Was a Minnesota House special election in the east metro a referendum on the Trump administration?

More than 13,000 people and nearly 47% of registered voters cast ballots in a special election for a suburban Minnesota House seat this week, far outpacing voter turnout in any other House special election over the last decade.

Democrats say it’s the highest turnout in any special election in state history, likely due to the seat’s significance in the ongoing power struggle in the Minnesota House and a burst of energy for the party nearly two months into President Donald Trump’s second term. The Secretary of State’s Office does not track historic turnout for special elections.

“The results of special elections all around the country show how deeply unpopular Trump is, and how motivated Democratic and Independent voters are to vote against Republicans,” said DFL House Leader Melissa Hortman.

DFL candidate David Gottfried received more than 70% of the vote for the Roseville-area seat, nearly 10 percentage points higher than the DFL candidate received in the district last November. He also outperformed former Vice President Kamala Harris' margin in the district.

Gottfried, a pro bono specialist for a local law firm, said he and his campaign staff knocked on thousands of doors and called almost as many voters throughout the east-metro suburban district and the response was fairly uniform: People want the chaos to end, and they want lawmakers to work in bipartisan fashion.

“A lot of folks are very upset over how the federal government is conducting itself,” he said.

The seat also held plenty of significance in Minnesota. The winner of the House District 40B seat in November was DFLer Curtis Johnson. But a judge later found Johnson ineligible to serve because he failed to meet the state’s residency requirement, ultimately prompting Tuesday’s special election between Gottfried and Republican Paul Wikstrom.

The judge’s ruling temporarily shifted a 67-67 split in the chamber to a 67-66 advantage for Republicans, who abandoned power-sharing negotiations with Democrats and attempted to take control of the chamber and committees when the legislative session began in January.

Democrats boycotted the session for three weeks to prevent Republicans from getting a quorum, the number of members needed to conduct business. In January, the state Supreme Court confirmed that 68 votes are needed to do any business in the House.

The court also ruled that Gov. Tim Walz improperly called an earlier special election for the seat in late January, pushing the date of the race until March.

Republican House Speaker Lisa Demuth said they had record turnout in both parties because of all of the twists and turns surrounding the seat in Minnesota.

“People were engaged a little bit more because of everything that has gone on here in the state of Minnesota — a tie and then an open seat,” said Demuth. “Then the governor prematurely called [the election], then he had to call it when it was supposed to have been called. That brought more attention to it.”

Wikstrom said he has campaigned in the district for the last year and saw almost five times more contributions for the special election than he did for the race last fall. His campaign had two dozen staffers and he said they turned out more Republican voters in a House special election than any other race since 2002.

Voters were frustrated by the DFL boycott of the session and the fact that Johnson didn’t reside in the district, Wikstrom said. He would hear some comments about what’s happening at the federal level, but he always brought the conversation back to state issues.

“Occasionally I would get those comments, but my response was true to my message, which is we need to focus on those issues in the state of Minnesota, which is affordability, crime and public education,” he said.

Gottfried’s addition to the chamber will bring Democrats back to 67 members, restoring a tie in the chamber and shifting the two parties into a negotiated agreement where they must share power.

The high-profile nature of the race in Minnesota likely boosted turnout, but Democrats say they’ve also seen higher turnout from their party in special elections across the country this year.

Heather Williams, president of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, an arm of the national party that works on statehouse races, said Democratic candidates in special legislative elections are outperforming in races by an average of 9 percentage points.

On the same night as Minnesota’s special election, a Democratic candidate in Iowa came within 5 percentage points of winning a special legislative election for a seat that Trump had carried by 27 points last fall.

“As chaos reigns in Washington, Democrats have a real opportunity to fight back in our state legislatures where there are winnable and chamber-deciding special elections nearly every single week,” said Williams, whose group gave $100,000 to the House DFL caucus ahead of the Roseville special election.

Gottfried said Thursday that the tie his election creates in the House “forces us to work across the aisle.” He said his future constituents in the district, which includes Shoreview and Roseville, “want to de-escalate the rhetoric and really want us to get to work.”

“We can provide a shield from the chaos in Washington,” he added.