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LiberalMind endorses Lisa Demuth

Election Day is November 3. Minnesotans have been voting since September 18, when absentee voting — by mail and in person — opened; direct early voting runs through November 2. This is the whole race — how a fraud scandal ended a governorship before a single vote was cast, the platforms, the worst claims against each candidate, and what the sources actually show. LiberalMind endorses Lisa Demuth — not because her record is long, but because her opponent's is: proven, party-line, and tied to the machine that slept through the theft. Read the research, and see why.

How Minnesota got here

This seat is open because Gov. Tim Walz quit. Walz — the Democrats' 2024 vice-presidential nominee — had announced a run for a third term. In January 2026, with a fraud scandal in Minnesota's state-run social services consuming his administration, he withdrew. U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar launched her campaign on January 29 and took the Democratic-Farmer-Labor nomination in the August 11 primary with 89.7 percent of the vote. Her running mate is Ben Schierer, the former mayor of Fergus Falls.

The Republican nominee is Lisa Demuth of Cold Spring, the speaker of the Minnesota House — the first Black lawmaker to hold that gavel — and a former school board member and small-business owner first elected to the House in 2018. Her path tells you something about her: the state party convention endorsed Kendall Qualls, President Trump endorsed MyPillow founder Mike Lindell, and primary voters chose Demuth anyway, with 43.4 percent in a split field. Her running mate is attorney Ryan Wilson, the party's 2022 nominee for state auditor.

Whoever wins, Minnesota elects its first woman governor. If Demuth wins, she would also be the state's first Black governor. The raters are not calling it close: the Cook Political Report says Solid D, Inside Elections says Likely D, Sabato's Crystal Ball says Safe D. October polling averages put Klobuchar ahead by roughly eight points. Republicans have not won a Minnesota governor's race since 2006 — and yet this race exists at all, in a state this blue, because of one word: fraud.

The scandal that decided this race before it started

Everything in this election runs through what happened to Minnesota's social services on Tim Walz's watch, so here is the record, separated into what is proven, what is estimated, and what is claimed.

What is proven. Feeding Our Future, a nonprofit administering a federal child-nutrition program through the Minnesota Department of Education, was looted in what federal prosecutors describe as a roughly $250 million scheme — the largest COVID-era fraud case in the country. Its founder, Aimee Bock, was convicted. The same pattern repeated across program after program: autism therapy billing that prosecutors say was fabricated wholesale, a Housing Stabilization Services program so overrun that the state terminated it outright, defendants who flew in from other states to bill Minnesota Medicaid — conduct the U.S. Attorney's office dubbed "fraud tourism." Federal prosecutors have charged 92 defendants across the child-nutrition, housing, and autism schemes. In October 2025, Walz paused payments to 14 high-risk Medicaid programs for 90 days and ordered a third-party audit.

What is estimated. On December 18, 2025, First Assistant U.S. Attorney Joe Thompson told reporters that the 14 high-risk programs had billed about $18 billion since 2018 and that "half or more" of it may have been stolen — an estimate of at least $9 billion, which he called "staggering, industrial-scale fraud." Read that sentence the way a prosecutor meant it: it is an investigator's estimate of exposure, not a courtroom finding. Walz called it speculation. The fraud that prosecutors have actually charged in court is a fraction of the $9 billion — and still runs across scheme after scheme, year after year, in program after program, which is the part nobody disputes.

What the oversight record shows. The fraud was not invisible; it was unacted-on. In January 2026, the Office of the Legislative Auditor reported that the Department of Human Services' Behavioral Health Administration lacked adequate internal controls, failed most grant-management requirements tested, and created or backdated documents after the audit began — including one case where a grant manager approved a $672,647.78 payment for a single month of work without detailed invoices, left the agency days later, and went to work consulting for the grantee. Fox News Digital reported that an account run by hundreds of DHS employees accused the Walz administration of ignoring early warnings and retaliating against whistleblowers. In December 2025, a viral video by independent creator Nick Shirley, visiting state-funded child care centers and finding no children at several, pushed the scandal fully national; federal officials visited the sites, and the Treasury Department announced a probe into claims — first aired by City Journal, citing unnamed counterterrorism sources — that stolen money reached the Somali terrorist group al-Shabaab. That last claim must be labeled plainly: no indictment alleges terrorism financing, and the Justice Department has not confirmed it. It is an allegation under investigation, not a fact.

The money around the fraud. Minnesota's fraud exploded in the same years its budget did. In 2023, a Democratic trifecta in St. Paul spent down a surplus of roughly $18 billion and expanded state government dramatically. State forecasters now project a surplus for the current biennium but a structural imbalance beyond it — the November 2025 forecast showed a $2.96 billion deficit for 2028–29; a February 2026 update improved the headline numbers while still projecting spending to outrun revenue by roughly $3.4 billion on a structural basis. A state that could not watch its checkbook when money was plentiful is asking voters to trust it with the cleanup.

