes than DFL incumbent Dan Wolgamott. The returns were then updated to show Wolgamott had a 28-vote lead with 100 percent of precincts reported. The less than 0.5 percent margin of victory in both of those races would trigger a publicly-funded recount if the candidates want to pursue it.
What a 67-67 House looks like
If the likely recounts in 54A and 14B are completed and still show Wolgamott and Tabke winning reelection, that would mean that Republicans and DFLers would share power during the 2025 legislative session. In order to know what that might look like, you would have to go back to 1979, the last time the GOP and Democrats had to share control in the state House.
At the outset of session there was brief talk among caucus leaders of adopting the solution that the state of Washington instituted earlier in the decade when their representatives elected two speakers.
But Section 5 of Article IV of the Minnesota Constitution prohibited that scenario, according to Minnesota legal scholars. The consensus reached among the GOP and DFL was that the Secretary of State “would hold the speaker’s gavel until a majority of House members elected someone else,” according to a 2020 article in Session Daily.
Other swing district results:
48B (Chanhassen, Chaska): Republican Caleb Steffenhagen lost by 225 votes to incumbent DFLer Lucy Rehm.
32B (Blaine, Lexington): Alex Moe lost by a little more than 400 votes to DFL incumbent Matt Norris.
35B (Coon Rapids, Andover): Republican Steve Pape lost to DFLer Kari Rehrauer by just under 300 votes.
41A (Cottage Grove, Lake Elmo): two challengers, Republican Wayne Johnson and DFLer Lucia Wroblewski, were vying for an open seat after the retirement of GOP one-term incumbent Mark Wiens. Johnson, a former Washington County Commissioner, was outspent by more than 2 to 1 in the race, but won by more than 300 votes, equating to a Republican “hold” of the seat.
41B: Tom Dippel defeated DFLer Jen Fox by more than 500 votes in a race where Fox raised more than $113,000 to represent the cities of Cottage Grove and Hastings.
57B: Republican incumbent Jeff Witte fended off a challenge from DFLer Brian Cohn by more than 1,000 votes.
3B: In Hermantown, incumbent Republican Natalie Zeleznikar won a second term in a former DFL stronghold by just 100 votes over Democrat challenger Mark Munger.
For more results across the state’s 134 house districts, click here.
Hank Long
Hank Long is a journalism and communications professional whose writing career includes coverage of the Minnesota legislature, city and county governments and the commercial real estate industry. Hank received his undergraduate degree at the University of Minnesota, where he studied journalism, and his law degree at the University of St. Thomas. The Minnesota native lives in the Twin Cities with his wife and four children. His dream is to be around when the Vikings win the Super Bowl.
