No Republican has won a statewide race since 2006. Populists found their solution in Royce White. Old-school Republicans are skeptical.
Minneapolis — On a drizzly Fourth of July morning, Minnesota U.S. Senate candidate Royce White led a few dozen supporters on a march across the Hennepin Avenue bridge over the Mississippi River, and into downtown Minneapolis, to the Federal Reserve.
They trailed a pickup hauling a White campaign billboard, speakers blaring a podcast by former Donald Trump adviser Steve Bannon. They wore Trump shirts and hats. They held signs that read, “The People are Coming,” White’s campaign slogan.
“You’re American citizens, you don’t have to be afraid,” White said at the start of a speech that, ironically, focused heavily on the many things he believes Americans should be very afraid of — a government that wants to “send your sons and daughters to die on a Russian battlefield,” the “Jewish elites” in charge of the Fed who are working to “crush you,” the elected leaders “talking about reprogramming you MAGA Republicans.”
“Have you guys ever been to a protest, a real march, a real circle-style picket-line-type protest?” the 33-year-old former NBA player-turned activist asked that crowd, which was overwhelmingly older and white. For the record, most of them had not.
White instructed them on how it works — get in two lines, make a circle, and march around and around the sidewalk with signs. This, he said, was critical. “Make no mistake about it,” he said, “if we don’t start to protest again in this country, we will lose your country.”
White, who received the Minnesota GOP’s endorsement in May and won his primary in August, is a curious choice to be the Republican nominee for Senate.
Four years earlier, as the Twin Cities were burning during the 2020 George Floyd riots, the St. Paul native led thousands of protesters on a march down Interstate 35, eventually taking over the Hennepin bridge. He has since rebranded himself as a far-right populist, writing in a lengthy 2022 Substack that he’d left the Democratic “plantation!”
He made a failed run for Congress that year, embracing endorsements from Bannon and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. He reported spending more than $1,200 in campaign funds at a Miami strip club, and thousands more at high-end hotels and limo services far from Minnesota. He’s denigrated his critics and political opponents as “uniparty cucks,” “f*gs,” and “c**ts,” and defended his language by claiming that he comes from a black community that is “a very vulgar community culturally, and just in general.”
White will almost certainly get smoked by Democrat Amy Klobuchar in November. Yet the fact that his name will be near the top of every voter’s ballot surely says something about the state of the Minnesota GOP in 2024. But what?
Is White’s mix of Trump-style populism, Alex Jones–style conspiracy theorizing, and Ron Paul anti–Federal Reserve libertarianism, combined with a direct appeal to racial minorities, the future of Republican politics in the North Star State? Or is his candidacy just a Hail Mary in a particularly tough matchup against a popular incumbent?
Or, perhaps, is White’s campaign evidence that after years of scandals and decline, Minnesota’s GOP has finally hit rock bottom and is in need of a drastic turnaround?
“The Republican Party can’t endorse people like Royce White for the United States Senate and then struggle to understand why they’re not winning elections in this state,” said Michael Brodkorb, a former Minnesota Republican operative and one-time deputy party chairman. “There’s not any redeeming quality to his candidacy.”
The Minnesota GOP is at a crossroads. But several Minnesota Republicans, including Brodkorb, told National Review that despite recent struggles, they are optimistic that the party can rebound in the coming years, bring political balance back to a state they still believe is as purple as Prince and the Vikings, and prevent Democrats from turning Minnesota into a “frozen California,” as a National Review editorial described it last year.
“When you look at issues and philosophy as opposed to party loyalty, we conservatives do well in Minnesota,” said John Hinderaker, president of the Center of the American Experiment, a free-market think tank in the state, noting polls that show most Minnesotans aren’t happy with the state’s high tax and spending levels, and are generally supportive of school choice.
“Minnesotans tend to live conservative lives,” Hinderaker said.
But there is no doubt that Minnesota has moved to the left politically. No Republican has won a statewide race since 2006, when then-governor Tim Pawlenty narrowly won reelection with a plurality of votes in a race that included a third-party candidate.
