How Republicans Lost the Minnesota State House

How much should the Republicans have won by? Given the overall electoral environment, the median State House district had a lean of 51.5-48.5 in favor of the Republicans1 – to get to a tie, the DFL had to win four seats where a generic Republican would beat a generic DFLer. And they managed to do exactly that by the barest of margins, court challenge pending.

The DFL did this by over-performing expectations in swing races. I rated 13 races as “toss-up,” “lean DFL,” or “lean Republican.” Averaging across these 13 races, the DFL candidates over-performed their district’s partisan lean – the expected outcome if a generic Democrat faced a generic Republican – by about half a point.

(All tables created with datawrapper - click on the table to see the whole thing if you’re reading this in your email).

13 close races can produce any number of stories about what happened, but I see two main things going on. The DFL recruited much better candidates than the Republicans, and low-quality Republican candidates probably handed wins to the DFL in four races, exactly the number they needed to tie the chamber. But the decline of the DFL outside of the metro area continued. The DFL is likely to retake control of the State House in 2026. However, they’ll do so without many (any?) members from the rural and mining areas that contributed the “F” and “L” to the DFL.2

Districts 35A, 35B, 32B, and 14B all should probably have gone Red. In a contest between a generic DFLer and a generic Republican, I’d expect the Republican to win by a point or two in all four. Three of the four districts had DFL incumbents, which by itself might get the expected vote to 50-50. But given the closeness of the House, we’d expect the Republican Party to go all out to recruit high-quality candidates in these races and supply them with the resources they needed to win.

They didn’t. Or if they tried, they failed. As a result, all four DFL candidates outperformed expectations and won by narrow margins.

What do I mean by “high-quality candidates”? The best predictor of being a good candidate is pretty simple: Have you previously held elected office? Candidates who have previously held an elected office, even a minor one, have, by definition, already run and won a political campaign. They are not rookies – they know the basics of managing campaign staff and volunteers, talking to voters, asking for donations. Moreover, they were sufficiently good at these things to win. They’ve been vetted, at least a little bit, by local leaders and the media. People who hold elective office likely have strong ties to their community, both because such ties are important for winning local office and because holding local office helps you develop these ties. And at least a portion of the electorate has already voted for them.

In the absence of previous office holding, we’d look for people who have strong ties to and have leadership roles in their communities – think, lifelong residents who are known for their professional accomplishments or community activism and have served on municipal advisory boards or as leaders of community organizations. It’s also nice if you are wealthy enough to write your campaign a big check, partially because of the big check and partially because this suggests you have rich friends and family who you can ask for money. A career that includes a lot of talking to the public and the media is also a plus, especially if it makes you something of a local celebrity.3

In the case of state legislative races, a party would prefer to run candidates who have previously been small-town mayors, city council or school board members, or county commissioners. Failing that, local business owners, people who are involved in a bunch of local organizations, local celebrities, and rich people will do in a pinch.

The four Republican candidates in these critical races had a combined total of zero years served in elected office. Josh Jungling in 35A is a local business owner and the “charitable gambling manager for Anoka Ramsey Athletic Association,” and Sue Ek in 14B has been involved in Republican and pro-life organizations, but Steve Pape in 35B seems to be just a dude.4 Meanwhile Alex Moe in 32B did run for State Senate two years ago … in Duluth, which is quite a distance from Blaine, where House District 32B is located. He’s currently a law student and doesn’t seem to have lived in the area before 2023. None are rich self-funders either – none donated more than $1,000 to their own campaign.

None of this is to say that Jungling, Pape, Ek, and Moe aren’t lovely people, and you certainly shouldn’t have to be rich or famous to run for political office. But these are not the biographies of people I’d pick if I was choosing candidates to run for my political party.

It’s difficult to judge the quality of the campaigns run by these candidates, particularly given the lack of media coverage that State House races receive. But fundraising numbers provide a proxy (albeit imperfect) for campaign effort. These four were out-raised by their DFL opponents by a more than 2-1 ratio, and Sue Ek, the candidate who came closest in matching her DFL opponent’s fundraising, was still behind by $30,000. Nor did the Republican Party seem very effective at directing donations their way – among the 13 Republican candidates in races rated “Lean” or “Toss-up” these candidates ranked 7^th, 8^th, 12^th, and 13^th in fundraising.

