Editor’s note: This is the second of two stories on Lisa Demuth’s rise to the candidacy for governor. The first focused on Demuth finding home in Cold Spring and entry into politics. 

Lisa Demuth’s most ardent critics and strident supporters converge on this point: No one pegged her to one day lead House Republicans and, from there, arguably become the most consequential figure in the Minnesota Republican Party. 

“She was more of an unknown,” said state Rep. Danny Nadeau, R-Rogers.

“It was a surprise,” state Rep. Marion Rarick, R-Maple Lake, said of her rise to lead the House GOP caucus in 2022. “I didn’t serve on committees with her, and didn’t really know her. But she was willing to lead.”

One of Demuth’s first acts as House leader was to join the Civility Caucus, a group of about 30 lawmakers striving for bipartisan respect. Asked at a Civility Caucus luncheon in 2019 for a misconception DFLers have of Republicans, Demuth responded, “They think we’re not caring. I do care about social issues, how we can help each other.”

Demuth chief authored 48 bills between 2019 and 2022. These included capital improvements for her district and measures regarding education, childcare and gun owner rights, among other subjects. 

One measure beseeched school boards to not enter into pupil withdrawal agreements as a way of avoiding expulsion proceedings. This wound its way into state statute.

However, as a rookie member of the minority party, most Demuth legislation did not even get heard in committee. 

Related: Snubbed by the state GOP and Trump, Demuth rallies to win the GOP nomination for governor

Demuth’s district counterpart in the Senate, Jeff Howe of Rockville, carried many of her doomed bills in the Senate. These included mandating that school districts permit the  Scouts BSA and Girl Scouts of the USA to give presentations on school grounds, prohibiting the closure of gun ranges during a state of emergency and expanding the rights of Minnesotans to use deadly force in states of emergency. 

Demuth and Howe also sought to ban abortions when a fetal heartbeat is detected. Following her elevation to House Republican leader and the 2022 U.S. Supreme Court decision that each state may craft its own abortion laws, Demuth acknowledged that her fetal heartbeat bill was unpopular with voters. 

“Minnesotans are probably, when it comes to abortion, somewhere in the middle,” Demuth told MinnPost in late 2022 after the DFL snared control of the House, Senate and governor’s office. “I think we did underestimate that.”

(Demuth’s sponsorship of the bill, though, was noted on her State Fair flyer that I picked up.)

On the campaign trail this year, Demuth said she has zeroed in on fraud since 2019. 

More specifically, she used her education background to focus on childcare centers that fleece taxpayer money meant to help low-income parents send their kids to daycare. And Demuth assisted with Nick Shirley’s widely viewed video that claimed to show deserted childcare centers run by Somali scam artists. 

(A week after the video, the Department of Children, Youth, and Families sent out a news release stating the centers Shirley toured were actually “operating as expected.” The infamous “Quality Learing Center” – “Learning” was misspelled on the daycare’s sign – had actually announced to the department that it was closing a week before Shirley’s video.)

In 2019, Demuth and Howe teamed up on a bill to create an ombudsperson for childcare providers, though it said nothing overt about fraud. 

The measure was reintroduced in 2021, and some of its ideas can be found in the Department of Children, Youth, and Families, a bureau the DFL-controlled Legislature created in 2023.

Demuth also introduced a bill in 2019 that required providers receiving government child care assistance to produce attendance records on demand from counties. The bill did not have a Senate sponsor and did not advance. 

Calm and conversational

Following their election wipeout in 2022, House Republicans surmised that Kurt Daudt, who had led the caucus since 2014, was part of the problem. 

“Daudt had such a strong personality,” Nadeau said. “Politically, he’s very astute and fearless. But I think people were very ready to go in a different direction.”

As Nadeau and other Republicans remember it, loquacious personalities like Jim Nash, the assistant minority leader at the time, and Kristin Robbins, who would later hold forth as leader of the House Fraud Prevention Committee, stepped into the breach. But in cacophonous closed-door caucus sessions, the early favorites canceled each other out, and Demuth gained steam as the anti-Daudt. 

“My tone is very different than Rep. Daudt,” Demuth told MinnPost in 2022. “I am more calm and conversational, but I can step up when needed to be loud.”

“I think Lisa kind of floated to the top as the one who can mediate between those strong personalities,” Nadeau said. “No one really had a lot of opposition to her.”

Fierce and brave

The 2023 and 2024 legislative sessions were a cover-your-eyes horror movie for Republicans. DFLers partied like Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933, passing labor and environmental protections and expanding the social safety net. 

“I didn’t have all the answers,” Demuth acknowledged during an interview at the State Fair about her time as minority leader. “And I didn’t have this grand plan of how we were going to navigate being in the minority under full Democratic control of state government.”

It is unclear what Demuth could have done during the DFL trifecta.

Some Republicans grumbled that she cost them leverage by letting a bipartisan bonding bill quickly advance out of the House. Bonding was arguably the one area of GOP leverage since it required a 60% majority to pass. 

But the Senate fared no better, even with its bonding proposal slower to materialize. And other Republicans thought that Demuth’s effervescence helped.