The standard for this race is the one the scandal itself sets: who saw the taxpayers' money as theirs to protect — and who treats oversight as an insult?

Amy Klobuchar (Democratic-Farmer-Labor)

Her platform: Klobuchar, a senator since 2007 who won all four of her Senate races by double digits, runs as the prosecutor Minnesota already knows — she was Hennepin County attorney before Washington. A top-to-bottom audit of state government on day one. On fraud, she promises prosecutions, not press releases: "send fraudsters directly to jail." No tax increases — she says so explicitly and notes she has taken on her own party over taxes before. Build 100,000 new housing units by the end of her term, working with the private sector. A state tax credit if Washington lets the enhanced Affordable Care Act credits lapse. Tariffs, she argues, are taxes on consumers and businesses; she proposes negotiating directly with Canadian provinces to blunt them. She is endorsed by the AFL-CIO, Education Minnesota, and — on guns — by Giffords and Everytown for Gun Safety.

The worst claims — and the record:

Claim: "I would have caught that fraud." Klobuchar's central argument is biography: as a former prosecutor, she says, she would have seen it and stopped it, and she now says flatly that "Tim Walz should have caught the fraud earlier and he should have done more." The concrete act she points to is real and specific: when the scandal broke into the open, she called the Justice Department and pressed for more prosecutors for the U.S. Attorney's office in Minnesota — "He said, 'I need more prosecutors.' I called the highest level of the Justice Department, and I got him those prosecutors." That is a senator using federal leverage from Washington. It is also, necessarily, an admission of the timeline: her intervention came after the fraud was public, from an office that did not administer a single one of the looted programs. Demuth's counter is the sharpest question in the race: name one policy where you would break from Walz. Klobuchar calls Walz an "incredible governor" in one breath and faults his fraud oversight in the next, and has not answered the question with a policy. "I know you wish you were debating Tim Walz," she told Demuth in their Brainerd debate, "but I'm the one here right now." Fair enough. But she is asking to inherit his state government, his commissioners' agencies, and his party's machine — and "I'm not him" is a biography, not a break.

Claim: She slept through the oversight from Washington. Demuth pressed her in the debates for missing a Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing where Minnesotans raised fraud concerns. Klobuchar's answer is factual: "The particular hearing that was raised here was a subcommittee that I was not even on," and she says she has raised fraud at a dozen hearings. On the record available, the specific attack misses. The broader one — that Minnesota's entire federal delegation, herself included, was slow to treat state-program fraud as its problem — is a judgment voters can weigh for themselves.

Claim: She will run up your health care costs and call it help. Demuth ties Klobuchar to the Affordable Care Act she voted for: "our healthcare costs have exploded across the country and in Minnesota because of the Affordable Care Act." Klobuchar's answer is more subsidies — a state credit if the federal enhanced credits lapse. Voters who believe government should underwrite the insurance market will find that responsive; voters who believe the subsidized market is the disease will note that her fix for a federal program's failure is a state program layered on top. On insulin, the debate produced one clean factual clash: Demuth cited her vote for the 2020 Alec Smith Insulin Affordability Act; Klobuchar countered that Alec Smith's mother has endorsed her — and accused Demuth of opposing the insulin price caps the family actually wanted. Both things can be true: Demuth voted for the 2020 emergency law, and the Smith family backs Klobuchar. What neither candidate disputes is that Minnesotans are still paying too much.

The flaw, plainly: Klobuchar is the most electorally successful Minnesota politician of her generation, and nothing in her record suggests incompetence. Her flaw is continuity with distance. She is the candidate of the party that designed, funded, and failed to police the programs that were looted — asking voters to hire her as the cleanup crew while declining to name a single policy of the outgoing administration she would reverse, and calling its governor incredible on her way out the door. For voters who hold limited government and free markets as the ground they stand on, her broader record — gun-control endorsements, the ACA, the subsidy reflex — is the values problem underneath the management question.

Lisa Demuth (Republican)

Her platform: Demuth runs on the reckoning. On day one she would fire every state agency commissioner and install new leadership: "We have to change the culture of fraud." Stronger internal controls; funding freezes when fraud is credibly suspected; a powerful independent inspector general. Tax hikes are, in her words, "absolutely off the table"; as speaker she pushed to exempt tips and overtime from the state income tax, and she backs eliminating Minnesota's tax on Social Security benefits. She proposes finding $1 billion in savings across state agencies. She supports cooperation with federal immigration enforcement. As speaker of a tied-and-then-Republican House under a Democratic governor, she negotiated the budget deal she campaigns on: what she calls the largest spending cut in state history, blocked proposed tax increases, and ended free state health insurance for adults in the country illegally. She is endorsed by the NRA Political Victory Fund and the Minnesota Gun Owners Caucus. Her signature line from her first campaign video: she will "never bow to the radical mob" and will "fight to make sure girls' spaces are for girls."