In 2021, Jennifer Carnahan, the party’s embattled chairwoman, resigned when a top donor she was close to was indicted on federal sex-trafficking charges, and she was accused of running a toxic work environment.
Politico declared that the Minnesota GOP was “in ruins” after the “shocking scandal,” and the Carnahan’s resignation “marked a new low for a state party in decline.”
A year later, despite the 2020 riots, rising crime, and a divisive debate over defunding the police, Minnesota Democrats won a surprising but narrow trifecta in state government — control of the house, senate, and governorship — and used that power to turn the state into a progressive labratory. Democrats enacted a “fundamental right” to abortion, hiked taxes, burned through a $17.5 billion budget surplus in a single session, turned the state into a “trans refuge,” and approved driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants.
Republicans are optimistic that the party’s turnaround will start in November when, with a good showing, they could take back the state house. But turning around the party’s fortunes will require much more than a strong performance in competitive state house races this fall. Long term, it will require re-establishing trust with suburban voters, building up fundraising capabilities to better compete with the Democratic machine, and possibly changing the way the GOP chooses its candidates to ensure the most electable names make the ballot.
And, as White’s candidacy shows, Minnesota Republicans will need to bridge their deep political divides. The question remains, can mainstream Republicans in the Pawlenty mode find common ground with the more rabble-rousing populists backing Trump and White?
“The Right is becoming a really broad, working-class coalition. And there’s nothing, I don’t think, incompatible with having a pro-economic-growth message, and continuing to bring in those folks,” said Jim Schultz, the 2022 Republican nominee for state attorney general who nearly defeated far-left Democrat Keith Ellison.
“Those who say it’s a foregone conclusion that Minnesota is going to be a deep-blue state and continue on this trend are just wrong,” he said.
‘Feckless and Spineless’ Republicans?
While Minnesota has the nation’s longest ongoing streak of supporting Democrats for president — it was alone in backing home-state candidate Walter Mondale 1984 — the state has not always been unfriendly to Republicans.
Republican Arne Carlson served as governor for most of the 1990s, and Pawlenty served eight years in the early 2000s. Republicans David Durenberger, Rudy Boschwitz, Rod Grams, and Norm Coleman won U.S. Senate seats in the ’70s, ’80s, ’90s, and early 2000s. Republicans have often controlled the state house in recent decades.
Hinderaker pointed to the 2008 recount in the U.S. Senate race between Coleman and Democrat Al Franken as a tide-turning moment. “The Republican Party went into debt by a fairly significant amount financing that recount,” he said. “And then, of course, the seat was lost. It took years, I mean years, for the Republican Party of Minnesota to get out of debt.”
With Donald Trump’s ascension, starting in 2015, the Republican Party generally, and the Minnesota GOP specifically, has struggled with an identity crisis.
Minnesota has a reputation for tolerating, and sometimes supporting bizarre characters — the state elected pro-wrestler Jesse Ventura as governor in 1998; it’s also the home of My Pillow’s Mike Lindell, as well as Zubaz zebra-print pants, Rollerblades, and that Lume Deodorant lady. But the state’s most successful Republicans have typically been mainstream conservatives with moderate temperaments and everyman appeal.
That support for mainstream voices was evident in 2016, when Minnesota was the only state to support Marco Rubio in the Republican primaries.
Since then, the state’s more populist voices have been on the rise, culminating in White’s endorsement and primary win this year. One former GOP state representative told the Minnesota Star-Tribune that he supported White’s candidacy because White is “new” and “running the same milquetoast Republican candidate in our state isn’t working.”
White had his own explanation for why Republicans have struggled in statewide races.
“What’s gone wrong with the Republican Party is they’ve become feckless and spineless, the lack of courage,” he told National Review after his Fourth of July speech, attributing blame for the party’s decline to donors and institutions “embedded in the fabric of Republican politics” who are “in on some of the scams.”
It’s unclear which specific “scams” he was referring to, though during his speech he railed against mainstream Republicans like Pawlenty and Coleman whom he said haven’t been willing to “end this Federal Reserve.” He also took aim at institutions he believes are behind “forever wars,” and politicians who want to send money to help defend Ukraine — “a country that participated in the genocide of the Jews in World War II.”
