Category: Politics

ST. PAUL, Minn. — On a sweltering summer morning, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D.,Minn.) was making small talk with merchants at the St. Paul farmers market when a cheesemaker expressed a sentiment that has kept coming up as Klobuchar campaigns for Minnesota governor.

“We’re going to miss you in Washington,” the cheesemaker, Brenda Carlson, told Klobuchar while bagging a piece of Tilsit.

Klobuchar acknowledged having mixed feelings about leaving her seat as the chamber’s third highest-ranking Democrat. “But we need to get this sorted out,” she said, frowning slightly.

By “this,” Klobuchar meant the current condition of Minnesota, which has become a punching bag in the Trump administration’s quest to portray Democratic-run states and cities as hopelessly dysfunctional.

As she gears up for what could be the capstone of a decades-long political career, Klobuchar is pitching herself as uniquely qualified to clean up the messes at home and reset the state’s poisonous relationship with the White House.

Her reputation makes the case, supporters say: She is known as both a hard-charging workaholic who scrutinizes program details to a fault and a centrist with allies on both sides of the aisle in Washington, including in President Donald Trump’s administration.

But both qualities could also cause friction. Minnesota agencies are bracing for turbulence as Klobuchar vows to audit every state program. And many residents remain shell shocked from the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown early this year, which paralyzed the Twin Cities for weeks and left two U.S. citizens dead.

When it comes to relations with the president, some residents say they want a fighter in the governor’s office, not a conciliator.

Nekima Levy Armstrong, a civil rights lawyer who is facing trial over her role organizing a protest against Immigration and Customs Enforcement at a church, said Klobuchar did not speak out stridently enough about the wintertime deportation campaign.

“Many of us felt abandoned by our elected officials during Operation Metro Surge,” Levy Armstrong said. “We felt abandoned by Amy Klobuchar in particular.”

In an interview, Klobuchar said she was “as angry about some of the things Trump has done as anyone.”

“But I have decided that I’m going to get us to a higher place and not act like him,” she said. Her first goal, she added, “is to earn back the trust of the people of Minnesota in state government.”

For now, Minnesota Democrats have expressed almost uniform relief that Klobuchar is their nominee rather than current Gov. Tim Walz.

They began 2026 in panic mode as a scandal over widespread fraud in state-run safety net programs dogged Walz’s bid for a third term. State lawmakers openly fretted that his name at the top of the ballot in this year’s midterm elections would give Republicans a strong shot at winning the governor’s mansion for the first time in two decades and controlling the tightly divided Legislature.

“I would definitely be lying if I said that the worry meter wasn’t ticking up, up, up by the week,” said state Rep. Mike Howard, a Democrat from the Twin Cities.

They exhaled when Walz dropped his reelection bid in early January, as the Trump administration was sending thousands of immigration agents to the state in what the president called a campaign of “RECKONING & RETRIBUTION.”

Klobuchar announced her run for governor later that month as Minnesotans were reeling from the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, two American citizens shot by immigration agents in Minneapolis. “These times call for grit and resilience,” Klobuchar proclaimed.

The announcement amounted to a reversal of fortunes for Democrats, making Klobuchar the clear favorite in the general election race against Lisa Demuth, the Republican speaker of the Minnesota House. Even far-left lawmakers in the state Capitol — where the party has a one-seat majority in the Senate and is tied in the House — have emerged as enthusiastic surrogates for Klobuchar.

“People in the Democratic Party here in Minnesota understand she’s our best path to winning a majority and defending ourselves from Donald Trump,” said state Sen. Zaynab Mohamed, a member of the democratic socialist wing of the party.

Klobuchar kicked off her run by calling all 101 Democrats in the Legislature, keeping several on the phone for more than an hour. There was talk of campaign strategy, lawmakers said, but Klobuchar was most interested in their policy goals.

When she ran for president in 2020, Klobuchar was the subject of several critical articles depicting her as a perfectionist and difficult boss whose office had among the highest turnover in the Senate.