And they all lost by an average of 438 votes, well within the range of a plausible candidate-quality effect.

So, what went wrong with Republican candidate recruitment? This being Minnesota, you can’t totally discount “the state Republican Party is dysfunctional” as an explanation.5 But I’d suggest that this may also be a downstream consequence of educational polarization. The kinds of people you’d like to recruit to run for office – politically-engaged, well-off, deeply involved in their communities – are exactly the kinds of people who have been fleeing the Republican Party over the last eight years. Even those who are still Republicans might prefer to stay in ostensibly non-partisan local office rather than run for the openly partisan and far more polarized State House. This shift also probably accounts for why Ek, Pape, Moe, and Jungling raised so little money. Even in purple suburbs like Blaine and Coon Rapids, the kinds of well-educated, politically engaged people who donate to political campaigns are, increasingly, DFLers.6

The DFL candidate out-raised the Republican candidate in every single swing race, even those featuring a Republican incumbent. Indeed, the worst Democratic fund-raiser7 raised more than all but four of the 13 Republican candidates in these races.

The DFL also nearly salvaged its majority by recruiting high-quality candidates in three races that they lost by very narrow margins.

In 41A and 41B, centered on Afton and Hastings, the DFL nominated a pair of city council members, one a retired police officer (Lucia Wroblewski in 41A) and the other a brewery owner (Jen Fox in 41B), both of whom raised a ton of money and outperformed expectations by about a point and a half. In 3B, former judge Mark Munger faced off against Natalie Zeleznikar, probably the Republican’s strongest incumbent candidate, and also had to content with a continued shift away from the DFL outside the metro. Munger still came within 160 votes of victory. Re-run these races in a less Republican-friendly environment (as the 2026 midterms are likely to be) and the DFL likely wins all three.

The three races with the greatest DFL under-performance were all outside the metro.

There are different things going in each of these races

• In 3B, which runs from Hermantown and the outskirts of Duluth north half-way to Ely, the DFL had a quality challenger (the aforementioned former judge Mark Munger) facing a strong incumbent (Natalie Zeleznikar, who defeated long-time DFL incumbent Mary Murphy in 2022).

• In neighboring 7B, an Iron Range district centered on Virginia, Republican Cal Warwas was a local township supervisor. The DFL nominee Lorrie Janatopoulos had extensive experience in state government (and won a Bush Fellowship for her work in economic planning and LGBT activism), but was an electoral rookie.

• In 26A centered on Winona, Republican Aaron Repinski checked most of the boxes for quality State House candidate: Local business owner, Winona city council member, not apparently rich enough to donated to himself but connected enough to be the top Republican fundraiser in a lean or toss-up seat. Sarah Kruger checked none of them and, given that she works for St. Paul-based FairVote Minnesota, had her local ties questioned (the DFL probably went with the wrong candidate, but given Repinski’s six-point win it probably wouldn’t have mattered).

The only thing tying these districts together is their geographical location outside of the metro. Notably, the one race where an inexperienced Republican candidate knocked off a DFL incumbent was also outside the metro: 18A, which encompassed North Mankato, St. Peter, and rural Nicollet County. This seat has swung back and forth between parties over the last couple of cycles, but at this point it is probably red for the foreseeable future.

The President’s party almost always performs badly in midterm elections, and this will likely exacerbate Republicans’ candidate recruitment issues. No one wants to run for office in a political environment that is stacked against them, so if the Republicans struggled to find high-quality candidates in swing districts this time around, I don’t expect them to be more successful in 2026.

The one thing that might push against this is the new Republican state party chair, Wayzata City Council member Alex Plechash. “Republican City Council member in a wealthy suburb” is exactly the kind of person who Republicans will need to recruit to avoid losing the metro entirely. “Wealthy suburban Republican” is also exactly the kind of donor they need to at least approach DFL candidates in fundraising. David Hann did get the state party out of debt, but he doesn’t appear to have been terribly effective at getting local Republicans to run for state office or finding Republican-leaning donors to help in swing races. This is the Republicans third chair in four years – not a sign of strength –but maybe Plechash will be better at these core party functions than Hann.