Hinderaker defended Pawlenty and Coleman as solid conservatives and good men who were good fits for Minnesota at the time the served.
“Experience has shown in recent decades that Republicans can win statewide in Minnesota if their candidates are obviously superior. And that was the case with both Tim and Norm,” he said. “They were obviously superior candidates, in every way, to the Democrats they were running against. And even so, those were very close races.”
A Party Worth Saving
As the new chairman of the Minnesota Republican Party in the wake of the Carnahan scandal, David Hann knows he has “the worst political job, certainly in the state, maybe in the country.” Another former party chairman, he said, joked that “the job was keeping the 50 percent of the people who hate you from talking with the 50 percent of the people who haven’t made up their minds yet.”
But Hann, a former state senator, said he ran for the job “because I believe that there are some very practical things that can be done, need to be done, and I think will be done” to return the Minnesota GOP to respectability, and eventually to power.
The party was broke when Hann took the reins. The two staffers who remained were ready to leave out of frustration. Major donors were “quite unhappy, justifiably,” he said.
But Hann believes the Republican Party in Minnesota is worth saving. He calls the Republican Party “maybe the greatest political organization ever created,” an organization broadly committed to conserving America’s founding principles.
As chairman, Hann has helped to stabilize the party’s finances and reassure skeptical donors. But it hasn’t been easy, and there’s still a lot of work to do to meet his goal of making the Republican Party the state’s dominant party by 2026.
A big part of the effort, he said, is convincing Republicans that the party’s main purpose is to win elections, not to “chase people out who don’t conform to whatever the flavor of the day” happens to be, said Hann, who’s been accused of of not being “pure” enough and faced a contingent of hard-right activists who tried to have him removed as party chair.
“That kind of behavior, it’s dysfunctional, it’s divisive, and it’s very unproductive,” he said of efforts to drive people away from the party. “And we specialize in it.”
As a party, Minnesota Republicans need to do a better job of talking to voters who aren’t registered Republicans, particularly in the Twin Cities suburbs where Democrats have been cleaning their clocks for years, Hann said. “We’ve got people who believe that we don’t need to talk to non-Republicans,” he said.
That goal of growing the party’s appeal could be helped by changing the way the Minnesota GOP allocates delegates to its state convention, Hann contends.
Currently, that is done using a formula that gives preference to areas of the state that have turned out large numbers of Republican votes. But that means parts of the state where Republicans need to do better — particularly the Twin Cities suburbs — get fewer delegates, which influences the types of candidates who win the party’s endorsement.
“If you’re going to run for governor or U.S. Senate and you need delegate votes, do you care what the delegates in Minneapolis or St. Paul think? No, you go where the votes are,” said Hann, who argues that giving each congressional district the same number of delegates would open up multiple paths to victory, including a metro-centric path.
Hinderaker is also optimistic that Republican donors can change the game by supporting more electable Republicans in primaries, even if those candidates don’t win the party’s endorsement through its hybrid caucus system.
While Democrats haven’t prioritized the caucus endorsement process for a while, viewing it more “as a play pen” for their activists, Hinderaker said, Republicans have typically gotten candidates who don’t win the party’s endorsement to step aside. He’s hoping more donors will push good Republican candidates to stay in through the primary.
“My hope is if that happens, and I think it will happen, it will once and for all break the power of the activist delegates to decide who’s going to be the Republican nominee,” he said. “We do have a history of not nominating our best candidates.”
The Money Game
Republicans looking to rebound in Minnesota face another major disadvantage: money.
The Democrats in Minnesota typically swamp Republicans in statewide races with gobs of money from public employee unions and outstate billionaires. Hann is working to build the party’s donor base to leverage financial advantages built into law — political parties get special mail rates and can spend every dollar they take in on politics.
“The downside is, because of campaign finance law, the money we raise as a political organization has to be reported by names. If you give more than $200, your name gets on our report, and there are people who don’t want to be identified,” he said. Democratic donors, he added, typically “don’t have that same level of concern.”
