Minnesota’s GOP Senate Primary is Suddenly Competitive

Republican candidate for Senate Royce White (Back C) poses for a photo before a rally featuring former President Donald Trump and vice presidential nominee Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) at Herb Brooks National Hockey Center in St Cloud, Minn., on July 27, 2024. (Stephen Maturen/Getty Images)

MINNEAPOLIS—Minnesota is, ordinarily, a heavily Democratic Party state. No Republican currently holds state office, and the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party controls both houses of the state Legislature.

It has provided a pipeline for national politics of progressive champions, such as former Vice President Walter Mondale, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), and state Attorney General Keith Ellison. And recently, Vice President Kamala Harris picked Democrat Gov. Tim Walz, who has a long record of progressive legislative achievements, as her running mate for the 2024 presidential election.

Yet Minnesota’s politics may be changing.

In 2016, former President Donald Trump lost the state by just 1.5 percentage points—a significant improvement over past GOP nominees—although that margin increased in 2020. To shore up his support, Trump held a rally with his running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), in St. Cloud on July 27.

In Walz’s former House seat, Rep. Angie Craig (D-Minn.) is fighting a tough reelection race that’s rated as a “toss-up.” Cook’s Partisan Voting Index scores the state as D+1, meaning it barely leans Democrat, which puts Minnesota on the verge of battleground state status.

In this political climate, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) is running for reelection to a fourth term. Opinion polls indicate she is far ahead of her rivals both in the Democratic primary and in the general election. Yet Trump’s efforts to win the state could give Republicans a boost at the top of the ballot, and the party’s Senate primary campaign has been competitive.

The primary on Aug. 13 will decide Klobuchar’s challenger for the matchup.

The Republican primary is currently a contest between two leading candidates: banking executive Joe Fraser and former professional basketball player and radio host Royce White, who ran for Congress in 2022.

There is no publicly available polling on the primary, but endorsement patterns suggest the race has broken down on factional lines in the GOP between the party’s establishment and populist challengers.

Royce White

White is the populist favorite in the primary. His campaign has been endorsed by Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), Republican Senate nominee Kari Lake of Arizona, MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, and InfoWars founder Alex Jones, among others.

In an upset result, White was also formally endorsed by the Minnesota Republican Party at its convention in May, where delegates voted by a two-thirds majority in favor of his nomination.

“My top priorities are the border, debt, and forever wars,” White states on his campaign website, indicating that he'll support increasing border security, decreasing government spending, and reducing U.S. military involvement abroad. White has also vowed to support congressional term limits, tax cuts, and reforming elections to require paper ballots.

White has attracted controversy for his past statements regarding Jews and Israel that have been criticized by American Jewish groups as anti-Semitic.

White has denied being an anti-Semite and told The Epoch Times that he is being falsely accused.

“This has become a trope that people use when they when they can’t say anything else,” he said, adding that his comments have been about his view that “the Jewish identity ... is now being used to justify the expansion of a global government.”

“I’m one of the biggest critics of Israeli influence and the Jewish lobby. So much I’m frequently called antisemitic,” he wrote in a December 2023 post on social media platform X. “But to say Judaism and Zionism are no different is dumb.”

The Jewish Community Relations Council, a Minnesota-based Jewish activist group, wrote about Royce’s candidacy, “We hope that Republican voters and party leaders will strongly consider whether the habitual antisemitism of Mr. White, which we unequivocally condemn, is something that can be looked past when deciding their party’s standard bearer for the general election.”

Notably, White has raised only $132,721 for his campaign, according to the Federal Election Commission (FEC). Klobuchar, by contrast, has raised more than $18.9 million for her principal committee and more than $3.7 million for her political action committee.

“I don’t think he can win a general election,” Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.), the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, told reporters in May.

White told The Epoch Times in response to the criticism from establishment figures that, “They said all of those things about Donald Trump ... many of them tried their hardest to make sure that Donald Trump was ousted in the Republican primary process because he was ‘unelectable.’”

He said he is now facing similar criticism in his Senate race.

Joe Fraser

Fraser, a former naval intelligence officer and banking executive, is running with the support of the state party establishment. He has been endorsed by the most recent Republicans elected statewide in Minnesota: former Gov. Tim Pawlenty, who left office in 2011, and former U.S. Sens. Norm Coleman and Rudy Boschwitz.

“We need the strongest candidate to win the Aug. 13th primary and Joe Fraser is by far that candidate,” Pawlenty, Coleman, and Boschwitz wrote in a joint statement.

Fraser’s campaign has largely focused on portraying White as unelectable against Klobuchar and damaging to other Republicans in competitive races.

“I am the only candidate who can defeat Amy Klobuchar and return Republican leadership back to our Senate seat,” Fraser wrote on Facebook.

“Royce White will absolutely be a detriment in Minnesota down-ballot. We have a chance at winning, but this guy is going to squander it for us,” he wrote on X.

Fraser has been endorsed by the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC), which cited White’s controversial comments in its endorsement message.

“Minnesota has not elected a Republican Senator in more than 20 years and liberal incumbent Amy Klobuchar is no pushover,” the RJC wrote. “Control of the U.S. Senate is up for grabs and it’s essential that the GOP put forward the strongest possible candidates for every seat.”

Fraser, however, lags far behind even White in fundraising. His campaign has received a little more than $68,000, according to the FEC. He trails Klobuchar in general election matchups, FiveThirtyEight reports.

Polls in Minnesota will open on Aug. 13 at 7 a.m. local time and close at 8 p.m.

The Fraser and Klobuchar campaigns did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Update: This article has been updated to include comment from Royce White.