Klobuchar Took 89.7% of the DFL Primary. If She Wins in November, She Has to Give Up Her Senate Seat.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar won Minnesota's Democratic-Farmer-Labor primary for governor on Tuesday, taking 89.7% of the vote against six other candidates with 99% of ballots counted. The margin was not close at any point in the night, and it hands the four-term senator the nomination for a job she has spent the year arguing she wants more than the one she already holds.

She will face Minnesota House Speaker Lisa Demuth, who won the Republican primary the same night. Demuth's nomination was itself a rebuke of President Trump, who had endorsed MyPillow founder Mike Lindell in the race while the state Republican Party endorsed Demuth. The general election in November will be the first open-seat contest for governor in Minnesota since 2010.

The seat came open in January, when Gov. Tim Walz announced he would not seek a third term after months of Republican attacks over the fraud scandals that have run through Minnesota's state-administered programs. Klobuchar has not tried to distance herself politely from that record — she has campaigned directly on it, promising audits and tighter controls on state contracts, and casting the fraud losses as a failure of management rather than of policy. "You expect leaders to deliver results, not excuses, and you are rightfully tired of this partisan theater," she said after the results came in.

The DFL endorsed Klobuchar and her running mate, former Fergus Falls Mayor Ben Schierer, in May, which cleared most of the serious competition out of the field months before voting began. What remained on Tuesday's ballot was a set of little-known challengers who together could not assemble 11% of the vote.

The arithmetic that follows the win is the part Washington is watching. Klobuchar has been in the Senate since 2007 and has won four elections there by double digits. If she wins in November, she must resign the seat, and an appointee would hold it until a special election is scheduled — a sequence that would put a Democratic-held Senate seat in play at a moment when neither party can spare one. Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan, who won Tuesday's DFL primary for the state's other Senate seat, is already on the November ballot in her own race against Republican nominee Michele Tafoya, the former sports broadcaster.

The historical baseline favors Klobuchar. Minnesota has not elected a Republican governor since Tim Pawlenty in 2006, the longest such streak in the country. But Demuth is the first Black woman to lead the Minnesota House, she won her primary without the president's help, and she inherits a fraud issue that Republicans have spent two years building into their central argument against DFL governance. Klobuchar's answer on Tuesday was to claim the issue herself.