Related: Demuth will run on fraud to beat Klobuchar, but their anti-fraud proposals are similar

“Imagine the frustration that her members were expressing to her,” Nadeau said. “During that trifecta, there was not one bill that I wrote that was heard in committee. I think that Lisa managed that difficulty really well. She said all you can do is make arguments and run down the clock.”

Demuth also began to work with Hortman, then the Speaker of the House, after her ascension to minority leader. 

“She had called me and said, ‘Congratulations, I’d like to meet with you weekly,’” Demuth told me in an interview earlier this year. “And I said, ‘Why? You don’t need my vote. Why would you want to do that?’ And she said, ‘We need to get to know each other, because we’re going to be working together.’”

“Hortman cared about the institution and she shared that with Lisa,” Nadeau said. “Lisa embraced that as much as she could.”

Demuth’s comfort with civility and institutional norms was put to the test when the 2024 election produced a tied House. The Minnesota Supreme Court stepped in and greenlit a powersharing agreement so the House could meet. 

In retrospect, Demuth cut a shrewd agreement. 

Along with replacing Hortman as speaker, she grabbed the power to not bring to the House floor any bill that cleared the Senate. This was precisely the tool Demuth wielded in refusing to have the House vote on an assault weapons ban before the Legislature adjourned in May.

Demuth also successfully negotiated a new committee around fraud prevention that would be majority Republican, a committee that has helped the GOP keep fraud — and especially shortcomings by Walz’s Department of Human Services — in the public eye.

“Lisa was fierce and brave and stood up for our caucus,” Rarick said of the powersharing deal.

DFLers said they were dealt a bad hand when it turned out one of their newly elected members did not live in his district. They bided their time until a special election could be held and ensured the House was actually tied. 

Plus, Demuth was obstinate in negotiations, DFLers said. So, more experienced Republicans, like state Rep. Paul Torkelson, R-Hanska, had to come in. 

Torkelson reputedly saved not just the power sharing deal but salvaged a two-year budget agreement in 2025, which came three weeks after the Legislature was supposed to adjourn. 

Demuth is open about the fact that Torkelson helped her, especially during the slow-motion dealmaking of 2025. 

The recently retired Torkelson said they had a productive dynamic. 

“I’ve been very pleased to work with her,” Torkelson said, adding that Demuth “treats everyone up and down the ladder with respect.”

‘A very good compromise’

In December 2024, the FBI raided one autism center in Minneapolis and another in St. Cloud. Federal prosecutors suspected widespread fraud in Early Intensive Behavioral Developmental Intervention, a childhood autism treatment program in which clinics could bill Medicaid. 

As evidenced by the new fraud prevention committee, Demuth was aware of the issue. But in 2025 budget negotiations, Republicans ceded fraud and expended their political capital on stripping undocumented immigrants of MinnesotaCare, a state funded health insurance program.

They partly succeeded – the budget deal cut adult undocumented immigrants off MinnesotaCare. But it was a strategy Demuth never fully explained, besides offering answers like, “We came to a very good compromise and that’s what a negotiation is, a bipartisan compromise.”

Toward the end of the 2025 session, the Minnesota Senate overwhelmingly passed a bill to create a new state bureau called the Office of Inspector General. 

Hortman had viewed the measure as flawed in its current form. The House did not take up the bill until Republicans moved to suspend the rules on the last day of session. 

“There was no process, work or contribution behind it,” said state Sen. Heather Gustafson, DFL-Vadnais Heights and Senate co-author of the Inspector General bill. “House DFL voted against the motion, not against fighting fraud, and everyone in that room understood that difference.”

Demuth never attended weekly bipartisan sessions on crafting the Inspector General bill, Gustafson said. 

State Sen. Michael Kreun, R-Blaine, the other bill author, credited Demuth’s advocacy for the bill in this year’s session. Demuth helped to retain the package’s law enforcement provision, Kreun noted. 

The bill’s successful passage is a key talking point in her gubernatorial campaign, a campaign that had started while Walz was still vying for a third term.

“When I entered the race, even after I announced, I didn’t think Gov. Walz would actually make it to the November election,” Demuth told me in May. “I’m also not intimidated with Sen. Klobuchar entering the race because I very much look at her time in the Senate as very much still a part of the Democratic machine.”

Demuth later said Klobuchar ignored fraud. At a press conference in August, Demuth appeared before a stack of what she said were the 1,000 press releases that Klobuchar issued between 2022 and 2025, and declared, “Not one of those press releases mentions fraud.” 

Related: What makes Demuth run: The unlikely rise of a category-defying politician

But it is unclear what Klobuchar could have done, especially on fraud in Medicaid, which is administered by the state. It was the Minnesota Department of Human Services, not federal civil servants, that gave money to scam providers.  

“The best they can do is say that she was fraud adjacent,” said Steven Schier, a political science professor emeritus at Carleton College.

Still, Schier said Demuth is probably the strongest GOP governor candidate since former Gov. Tim Pawlently, thanks to her record and demeanor. “She’s a happy warrior on the stump,” he said. “She’s always smiling when attacking. She is clearly enjoying campaigning.”

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