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Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), who is expected to be the incoming Senate minority leader, has thrown his support behind Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) to be the next chairman of the Democratic National Committee. The backing provides a major boost to the expected candidacy of Ellison, who has the support of several liberal lawmakers, including Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and an array of progressive advocacy groups. Schumer spokesman Matt House said that Schumer and Ellison spoke Thursday and that Schumer has decided to support the Minnesota lawmaker, who co-chairs the Congressional Progressive Caucus....

A crowd is gathering at the University of Minnesota Duluth campus this evening for a rally featuring former presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. Sanders is making his third trip to the Northland this year, this time to campaign for Hillary Clinton, Rick Nolan and other candidates on the Democratic ticket. People started streaming into the venue at the Kirby Student Center just after 5 p.m., with an expected start time of 6 p.m. College students dominated the crowd, but there were people of all ages. "The line has been full of different majors, a really diverse group," said Shelby Chmielecki, 22,...

Is Minnesota now a toss-up state? That’s the verdict from election-tracker site Real Clear Politics this week, which moved Minnesota out of the “Leans Clinton” category in its analysis of the presidential race between Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Donald Trump. If Minnesota is a toss-up, though, the campaigns aren’t acting like it. Trump made campaign stops in neighboring Iowa and Wisconsin on Wednesday, but he skipped Minnesota. Clinton also appeared in Iowa on Thursday but skipped Minnesota — though her campaign did dispatch Anne Holton, wife of vice presidential nominee Tim Kaine, to an early voting event Thursday at...

Local and national polling shows a neck and neck race between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in Minnesota. MINNEAPOLIS, M.N. — For over 50 years, Minnesota has remained a safe haven for democratic presidential votes. Even in 1984, Minnesota was the only state in the union to vote for Walter Mondale instead of Ronald Reagan, who won in a landslide. However, a new KSTP/SurveyUSA poll shows the race between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump is much closer than originally thought in the Land of 10,000 Lakes. The new poll numbers released by KSTP this morning show Clinton leading Trump 46%...

Three Breitbart/Gravis state polls of likely voters — Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina — demonstrate how close the presidential election between Democrat Hillary R. Clinton and her GOP rival Donald J. Trump has become just before the first presidential debate. In Minnesota, Clinton and Trump are tied with each having 43 percent of the vote, said Doug Kaplan, the managing director of Gravis Marketing, the Florida-based polling firm that executed the poll. In Pennsylvania, Clinton leads Trump with 46 percent to his 43 percent, and in North Carolina the former first lady leads Trump 44 percent to the New York...

ST. PAUL—A new Minnesota presidential poll continues to show a closer contest than is common in the state, with Hillary Clinton up by 7 points. However, if Minnesota voters are like Americans in general, half were waiting for debates to begin to make up their minds. A just-released SurveyUSA poll from the Twin Cities' KSTP-TV indicates that if the election were held before the Monday, Sept. 26, opening presidential debate that 46 percent would vote for Democrat Clinton while 39 percent were behind Republican Trump....

ST. PAUL—A new Minnesota Poll shows Donald Trump closing Hilary Clinton's lead in the state, which mirrors national polls showing the presidential race tightening. The Star Tribune's Minnesota Poll indicates Clinton would receive 44 percent of the vote and Trump 38 percent if the election were held now. North Dakota native Gary Johnson, the Libertarian candidate and former New Mexico governor, received 12 percent support, although more than a quarter of those surveyed said they did not know who he is. Democrat Clinton's strongest support came in the heavily Democratic areas of Minneapolis and St. Paul, where she held a...

Sen. Al Franken dusted off his comedic chops over the weekend and took some jabs at his Senate colleague and Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz, declaring him “the lovechild of Joe McCarthy and Dracula.” “Republicans are in kind of a bind since their best hope for stopping Donald Trump is a guy who’s the lovechild of Joe McCarthy and Dracula,” Franken said at MinnPosts's annual variety show, MinnRoast. The event took place last Friday, with video posted on Wednesday. That wasn’t the end of it. He also quipped that “Cruz can be really hard to get along with, but I...

First-time caucus-goers meeting at Neighborhoods Organizing for Change headquarters before introducing the reparations resolution at their precincts. Some Minnesota voters hope to make reparations -- the idea of compensating African Americans for the legacy of slavery -- a main agenda item for the DFL. It didn't get much attention at the time, but voters throughout the state voted at the state's March 2 DFL caucuses to pass a reparations resolution, a proposal brought forth by members of Neighborhoods Organizing for Change (NOC). Passed resolutions don't necessarily make it into official party platforms, but NOC organizers said they're hoping to start...

