Sen. Amy Klobuchar, Minnesota’s senior senator and the state’s most accomplished vote-getter, launched her campaign for governor Thursday, hoping to make history as the state’s first female governor after a failed attempt in 2020 to become the nation’s first female president.
Klobuchar planned to launch her campaign Jan. 26, but she delayed it after federal agents shot and killed Alex Pretti a few days prior.
“In these moments of enormous difficulty, we find strength in our Minnesota values of hard work, freedom, and simple decency and good will,” Klobuchar said in a statement. “These times call for leaders who can stand up and not be rubber stamps of this administration, but who are also willing to find common ground and fix things in our state.”
“I believe we must stand up for what’s right and fix what’s wrong,” she said, adding that she’s running to make people’s lives more affordable and expel federal agents from Minnesota.
Klobuchar, 65, has been reelected three times since first winning her seat in 2006. In 2012, she won all but two of the state’s 87 counties — a stunning victory in a purplish state where conservative rural counties far outnumber the more populated metropolitan area ones. Her margin of victory has narrowed over time.
Klobuchar is announcing her candidacy after Gov. Tim Walz ended his campaign for a third term this month, after reportedly meeting with Klobuchar and urging her to run. Other Democrats have stayed out of the race since then, no doubt deterred by Klobuchar’s electoral record, top-flight political operation and fundraising prowess.
Klobuchar would be a heavy favorite to win in November against a field of Republicans who are unknown to most Minnesotans, aside from pillow mogul Mike Lindell. Republican candidates include House Speaker Lisa Demuth; 2022 nominee Scott Jensen; Rep. Kristin Robbins; and Kendall Qualls, a perennial candidate, Army veteran and former health care executive.
Even before jumping into the race, Republicans have attempted to tie Klobuchar to Walz and the fraud scandal that has rocked Minnesota’s state-run public programs.
“All of the Democrats from the state of Minnesota, whether they’ve served in the state Legislature or if they’ve served in Washington D.C., have stayed locked step with Gov. Walz over everything,” Demuth told KARE 11. “There is no difference. This is gonna be a Tim Walz third term and Minnesotans need and deserve better.”
The biggest question for Klobuchar — and, Minnesotans — is what kind of governor she would be following two decades in the Senate, where lawmakers primarily send out press releases, take lots of votes and manage constituent services.
The governor of Minnesota oversees an enterprise with more than 36,000 employees, an annual general fund budget of $33 billion and billions more in Medicaid and other federal dollars now under considerable scrutiny following the discovery of hundreds of millions in fraud in recent years. Walz’s tenure, though more extreme than most, underscores the importance of crisis management for most governors. He’s managed the state’s response to a pandemic, the police murder of George Floyd and the uprising that followed, the assassination of a lawmaker and now an onslaught of federal immigration agents.
Indeed, Klobuchar is launching her campaign under unprecedented circumstances. Minnesota is flooded with 3,000 federal agents whose conduct has resulted in countless allegations of civil rights violations.
In recent weeks, Klobuchar has been on the ground in Minnesota acting as a face of Minnesota’s opposition to the federal immigration surge in her home state.
Klobuchar said she will not vote for additional funding to the Department of Homeland Security — which oversees U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement — when the bill comes up later this week, arguing that Congress should claw back some of the $75 billion the agency received as part of President Donald Trump’s signature domestic policy, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. If the funding doesn’t pass, the federal government could face a partial shutdown.
“ICE needs to leave our state. They are making us less safe, not more safe,” Klobuchar said on “Meet The Press” earlier this week.
Asked if she would support abolishing ICE, Klobuchar demurred: “We’re always gonna have some immigration enforcement in this country and border control. I think most Americans believe that. But the way that this agency has been functioning is completely against every tenet of law enforcement.” Klobuchar was Hennepin County Attorney — where she prosecuted high-profile crimes — before running for Senate.
Because she’s been in Washington, Klobuchar is untouched by the ongoing scandal of fraud in Minnesota safety net programs that contributed to the end of Walz’s campaign.
