Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota formally announced her campaign for governor on Thursday with a call for unity and decency in her troubled state, which has been roiled by political violence, President Trump’s immigration crackdown and widespread protests after two killings of Minnesotans by federal agents.
Ms. Klobuchar, a popular Democrat with a history of winning by double-digit margins, has spent nearly two decades in the Senate as a common-sense centrist with a folksy demeanor and a carefully cultivated history of bipartisanship.
Now, with her run for governor, the self-proclaimed “senator next door” is gambling that her message of moving past partisan divides can still work even amid one of the most volatile domestic conflicts of the second Trump administration.
In a gauzy, four-minute video introducing her campaign, Ms. Klobuchar praised the “resilience” of her home state, saying that she would not be a “rubber stamp” for the Trump administration but that she would also seek “common ground” to fix problems in the state.
“Now is our moment to renew our commitment to the common good,” said Ms. Klobuchar, speaking directly to the camera. “I’m asking you to look to each other. I’m asking you to look up to the North Star and to see that there is a better future before us.”
Her message of togetherness marks a striking contrast to the approach of many fellow Democrats, who have focused on demonstrating to their furious base that they are “fighters” ready to take on the president in the courts, the halls of Congress, protest marches and on social media.
Ms. Klobuchar’s campaign may offer an early test of whether a message more focused on restoring calm and consensus can drive Democrats to the polls and expand their margins in battleground areas. She will, however, begin the race as the heavy favorite and is unlikely to face a serious primary opponent. Republicans, who have not won a statewide race in Minnesota since 2006, have grown more pessimistic about their chances in the wake of the unrest.
She signaled her intention to run shortly after Gov. Tim Walz, a Democrat, made the stunning decision to end his campaign for a third term in early January, amid a major scandal over fraud in social services programs in Minnesota.
Ms. Klobuchar nodded to that controversy in her video, saying, “I will make sure the people who steal taxpayer money go to jail, and root out the fraud by changing the way state government works.”
More recently, the killings of the two demonstrators in Minneapolis at the hands of federal agents have prompted a national furor that pushed the fraud allegations out of the news cycle.
Democrats across the country have raced to tap into voter anger over immigration enforcement tactics, pushing to halt billions of dollars in funding for the Department of Homeland Security and upending campaign messaging focused on the cost of living.
Ms. Klobuchar has been trying to harness the fury of her base without losing moderate voters who still support stricter border controls.
In her video, Ms. Klobuchar never mentioned President Trump by name, even as she promised to oust Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and what she described as the agency’s “abusive tactics,” from Minnesota.
“We want immigration enforcement,” Ms. Klobuchar said this week in an interview on a local Fox station. “We want order at the border, but what we don’t want is groups of, basically, thugs roaming our streets, not following the law.”
She opened her announcement video by recounting the wave of violence that has hit her state over the past year: the assassination of State Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband, a shooting at a Catholic church that killed two children and the killings of the two demonstrators. She also pointed to the influx of thousands of federal immigration agents.
“Minnesota, we’ve been through a lot,” she said. “We cannot sugarcoat how hard this is.”
The chaos in Minneapolis has already affected Ms. Klobuchar’s nascent candidacy, prompting her to push back her formal announcement after federal agents fatally shot Alex Pretti, an intensive care unit nurse, during a demonstration on Saturday.
She begins the race as the heavy favorite and is unlikely to face a serious primary opponent, lessening the pressure she may feel from her party’s left flank over her moderate stance on immigration.
During her 2020 presidential campaign, Ms. Klobuchar rejected calls by some Democrats to abolish ICE.
In recent days, she has urged fellow Senate Democrats to join her in voting against funding for the Department of Homeland Security — a move that could lead to another government shutdown.
And she has said that she has been “pleading” with administration officials in private meetings and calls to withdraw federal officers from her state.
But Ms. Klobuchar has not gone as far as more liberal members of her party, stopping short of calling for ICE to be dismantled.
“We’re always going to have some immigration enforcement in this country — and border control,” she said in an interview on NBC’s “Meet The Press” over the weekend. “But the way that this agency has been functioning is completely against every tenet of law enforcement.”
Should Ms. Klobuchar become governor, she would forfeit her post as the Senate’s third-ranking Democrat.
The race has drawn an unusually large slate of Republican candidates, including the speaker of the Minnesota House, Lisa Demuth, and Mike Lindell, the chief executive of MyPillow and an ally of Mr. Trump.
Even after Mr. Walz dropped his bid, Republican strategists were hopeful that the party could seize on the fraud scandal to weaken Democrats.
But the recent violence has centered the political conversation on Mr. Trump’s immigration enforcement tactics. One Republican candidate, Chris Madel, dropped out of the race after Mr. Pretti’s killing, calling the federal immigration operation “a disaster.”
Ms. Klobuchar does not have to relinquish her Senate seat to run for governor. If she were to win and remain in the Senate until she became governor, she would be able to name her own replacement.
That would leave the state with two new senators. Senator Tina Smith, a Democrat, announced she would retire at the end of her term in 2026.
“I like my job in the Senate,” Ms. Klobuchar said in her announcement video. “But I love our state more than any job.”
Lisa Lerer is a national political reporter for The Times, based in New York. She has covered American politics for nearly two decades.
The post Amy Klobuchar Calls for Unity as She Begins Run for Minnesota Governor appeared first on New York Times.