Hillary Clinton was visibly perturbed during a tense exchange with a young Somali-American voter in Minneapolis on Tuesday when asked about past references to young black men as "super predators" while supporting a federal crime bill that resulted in disparate, harsher sentences for minority communities. Clinton has been under fire for the comments since they were highlighted by Black Lives Matter protesters who crashed a private fundraiser to confront the candidate about them last week. "Well first of all, that comment was made one time," Clinton told the unidentified voter. "I've always been in favor of young people [getting more]...

New York businessman Donald Trump won Republican primaries Tuesday from the Deep South to New England, but Texas Sen. Ted Cruz took his home state and Oklahoma, ensuring that the race for the GOP nomination will stretch into the spring...

The Star Tribune Minnesota Poll surveyed 800 Minnesota registered voters Jan. 18-20, 2016. Respondents were reached on both landlines (70 percent) and cell phones (30 percent). The poll has a margin of sampling error of 3.5 percentage points, plus or minus....

The Ted Cruz campaign for president took a chance booking a venue as large as the Harriet Island Pavilion in St. Paul for a rally. Not to worry. Thursday night, 500-plus Cruz supporters packed the place, a testament to the Texas senator's increasing strength in the Republican field of presidential candidates. They cheered, hooted, and hollered at the candidate who spits out bites of his conservative philosophy with a Texas drawl and John Wayne simplicity. When he is president, he said, “We will have a president willing to utter the words ‘radical Islamic terrorism.’” When he is president, he said,...

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz has easily won a straw poll of Minnesota Republican activists. Cruz finished first among 14 Republican candidates in the poll at the Minnesota GOP State Central Committee meeting Saturday in Monticello. Cruz claimed 90 votes. That was almost twice the votes for the second-place finisher, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who had 46 votes. Former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina came in third. GOP front-runner Donald Trump finished fourth in Saturday's straw poll, followed closely by Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul. Minnesota is one of a dozen states that will hold a primary or caucus on Super Tuesday March...

The leader of Black Lives Matter St. Paul kicked off his campaign for a seat in the state Legislature, challenging the only black member of the Minnesota House for her seat. The Pioneer Press reports that Rashad Turner, 30, a lifelong St. Paul resident, will challenge Rep. Rena Moran next year. The DFL incumbent is in her third term representing Frogtown, Midway, Summit-University, and portions of the North End and Cathedral Hill in St Paul. The Star Tribune’s story said that Turner indicated that he thought not enough progress has been made in St. Paul’s communities of color during Rep....

Minnesota businessman Stewart Mills announced his second challenge to 8th District Democratic Rep. Rick Nolan Tuesday morning. “In 2014, I decided it was time to stop talking about the problems facing our country and start doing something to solve them,” Mills said in a statement. “I intend to finish what I started, and look forward to working for the people of the 8th District.” Mills lost to Nolan by less than 2 points in 2014. He has been mulling a rematch for months and formed an exploratory committee last month. Nolan has been expecting the Republican to challenge him again,...

Sen. Bernie Sanders will get a pre-debate boost from Rep. Keith Ellison, the co-chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, who will become the second member of Congress to endorse Sanders’ insurgent presidential campaign Monday, he told MSNBC. “I’m endorsing Bernie because he is talking about the issues that are important to American families,” Ellison told MSNBC in an email via his spokesperson. “His candidacy is important for many reasons, but I believe the most important part of his candidacy is that it has the ability to create a renaissance in voter participation, which was at its lowest in decades this...

It's been a long-standing tradition at the Iowa State Fair, but now you can cast your kernels for presidential candidates at the Minnesota State Fair. The early front runners in the unscientific poll at the Minnesota Republican Party booth are Donald Trump, Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina. "Anybody can stop by our booth and and cast a vote for whoever their favorite candidate is," GOP Party Chair Keith Downey said. If you make a donation or sign up to support the GOP, voters get a small cup full of corn kernels they can distribute among as many of the candidates...

By far the biggest story of the summer is Donald Trump's surging candidacy for the U.S. presidency. It's obvious why. Hate him or love him, Donald Trump knows how to captivate the public's attention. He seems immune from being hurt; I want to examine why. What is it about Donald Trump that allows him to survive any occurrence that no conventional political candidate could? And, not only that, but to use these instances to further galvanize his base of supporters, while growing it? This summer, we have seen example after example of this. People were horrified when he questioned Sen....