A deadlocked Minnesota House? We’ve been here before
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The Minnesota House of Representatives appears headed for a tie.
With all precincts reporting, Republicans and Democrats each have won — or are in the lead for — 67 seats. While two of those races are expected to go to recounts, leaders from both political parties are bracing for at least two years of divided government in St. Paul, following two years of Democrats holding all three levers of power at the Capitol.
But the state has seen this situation play out before. In 1979, Democrats and Republicans faced a deadlocked House after Independent Republicans — what the party was called at the time — picked up 32 seats in the 1978 election.
What happened that time? Months of backroom negotiating, public bickering, a heart attack, allegations of unfair campaign practices and a power-sharing agreement.
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It’s all a potential harbinger of how evenly split party caucuses might manage one half of the Minnesota Legislature. And with Democrats holding only a one-seat majority in the Minnesota Senate, the two parties will have to cooperate to pass a two-year budget that’s signed by Democratic Gov. Tim Walz — or face a state government shutdown.
For her part, current House Speaker Melissa Hortman, DFL-Brooklyn Park, said she was confident that she and House Minority Leader Lisa Demuth, R-Cold Spring, would be able to navigate the divide. Hortman told MPR’s Morning Edition that the leaders have a strong working relationship, and she said she expects they’ll be able to work together.
“It appears that the voters may have sent a tied Minnesota House, but the voters want us to get our work done,” Hortman said. “And if they're asking us at 67-67 to work together to get things done, that is exactly what we will do.”
Hortman said Democrats passed significant policy changes over the past two years, and she said the next legislative session would likely be slower going, no matter who ended up with the gavel. With a split chamber, that’s more of a guarantee, she said.
“We were going to be entering, in the next two years, a phase of boring government, which is where we need just good governance, that we make sure that our agencies and our school districts, our cities and towns are well-funded, and that the things that are supposed to get done by government every day" get done, Hortman said. “The system absorbed a lot of change in ‘23 and ‘24 and so going forward, it was likely to be a less change-oriented session and biennium, regardless of who is in control.”
Speaking to supporters early Wednesday, Demuth said Republicans expected to pick up at least one of the most closely-contested seats — in St. Cloud and Shakopee — and she declared victory for House Republicans. Both of those seats were expected to come up for state-funded recounts due to the close margins.
“We are still waiting, but things are looking very, very positive in the state of Minnesota, for the House flipping to Republican control right now,” Demuth told supporters at a GOP election night party. “Our job is to restore that balance. We need to make sure that your tax dollars are not being wasted. We need to make sure that our tax dollars are not going to fraud. We need to hold Gov. Walz, when he comes back to return as governor, more accountable where there has been none.”
House GOP leaders planned to hold a news conference to discuss election results Wednesday afternoon.
A look at the last 67-67 split
As Demuth and Hortman weigh how they will approach divided control of the Minnesota House, they could dust off the blueprint used following the 1978 election — when Republicans were given the powerful speakership position for the 1979 session, and Democrats took control of the powerful Taxes and Appropriations Committees.
“We simply sat down and had to negotiate how we were going to share the power for the ‘79 session,” said Rod Searle, the Republican leader who ascended to become the speaker of the Minnesota House in 1979.
“We started in November, and we sat across the table from each other from November through January,” Searle recounted to MPR in 2008; he died in 2014.
The partisan stalemate created uncertainty and worry that an illness or an unexpected absence could shift the balance of power in the legislative body — and the House did have to navigate those situations.
In the days before the House convened in January, a Ramsey County judge dismissed a DFL lawsuit against Rep. Robert Pavlak, R-St. Paul, for distributing false campaign literature. And Rep. Richard Kostohryz, DFL-North St. Paul, suffered a heart attack and was in the hospital for several weeks — raising questions over whether Republicans would force a vote on the speakership.
“I hope and pray that we are not forced into a position that we would have to bring someone in on a sick bed or some other situation that might place in jeopardy the health of one of our members,” Democratic Leader Irv Anderson told Searle in 1979. “I will not place myself in that position. I will not take it upon myself to have that individual brought in here and have him cast a vote so that we can retain speakership. But I would hope that you, too, would take that into consideration.”
The tie in party control broke later that year, after the Minnesota Supreme Court ruled in May 1979 that Pavlak did violate campaign finance law. DFLers quickly voted to remove Pavlak and declare the seat vacant. Democrats won the special election and took control of the speakership for the 1980 session.
While it lasted, the deadlocked Minnesota House of 1979 did force legislators to cooperate in an unusual way.
“It turned out to be quite a good session from a House standpoint because all of the bills that were passed out of our body had already been negotiated,” Searle recounted in 2008. “It drove the Senate absolutely wild because there was nothing to negotiate.”
Former Minnesota Republican House Speaker Steve Sviggum was first elected to the state House in 1978, his first session was during the power-sharing agreement of 1979. He told MPR News on Wednesday that the latest election results feel like history repeating itself.
“I remember the first six weeks of that parity situation in 1979, people just sitting in their offices, not knowing what to do, not knowing what committees we’re on, not knowing what the agenda was, or leadership,” Sviggum recalled. “It was a fairly quiet, chaotic time for the first six weeks, until we got organized.”
Sviggum said a tied House will force Democrats and Republicans to compromise and cooperate with each other.
“One of the great powers of the speakership itself is deciding the chairs of the committees and the makeup of the committees,” he said. “That will all now be negotiations. It will not be the speaker’s decision anymore.”