Can the Minnesota House Salvage a Bipartisan Session?

Brad Tabke knows what it’s like to win elections. He knows what it’s like to lose them too. But the fight for party control of the Minnesota House since the 2024 general election has put Tabke in a kind of limbo he hasn’t experienced before.

For the last two years, Minnesota’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party has enjoyed control of all three branches of the state government. They’ve used that control to pass a slate of progressive legislation, including gun control policies, paid family leave, new protections for reproductive rights, more ambitious climate policies and long-sought investments in public transit. That record helped propel Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz to become the Democratic nominee for vice president in 2024.

But 2024 turned out to be a bad year for Democrats. In the Minnesota House, Republicans flipped three Democratic seats, and the night ended with a 67-67 tie between the parties. Soon after, a successful residency challenge against a Democratic representative-elect in Roseville gave Republicans a 67-66 edge, pending a special election. That’s when things got strange for Tabke, a swing-district Democrat who’d won by just a few dozen votes. Republicans challenged his victory. A recount came back in his favor as well. A court ruled that he’d won the election, but Republicans, leaning ona state law that says the House itself is the final judge of its own members’ eligibility, wouldn’t commit to seating Tabke.

That led to a weekslong standoff, with Republicans attempting to forge ahead with the legislative session while all Democrats refused to attend, denying the Republicans a quorum and the ability to pass any legislation. The standoff ended Wednesday night, when party leaders struck a power-sharing deal and Republicans agreed to allow Tabke to be seated. In the meantime, the prospects of bipartisan cooperation during the session have dimmed considerably.

“My expectations are significantly lower to nonexistent as to what we will be able to get done,” Tabke told Governing on Tuesday.

Swing District

Tabke, an Iowa native who began his career in horticulture and landscaping, served two terms as mayor of Shakopee, Minn., from 2012 to 2015. He won his first race for state representative in 2018 by 600 votes, then in 2020, he lost to the same opponent by a similar margin. In 2022 he ran for the seat again and beat the incumbent more comfortably. Last year, facing a new opponent, he won by just 15 votes.

“It’s been back and forth. It’s a classic swing district,” says Larry Jacobs, a political scientist at the University of Minnesota.

Recognizing that he represents a politically split district, Tabke says he has tried to focus on bipartisan issues. He has sponsored a series of measures related to transportation, including a campaign to restore public order on public transit during the depths of the pandemic ridership losses. He says he wants to spend the 2025-2026 session working on roadway safety, increasing enforcement for drunk driving and making streets safer for bikers and pedestrians.

“I have always worked closely with my GOP colleagues. It’s really important to me to do that kind of work,” Tabke says. But over the last month, he’s felt that the Republicans were willing to disregard the will of the voters in his district in order to gain advantage in the legislative process.

“If they wanted this power, they should have won a 68th vote. That’s not what happened,” he says.

Quorum Denied

The days immediately following the election were a time of unusually high hopes for bipartisan cooperation in the Minnesota state Legislature. The parties are rarely evenly tied in the House. The last time it happened was 1979. Party leaders say they set about negotiating a power-sharing agreement, divvying up leadership roles and committee chairs with the expectation that they’d treat the tie as an opportunity to make progress on shared goals. That dynamic fell apart when it was clear that the Republicans would have at least a temporary majority pending the special election, and amid the initial uncertainty over Tabke’s election.

“You’ve got a Republican Party that’s been locked out of power … and the party activists are breathing fire,” Jacobs says. “That has created a kind of must-show-results intensity among the Republican leaders in the House.”

For Republican leaders, there was no reason to honor an agreement based on a tie that no longer existed. “The empty seat in Roseville belongs to the voters until the election,” Republican state Rep. Lisa Demuth, the party’s speaker-designate, said earlier in the week. “Any assumption that there would even need to be a power sharing agreement is misguided.”

Democrats saw it differently. From their point of view, voters had elected Democrats to 67 of the seats, including Roseville, which has been held comfortably by Democrats for years. There was no reason to disregard the partisan split because of what was likely a temporary Republican majority.

“We have been trying since the first day of the legislative session to get Republicans to do one simple thing, and that is to honor the will of the voters,” says DFL state Rep. Melissa Hortman, the former speaker of the House. “The people they elected should be seated … they did not send a Republican majority.”

Rather than start the session and let Republicans use their temporary majority to set the rules for the next few years, the entire Democratic caucus agreed not to appear at the House, denying a legislative quorum. Republicans tried to move ahead anyway, until the state Supreme Court ruled they needed 68 legislators to make any decisions. The impasse lasted for weeks, with tense negotiations between party leaders and little visible movement on either side.

“It’s creating a lot of hard feelings and disintegrating solid relationships,” Tabke said on Tuesday. “This session being a tie in the Minnesota House could have been just a phenomenal opportunity for people to prove that politicians and folks in government really do want to work together. We could have used this as a moment to not be beholden to the far right and the far left, the extremes of both of our parties, and we could work together on things.”

Keeping the Lights On

Finally, late Wednesday night, the parties announced a power-sharing agreement and said they anticipated a quorum on Thursday. The agreement includes making Lisa Demuth speaker of the House for two years, giving Republicans committee chairs while they have a majority and switching to co-chairs if and when the tie is restored, and seating Rep. Tabke.

“We solve these problems,” Hortman said before the announcement on Wednesday, “but it’s usually pretty frustrating until we do.”

What does the saga portend for the remainder of the session? Leaders in both parties say they’re still hopeful they can work together to pass a budget. Walz has proposed a budget that’s somewhat smaller than the last one, which like many states’ was buoyed by a revenue surplus. Some of the proposals have upset progressive advocates, including transportation-focused groups hoping to protect progress on transit funding. Republicans, meanwhile, will have partisan control of the new House Fraud Prevention and State Agency Oversight Policy Committee, and Demuth says they’ll be focused on accountability for state-funded programs. But after a season of rancor, it may not be the enthusiastically bipartisan session legislators once imagined.

“It’s going to be kind of a lights-on budget,” says Jacobs. “That’s the best that can be hoped for.”