Klobuchar has a tendency to personally tackle tasks most elected officials delegate and to fire off all-caps emails to aides, which often land in inboxes between midnight and dawn.

Some supporters now call that feverish approach an asset.

State Rep. Zack Stephenson, the Democratic leader in the Minnesota House, recalled being startled by a 3 a.m. email from Klobuchar in 2006 when he served as a lowly aide in her first Senate campaign.

“The lesson I took away from that race is that to be successful in politics, the secret is to work really hard,” he said.

The sense of relief extends to Democratic voters like Carlson, the cheesemaker, who says she has soured on Walz, a former schoolteacher and coach who oversaw the adoption of a raft of progressive policies and made a splash on the national stage by running for vice president in 2024.

In recent years, Carlson said, small-business owners like herself have grown frustrated by tax increases and red tape that seem to grow each year. Then came revelations about rampant fraud in state programs meant to feed low-income children, treat minors with autism, and help people at risk of homelessness.

“I just think things got away from him when he did the whole run,” said Carlson, 54, who lives in Center City, a conservative town 40 miles north of the Twin Cities. “He couldn’t keep a watchful eye, and whoever was wasn’t doing their job.”

She said she hoped Klobuchar would be different.

That is the senator’s pitch.

Having enthusiastically backed Walz’s vice-presidential bid two years ago, Klobuchar has now distanced herself from him.

She kicked off her campaign in May by announcing a detailed plan to combat fraud. Evoking the years she served as the elected county prosecutor in Minneapolis, she stood alongside the former U.S. attorney in Minnesota against a backdrop of law books.

“You are right to be angry about the fraud,” Klobuchar said at the time.

Klobuchar has also questioned how Walz and allied lawmakers spent a $17 billion surplus in 2023. After Walz granted a pardon in June to a man convicted of child sexual abuse who was facing deportation to Laos, Klobuchar said she would have let the conviction stand.

A spokesperson for Walz did not respond to a request for comment.

Demuth, the Republican candidate for governor, has sought to portray Klobuchar’s bid as a de facto third term for Walz, questioning why she wasn’t outspoken about the fraud problem before jumping into the race.

“She will not be able to enact the changes that are desperately needed,” Demuth said in an interview.

Klobuchar has called Demuth a “rubber stamp for Donald Trump.”

But how Klobuchar will approach the Trump administration — and whether that will satisfy Democrats in a state with a strong leftist streak — remains unclear.

Activists have pressed her to adopt a statewide sanctuary policy for immigrants without legal status, which would ban local jurisdictions from signing cooperation agreements with ICE. One activist recently confronted Klobuchar about the issue as she marched in a small town parade.

So far she has refused. In the interview, Klobuchar, who has long championed a broad overhaul of the immigration system, said she intended to make a case that immigrants are vital to Minnesota’s economic growth.

“I cannot tell you the number of small businesses that we have run by immigrants in our state,” she said.

Klobuchar trounced a handful of little-known candidates in the Aug. 11 primary, winning nearly 90% of the vote. That dominance meant she avoided being meaningfully drawn into fraught policy debates playing out in other national races, said Kobey Layne, 26, a democratic socialist who placed a distant second.

Layne said she worried that as governor, Klobuchar would prioritize bipartisan cooperation and incremental change over bold overhauls, such as the creation of a state-run, single-payer healthcare system.

Asked about the growing clout of democratic socialists, Klobuchar said she welcomed intraparty policy debates and expected pushback from all sides if elected. She also acknowledged rumors that she was considering appointing Republicans to her cabinet.

“Spoiler alert,” she said. “You’re not going to like everything I do.”

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

TANGERMÜNDE, Germany — During the coronavirus pandemic, a little-known German state lawmaker with an upbeat patter and a telegenic smile started railing on TikTok against pandemic regulations. Complaining about masks, vaccinations, and other government requirements that he deemed “crazy,” the lawmaker attracted millions of viewers with his videos by using an affable tone to deliver an antiestablishment message.