While Republicans certainly need more money, they don’t necessarily need to match Democrats dollar for dollar to win in Minnesota, Hann said. He pointed to Schultz’s narrow loss in his attorney general race in 2022 and Ryan Wilson, their state-auditor candidate, who lost by an even more narrow margin.
“Democrats spent extraordinarily large amounts of money to barely win,” he said.
Schultz is hoping to help close the money gap. He is now the president of the Minnesota Private Business Council, a new organization aimed at improving the state’s business climate. Its political arm, Renew Minnesota, is trying to become the Republican answer to the Alliance for a Better Minnesota, a powerful nonprofit that supports Democrats.
This year, Renew Minnesota is raising money and targeting a handful of state-house races to help Republicans take back the chamber. Schultz said there is a definite path to victory.
He believes that Minnesota voters are frustrated with the state’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party. Data show people are fleeing the state in record numbers.
“It’s not the party of Walter Mondale anymore,” he said. “It’s the party of the hard left.”
But to win long term, the Minnesota GOP needs to improve its brand, Schultz said.
“I think you have to say that after losing election after election over the past 15 years, you have to say there’s a lot of work to be done on the brand. I don’t think you can come to any other conclusion,” he said. “I think people often perceive us, perceive those on the Right in the state as a little kooky or mean.”
Minnesotans are “hardworking, humble people” who deserve a credible Republican Party that will advocate for safe streets and a great education system, Schultz said. But Republicans in Minnesota can’t just hit the rewind button to win again, he said. They need new leaders with a center-right vision that can resonate statewide.
One Republican leader Schultz looks at as a model is Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin.
“He managed to win in a state that demographically looks a lot like Minnesota,” Schultz said. “And there was nothing milquetoast about him.”
Brodkorb, the former Minnesota GOP operative, endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris for president, hoping that a decisive Trump loss would lead to a recalibration of the Republican Party, which he said he wants to re-engage with. The Trump-White populist wing of the party absolutely should be part of that recalibration, he said.
“But you know what I’m not interested in, is having a Republican Party that is in the political wilderness, isn’t in a position to win, and wants to be more of a debating squad than it does to actually govern and win elections,” Brodkorb said. “The reality is that the Tim Pawlenty model won. If someone can show me how Donald Trump at the top of the ticket helps Republicans win, I’d be interested in hearing that.”
Brodkorb worries that having Trump and White at the top of the ticket is going to hurt down-ballot Republicans and the party’s chances of winning back the state house.
Republicans, he said, “can’t even get in the door with a number of voters in this state because Trump is so radioactive. And then you add Royce White into the mix.”
‘Tell Me How You Win’
Hann said that he spoke with White after he won his primary, and offered him tips on how to make a good showing against Klobuchar in November and to help the party in the process. “Whether he will follow through with those things, we’ll see,” Hann said.
During a trip to state in May, Trump expressed confidence that he would win Minnesota in November — he also falsely claimed that he’d already won there. “I thought we won it in 2016,” he said, according to the New York Times. “I know we won it in 2020.”
That speech was before Harris replaced President Joe Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket and picked Minnesota governor Tim Walz as her running mate.
Hann isn’t counting Trump out. The former president’s organization has invested a lot in the state. And Hann isn’t sold that Walz is going to help Harris much in Minnesota.
“There are a lot of people who are very unhappy with Walz in Minnesota, a lot of those independent voters who have seen the effects of the kinds of policies he’s embraced,” Hann said. “I think they would love to vote against him and send him a message.”
Hann contends that in some ways Minnesota is already more Republican-friendly than many people acknowledge. The state’s eight congressional districts are evenly split between Republicans and Democrats. And the legislature is narrowly divided — Democrats have a one-seat majority in the Senate, and only won the chamber with a 321-vote surprise victory in a redrawn district east of the Twin Cities.
“There has to be a coming together,” Hann said of traditional Republicans and the more populist newcomers. “There’s not enough voters in Minnesota, as we’ve seen over the past 30 years, to elect a statewide candidate if you only appeal to one part of that argument.”
Building a winning coalition, he said, is not about subtraction.
“You have to win majorities if you want to govern. That’s the bottom line,” he said. “If you want to govern the state, don’t tell me what you believe in. Tell me how you win a majority.”