DFL hopeful Angela Nelson spent her afternoon door-knocking in the rain, hitting one beige apartment with vinyl siding after another in Coon Rapids.
Her message was that Republican Jim Abeler – despite his moderate record – had been in office for decades to improve Minnesota, and had not done enough.
Nelson’s message sufficiently resonated. She defeated Jim Abeler in Minnesota Senate District 35 with 54% of the vote, knocking off a politician who had represented the Anoka area in the Legislature since 1998.
“I want to thank my constituents for their support over the many years I’ve been privileged to serve,” Abeler said in a statement late Tuesday night. “God bless our state.”
While final tallies for all races weren’t available early Wednesday, victories in key contests put the DFL Party on the path to power in the Senate and also in the House, where several seats flipped from GOP to DFL control. For the last two years, the House has been tied and the DFL had a one-seat majority in the Senate.
With Democrat Amy Klobuchar winning the governor’s race, the DFL will return to the salad days of 2023 and 2024 when it controlled the governor’s office, state House and state Senate.
According to preliminary results:
According to preliminary results:
The most resounding DFL outcome?
In 2024, DFLer Brad Tabke beat Republican Aaron Paul by 14 votes. Paul – logically – sought a rematch. After all, he lost by 14 votes.
Well, Tabke won by 3,000 votes this time, getting 57% of the tally to Paul’s 43%.
Election night was primed to break the deadlock that made the Legislature a petri dish for the limits of a lawmaking body with 101 DFLers and 100 Republicans, as well as the possibilities of old-fashioned dealmaking.
The Minnesota Supreme Court needed to step in in 2025 to greenlight a power sharing agreement in a House split between 67 DFLers and 67 Republicans. The ensuing legislative session was an odyssey of closed-door negotiations between DFL Gov. Tim Walz; Senate Majority Leader Erin Murphy, DFL-St. Paul; House Speaker Lisa Demuth, R-Cold Spring; and Speaker Emerita Melissa Hortman, DFL-Brooklyn Park.
The budget deal – which passed three weeks after the Legislature was supposed to adjourn – was a bland but somewhat healthy Minnesota hotdish of fiscal restraint mixed with pet issues, like the Republicans stripping adult undocumented immigrants from applying for public healthcare assistance. In the public eye, at least, the budget deal was instantly forgotten when Hortman was assassinated at her home five days later.
The 2026 legislative session brought predictable impasses. A Senate with one-vote DFL control passed a gun-control bill that included an assault weapons ban and a package to rein in federal immigration law enforcement. The measures died in the House on party lines.
But amid speculation (including from this reporter!) that nothing would get done, Walz and the Legislature expanded the state’s power to investigate Medicaid fraud, kept open Hennepin County Medical Center, approved a $1.2 billion infrastructure borrowing package, and put money toward updating systems that administer social services, among other deals.
Following the legislative session, Brian Arola and I dove into several races in the suburbs, on the Iron Range, in Moorhead and St. Cloud and elsewhere that we predicted would be nailbiters.
The value of this coverage, in part, was showing that different issues took priority in different parts of the state. The well-worn “Fraud v. Trump” framing did not always hold.
Drinking water politics dominated a District 41 in the East Metro where the Senate and both House races came down to the wire. Mining and tourism took centerstage in the 3rd District, which had one of the most expensive Senate races. And protecting Moorhead businesses from losing out to their Fargo neighbors – or relocating to North Dakota themselves – hung over a 4th District Senate contest.
For the most part, the candidates for these races were accessible, candid and excited over thinking about policy. Like all legislators, they were vying for a part-time job that likely had no more reward than a possible committee chair position – and the chance to reshape the lives of Minnesotans.
But as they tried to spread their messages to voters, an obscene amount of outside spending risked drowning them out. Negative attack ads permeated most remotely competitive races.
Incumbent DFL senators in St. Cloud, Moorhead and northeastern Minnesota bore the brunt of it, though a fair share went after Republicans in Northfield and Anoka. Outside groups also helped DFL House candidates a bit more than Republicans.
Brian Arola and Cleo Krejci contributed to this story.
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