Now, that lawmaker, Ulrich Siegmund, has harnessed his online popularity to come closer to power than any other far-right politician in Germany since the Nazi era ended in 1945.

Siegmund, 35, a former air freshener salesperson, is the lead candidate for the Alternative for Germany party in Saxony-Anhalt, a state in eastern Germany where the party was projected to finish first in a statewide election on Sunday.

If the party, known by its German initials, AfD, wins an outright majority, Siegmund will become the first far-right politician to govern a German state since the reestablishment of the country’s democracy nearly eight decades ago. That would be a convulsive moment for Germany’s postwar political system, which was designed in the aftermath of World War II to prevent politicians deemed extremist from ever taking office.

To the political establishment in Berlin, Siegmund’s party is an outcast. The domestic intelligence agency has labeled it as “suspected extremist,” an accusation it rejects as politically motivated. The party has said that Islam is incompatible with the German Constitution and has vowed mass deportations of immigrants. Several of its leaders are close to Russia, and some have made dog whistle comments about the Nazi era, such as minimizing the Holocaust and repeating Nazi slogans.

Siegmund himself has said, in a podcast interview with Politico, that he could not “presume to judge” if the Holocaust was humanity’s worst-ever crime, “because I can’t possibly come to terms with the entirety of human history.” He also declined to condemn supporters who chanted his surname, Siegmund, in the style of the Nazi salute, “Sieg Heil.”

Still, Siegmund has won over voters in Saxony-Anhalt, experts say, through his ability to present the party’s hard-line policies in a more approachable and optimistic tone than many of his AfD colleagues, without distancing himself from extremists. In addition to deporting immigrants, the party has proposed cutting funding for public broadcasters, banning gay pride flags in schools, and teaching more Russian, as well as providing tax breaks for large families and free childcare.

“I can provide motivation, create a sense of optimism, and get things moving forward again,” Siegmund said in an interview with the New York Times this year. (He declined more recent interview requests.)

That affability has made him more acceptable to voters beyond his hard-right base, said Steffen Mau, a prominent sociologist at Humboldt University of Berlin.

“He’s a canvas onto which people can project some kind of promise for the future,” Mau said.

Many mainstream politicians, who have said Siegmund and the AfD are dangerous, also call his proposals unrealistic. “Whenever the topic turns to substance, when people actually ask how you intend to move our country forward economically, you’re nowhere to be found,” Sven Schulze, the incumbent governor of Saxony-Anhalt, said to Siegmund during a televised debate last month.

An August cover story in Germany’s premier newsmagazine, Der Spiegel, called him “the most dangerous man in Germany,” partly because his sunny disposition makes his party’s hard-line goals more palatable to some voters. Siegmund’s followers took it as a badge of honor and, during campaign stops, asked him to sign copies of the edition.

Siegmund is “so approachable and charming,” said Wolfram Adler, 67, a retired train driver who attended one of those rallies.

From air fresheners to politics

Born in 1990, weeks after the reunification of East and West Germany, Siegmund was raised in the picturesque medieval town of Tangermünde, in eastern Germany.

Growing up in the east, he came of age amid increasing resentment about how reunification played out for his home region. The east’s economy, employment rates, and population ebbed after 1990, leading many East Germans to feel excluded in the new Germany. It was a sense of grievance on which the AfD would later capitalize, particularly in Saxony-Anhalt where the unemployment rate of roughly 8% is well above the national average.

In his 20s, Siegmund worked as an account manager at a healthcare provider before starting his own business in Berlin selling room deodorizers.

He joined the Christian Democratic Union, a mainstream conservative party that currently leads the national coalition government.

But he soon grew tired of the party’s rigid leadership structures, he has said in past interviews with the news media, and joined the AfD in 2014. He was drawn to the AfD, he said, because the party stood against what he perceived as the high-handed policies of the national government in Berlin.

