The assassination of an elected official is rare and shocking anywhere on American ground.
Nowhere is it more jarring than in Minnesota, a state known for a singular political culture with high value placed on bipartisanship and a tradition of civic involvement that transcends ideology.
“What happened today is simply incomprehensible and unimaginable, certainly in the context of Minnesota,” Norm Coleman, a former senator from Minnesota and former mayor of St. Paul, said in an interview on Saturday. He ticked off a list of Republican and Democratic politicians who had reached across the aisle — Hubert Humphrey, Tim Pawlenty and Amy Klobuchar. “It’s a history of people who tried to find common ground.”
Authorities in Minnesota were still trying to capture the 57-year-old man who has been identified as the suspect in the shootings that took place early Saturday in the quiet suburbs of the Twin Cities. But they said that it was “politically motivated” act of violence, and that the suspect had papers in his car that indicated he may have been planning to target one of the “No Kings” protests taking place in the state or cities across the country on Saturday.
Even as the national political discourse has grown hyperpartisan in recent years, Minnesota has kept a foothold on its own traditions, formed by a long line of politicians who were known for their openness and bipartisanship approach. Some lawmakers, including State Senator John A. Hoffman, a Democrat who was shot in the attacks overnight, still posted their home addresses online. State Representative Melissa Hortman, a Democrat, was killed in the attacks, along with her husband, Mark, and Mr. Hoffman and his wife, Yvette, were seriously wounded.
Minnesota, one of only three states with a legislature where control is split between Democrats and Republicans, consistently has higher voter turnout than any other state, with 76 percent of voting-age citizens casting ballots in the 2024 presidential election.
“It’s a state where people are highly engaged,” said Alex Conant, a Republican political strategist who has worked on campaigns in Minnesota. “It has one of the best political press corps in the country because there’s a lot of interest in politics. It’s one of the last states to have a robust caucus system, which requires high levels of grass-roots engagement from both parties. Instead of having primaries, where it’s TV ads and turnout operations, it’s caucus systems where neighbors talk to each other about who the nominee is going to be.”
Senator Tina Smith of Minnesota said on Saturday that she was “shattered” by the news of the shootings, having just seen Ms. Hortman on Friday evening at an annual Democratic Party dinner. Ms. Hortman was respected by lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, she said, someone who “had this way of being real with people.”
“It’s that attitude of, ‘I’m not going to spin you, don’t try to spin me,’” she said. “Let’s just talk for real about what we’re trying to get done here.”
Senator Smith said she believed the shootings marked “a very dangerous moment in our country.”
“I think Minnesota is very proud of our civic culture and our belief in the strength of the civic institutions,” she said. “While we certainly have our fights in the Legislature — and I was privy to many of those fights — it never rose to the level of the kind of animosity that we have seen in other parts of the country and Washington, D.C. To see this terrible violence and hatred infecting the political realm in Minnesota is just terrifying to behold.”
Among longtime political observers in Minnesota, there is a deepening sense that the state is changing along with the rest of the country.
While Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, a Democrat, began his political career representing a rural, conservative Congressional district, that career arc seems less imaginable today. The urban-rural divide in Minnesota has become more intense, political strategists said, and the nationalization of party politics has weighed more heavily on voters than local issues.
“I don’t see Minnesota as unique anymore,” said Ryan Dawkins, an assistant professor of political science at Carleton College in Northfield, Minn., who studies American politics and polarization. “A lot of the unique character of state politics is not gone by any stretch, but it has become much more muted as polarization has increased.”
Former Gov. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota, a Republican who was elected in 2002 and re-elected in 2006, pointed to the state’s “nation-leading levels of civic engagement and political civility.”
But he acknowledged that it is no longer the Minnesota it used to be. “While we still cling to it,” he said, “even here it’s slipping away.”
Julie Bosman is the Chicago bureau chief for The Times, writing and reporting stories from around the Midwest.
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