The worst claims — and the record:

Claim: The $9 billion. Demuth's campaign rhetoric treats Thompson's "half or more of $18 billion" estimate as the established size of the theft. It is not, and she knows the difference — she runs the House. The honest version is damning enough: a quarter-billion-dollar nutrition scheme convicted in court, 92 defendants, a housing program terminated for fraud, an autism program billed for children who were never treated, auditors finding backdated documents in the agency in charge. When a candidate inflates the number past what prosecutors have charged, she hands her opponent the only rebuttal Klobuchar has: that the reckoning is politics. The record does not need the exaggeration. It never did.

Claim: Her inspector general already exists. Demuth's signature oversight proposal — an independent Office of Inspector General — was signed into law by Governor Walz in May 2026, before the primary. It becomes fully operational September 1, 2027, and the next governor will shape it through appointments and funding, so her support for it is not meaningless. But a candidate running on "Demuth will finally create oversight" is campaigning for a law that is already on the books, and voters are entitled to notice.

Claim: She is a Trump puppet or a party functionary. The primary record answers this one by itself. Trump endorsed Lindell; the party endorsed Qualls; Demuth beat both, then beat the machine's second choice for speaker before that, holding the gavel through a tied House and a power-sharing fight. Whatever else she is, she is nobody's appointee. The opposite claim — that as speaker she is co-owner of two years of St. Paul budgets — is also fair, and Klobuchar makes it: Demuth negotiated with Walz, signed off on compromises, and cannot run as an outsider against a state government she helps lead. Her answer, that she used a tied House to cut spending and kill tax hikes, is the strongest version of an incumbent's defense: judge the direction she pushed, not the building she pushed it in.

What's unproven, and her one real mark: Demuth's platform is the conservative platform — no tax hikes, spending restraint, enforcement, cooperation with federal immigration law, Second Amendment endorsements earned rather than rented. What is often called her flaw is not a flaw at all: she has been speaker for under two years and has never run an executive agency, which means she has never had the executive chance to prove herself or to fail. Unproven is not a demerit — it is a watch-them-closely, and we state that expectation below rather than pretend the unknown is a verdict. Her one real mark is proportion: her headline number outruns the court record (the claim above has the details). That is rhetoric discipline she will be held to — the proven record is damning enough without the inflation — stated here as an expectation, not a disqualification. The open question with Demuth is not what she believes. It is whether a legislative leader's indictment of the executive branch becomes an executive's command of it — and that is a question only governing can answer.

The verdict: LiberalMind endorses Lisa Demuth

Two candidates. One proven record — and one not yet written.

Klobuchar's record is proven, and that is the problem. She is a mainstream liberal Democrat — gun control, the ACA, subsidy-first economics — with a party-line record in Washington, running as the competent manager of the very political machine that slept through industrial-scale theft, faulting the outgoing governor's vigilance while praising his governorship and naming no policy she would change. She is not a moderate exception in the Manchin or Fetterman mold. She is an enabler of a proven record — the establishment the scandal happened under, asking for a promotion to fix it. Voters know exactly what she is, because she has shown them for twenty years.

Demuth is unproven, and unproven is not a flaw. She has never held executive office and has held the speaker's gavel for under two years; she has never had the executive chance to prove herself or to fail, and we will not score the absence of a record as a failure of one. What she has demonstrated is direction: the right values — protect the taxpayers' money, cut the taxes, enforce the law, distrust the machine — proven in the fights she could reach, against her own party's establishment and the president's endorsed candidate alike. We endorse her on that direction, with the expectation stated in the open: watch her closely, and hold her to it.

Her one real mark stays on the record beside the endorsement: her $9 billion headline outruns what prosecutors have charged (the proven tier is the ~$250 million Feeding Our Future scheme and the cases around it; the $18 billion is the U.S. Attorney's billed total, and "half or more" stolen is his estimate). That is rhetoric discipline she will be held to as governor — measured against the court record, not the campaign number — presented here as an expectation, not a disqualifier, because the documented record needs no exaggeration to condemn the other side.

So LiberalMind endorses Lisa Demuth for governor — the direction is right, the record is unwritten, and we will be watching to see that she writes it the way she campaigned.

Minnesota is about to elect its first woman governor. The scandal made sure of the choice's shape: the prosecutor from the party that missed it, or the speaker who would fire everyone in sight. We choose the speaker — knowingly, with our expectations on the record. Here are the facts, here are the claims, and here is what the sources show. Vote early. Research your candidates. Choose the best moderates, whatever their party — no extremism from either side. And encourage your friends and family to do the same.

Choose like the next audit depends on it — because it does.

Sources

AI-assisted article — but the sources are human, and the facts are very real.

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