Good morning. The election countdown has hit four weeks to impact.

A month away from Election Day, we’re watching to see if Minnesota’s lower-key Senate race jumps into a higher-tier contest. U.S. Senate Majority John Thune campaigned with Republican candidate Michele Tafoya in Le Sueur on Monday. He called Minneota’s race a “very unique race” that is starting to generate GOP buzz . But so far, we haven’t seen outside groups pour money in as they are in the battleground states. DFL nominee Peggy Flanagan also spent recent days traveling the state and spoke outside a gas station in Brooklyn Park yesterday, highlighting the high cost of gas and President Donald Trump’s war in Iran. It’s rare for Minnesota to have an open Senate seat, but the race hasn’t garnered much attention from either national party. Thune was coy about future party plans for Minnesota, but the GOP is dropping tens of millions of dollars into places like Ohio, Texas, Michigan, Iowa and Alaska. Even Kansas has risen on the radar, with Republicans now spending heavily to protect an incumbent. 

The leading candidates for Minnesota governor — Republican Lisa Demuth and Democrat Amy Klobuchar — made pitches to the business community yesterday about why they’d be best to lead the state. Both spoke with the Economic Club of Minnesota at an event in Golden Valley. They talked about taxes, a push to end fraud in state government programs and plans to make Minnesota more of a magnet for businesses and workers. Demuth said her plan would start with a rollback of mandates on businesses that came out of the last DFL trifecta. She also said the state work force grew too much in recent years and she’d look to trim it. “It's finding right-sizing. Any business person in this room knows when you are facing challenging economic times, you find ways to right-size and to cut costs,” Demuth said. Klobuchar said she would consider trimming some state programs if an audit of state government revealed redundancies. “The top-to-bottom audit is about the fraud, but it is also about what we can get rid of when it comes to duplicative functions, duplicative programs,” Klobuchar said. She said the state should also increase apprenticeship positions, work on bringing down the cost of housing, childcare and healthcare and streamline the state permitting process.

Lisa Demuth’s upbringing has been a point of illumination as she lands on the biggest political stage of her career, in part because of the way it might inform the Republican governor candidate’s approach to the social safety net. In a substantive conversation with the Star Tribune’s Briana Bierschbach , Demuth shared additional details of her childhood in a family that was, in her telling, briefly on state assistance. She’s used that past to reinforce her stance that the programs have been weakened by fraud and verification of enrollees needs to be stiffened to safeguard them. She said her family’s ability to move from using assistance to sustaining itself demonstrates the programs should be reserved for the “most needy” and not be a “permanent condition.” She said, “As soon as you are able to be more self-sufficient, you should be. …Those programs are a safety net while people get on their feet.” Demuth would have a big budget task on her hands next year because she’s promising a battery of tax cuts and fee relief and would need to find cuts or other cost savings to make the numbers work. Demuth said she would set out to slim government to the tune of $1 billion but hasn’t yet detailed what would be sacrificed, other than some very small items like the “lawns to legumes” program (one that has cost a couple million dollars per year).

The 87 county checkoff that’s been a mainstay of Amy Klobuchar’s time in the U.S. Senate has been completed again. Klobuchar, this year a DFL candidate for governor, made her final foot tap in Freeborn County, with a visit to an oats milling facility in Albert Lea. Her itinerary over the year has included visits to schools, project groundbreakings, community gatherings, natural disaster surveying and coffeehouse drop-ins. 

There will not be a trial this fall involving a man who violently attacked state lawmakers and their families. Vance Boelter’s state trial has been moved to May 2027 . While Boelter pleaded guilty to federal charges and will spend the rest of his life in prison, he also faces state charges in the killing of Melissa and Mark Hortman and the nonfatal shootings of John and Yvette Hoffman. Boelter has spent the time since his federal guilty plea making spurious claims and suggesting the attacks were justified. A gag order has been issued in the case. A Hennepin County District Court judge delayed the trial from November to May because of the evidence his defense team wants time to review. Boelter admitted to staging middle-of-the-night attacks on the Hortmans and Hoffmans while posing as a police officer. He also stalked other Democratic lawmakers. 

Anyone who has been to the Capitol in the past year knows that security screening is now routine for visitors and others who work there (lawmakers and some staff get to bypass it). Sometimes there have been chokepoints on busy days. The Department of Public Safety is ready to buy more weapons screeners and bag scanners. A request for bids posted last week calls for two more of each kind of hardware so maybe that means additional capacity through more checkpoints. The purchase could be $250,000 to $320,000 for a one-year contract, according to the bid materials. The state hopes to procure the devices quickly. Bidding ends on Oct. 6 and delivery could be soon after.