On the flipside, however, Minnesota and its politics are far different than when she left for Washington two decades ago. Today’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor voters especially are younger, more diverse and more urban than when she climbed up the political ladder in the 1990s and early 2000s. The most prominent Democrat of that era was then-President Bill Clinton — a master triangulator who threw the party’s progressive wing overboard when he felt it was expedient, on issues like crime and welfare.
A well-known father
Klobuchar’s father, Jim, grew up in Ely and was a longtime columnist for the Star Tribune, where he wrote a general interest column and covered sports. Klobuchar grew up in Plymouth, and her mother was an elementary school teacher. She attended Yale University, and during her college years she interned for Vice President Walter Mondale.
Fellow Minnesotan Mondale became a longtime mentor to Klobuchar.
After graduating Yale, she attended the University of Chicago Law School and became a corporate lawyer.
Her father’s alcoholism and parents’ divorce affected the young Klobuchar.
During Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing in 2018, Klobuchar asked Kavanaugh whether he had ever drank so much that he didn’t remember what happened the night before.
Kavanaugh answered the question with a question.
“You’re asking about, you know, blackout. I don’t know. Have you?” Kavanaugh asked the Minnesota senator.
Klobuchar had prefaced her question by noting her father’s battle with alcoholism.
From lobbyist to prosecutor
Klobuchar’s political origin story begins in 1995 after the birth of her daughter. Klobuchar’s health insurance plan allowed new mothers a 24-hour hospital stay, which was common at the time. Klobuchar was discharged even though her daughter, Abigail, remained in the hospital due to a condition that prevented her from swallowing. Klobuchar left the hospital, while Abigail stayed behind.
Klobuchar was outraged and showed up at the the next legislative session to lobby Minnesota lawmakers to pass one of the first laws in the country guaranteeing new moms and their babies a 48-hour hospital stay. President Clinton later made it a federal law.
When health insurance companies lobbied against the bill, Klobuchar packed the hearing room with pregnant women and their children.
Klobuchar ran for Hennepin County attorney in 1998 and won by less than 1 percentage point.
As county attorney, Klobuchar managed a staff of 400 and prosecuted about 10,000 cases per year. She developed a tough-on-crime reputation, which underwent scrutiny during her 2020 presidential campaign and again after the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
The Associated Press investigated Klobuchar’s prosecution of Myon Burrell, who was serving a life sentence for the 2002 death of an 11-year-old in Minneapolis. Burrell was 16 when he was arrested. Klobuchar had often boasted about her efforts to get justice for the 11-year-old.
The AP noted that Klobuchar’s office used dubious tactics to prosecute Burrell, including using the testimony of a jailhouse informant.
Burrell’s sentence was later commuted. Klobuchar said the commutation was “the right and just decision.”
A moderate senator
As a three-term senator, Klobuchar has sought to build relationships with Republicans, though she rarely breaks ranks with her caucus. Klobuchar is known for her relentless work ethic — visiting every Minnesota county every year, for instance — and focusing on broadly popular, often bipartisan legislation like funding rural broadband infrastructure, banning lead in children’s products and expanding services for victims of human trafficking.
Her bipartisanship extends to confirming many of President Donald Trump’s federal judges.
In 2020, Klobuchar joined a bevy of Democrats who ran for president. In a field that sought to placate progressive interest groups, she pitched herself as a more moderate and pragmatic choice.
Her campaign was hit with stories about her management style, including an allegation that she hurled office supplies in frustration. Numerous former staffers said Klobuchar berated them and described a boss who was not merely tough but dehumanizing.
She dropped out of the race before Super Tuesday and endorsed President Joe Biden. Klobuchar was on the short list of vice presidential candidates, but Biden pledged to choose a woman of color.
The Minnesota senator filed paperwork to run for governor last week, which allowed her to kick off fundraising efforts before officially launching her campaign. Klobuchar will not be able to transfer funds from her U.S. Senate campaign account to her governor campaign, according to Minnesota law. But Klobuchar has a robust fundraising network that DFL-aligned groups will augment with millions more to keep the governor’s office in DFL hands.
It remains to be seen how Klobuchar will run the state as Minnesota governor. The state has been rocked by billions of dollars stolen from social services programs, so she will be tasked with fixing a huge scandal.
Minnesota Reformer is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Minnesota Reformer maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor J. Patrick Coolican for questions: info@minnesotareformer.com.
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