The AfD was founded in opposition to Germany’s adoption of the euro. After it shifted to an anti-immigrant message, Siegmund ran on the party’s slate for the statehouse in 2016. He won a seat as the party netted 24% of the state vote, profiting from growing concerns about Germany’s decision to welcome roughly 1 million refugees during the European migrant crisis. He also served on his local council alongside his father and brother.

He rose to national fame in 2021 with his personable videos about pandemic restrictions, helping to project both the party and himself as the voice of voters who felt disenfranchised by mainstream parties.

Now, Siegmund has more than 850,000 followers on TikTok, an astronomical number for any German politician, giving him a platform that helped to amplify his stump speeches on the campaign trail this summer.

When speaking to sizable crowds, he has often filmed the scene on his phone, turning the camera toward the crowds to show viewers how big they were.

“When you see all of Siegmund’s campaign appearances, it becomes perfectly clear: They’re not primarily intended for the live audience, they’re primarily for the internet,” said Paula Diehl, a professor who studies populist leaders at Kiel University.

His preppy shirts and his trademark tuft of graying hair have made him instantly recognizable in Tangermünde, his hometown of 10,000 residents. During the Times interview this year, passersby repeatedly greeted him, wished him luck or smiled.

Throughout the conversation, he combined a measured, even tolerant tone with a hard-line, exclusionary message.

He said that he did not blame immigrants for coming to Germany — before, seconds later, vowing to make their lives in his state “very uncomfortable.”

Combining nostalgia with optimism

The backgrounds of his campaign team also highlight his contradictions. The production company behind Siegmund’s genial campaign videos is led by a far-right activist with the Identitarians, a movement that German intelligence has accused of extremism. Siegmund’s spokesperson was once part of a banned extremist group inspired by the Hitler Youth.

Siegmund did not reply to requests for comment about these links. In interviews with other outlets, he dismissed their relevance.

Siegmund, said Diehl, “pretends to engage in an inclusive discourse and then immediately shatters it.”

Part of his strategy has been to tap into nostalgia for East Germany among some residents, even though he was born after it collapsed. Though many remember Communism as a dictatorship, some recall it as a time of full employment and stability.

One campaign event featured a comedian who sang the East German national anthem — an act so contentious, because it appeared to validate an authoritarian regime, that even some AfD politicians distanced themselves from it.

At some events, Siegmund rode through the countryside on a Simson, an anemic two-stroke East German motorcycle that has long been associated with life during Communism. His machine was painted baby blue to match the AfD’s colors.

At other times, he has sought to look forward instead of back. Tapping into widespread disenchantment with high unemployment and living costs, he has painted a picture of a better, if ill-defined, future under AfD leadership.

“Things are going downhill everywhere, and that’s a bad and demotivating place to start,” he said in the Times interview. “I want things to start moving uphill,” he said.

Critics say he is simply selling false hope, pointing to his past life as a salesperson.

“I discovered my strength in sales early on,” Siegmund told a business magazine in 2014. “I love to sell.”

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

WASHINGTON — In the White House Rose Garden, President Donald Trump recently gathered some of the most politically endangered House Republicans for a dinner where he promised to make himself the face of the party’s uphill battle to keep control of Congress.

He was with them “100% — all the way until November,” Trump told the roughly two dozen lawmakers as they dined on prime aged beef burgers at tables adorned with bouquets of yellow roses. The president said he would travel to 35 key districts “to see if we can get everyone elected.”

The scene encapsulated the box that GOP lawmakers have found themselves in as they stare down a bleak political environment.

They cannot afford to snub Trump, needing help from his enormous financial reserves and strong turnout from his base to win their campaigns. But they also do not want the election to be a referendum on the president, whose popularity is at a record low. And so far, he has shown little appetite for focusing on anyone’s political needs besides his own.

Two months before the midterm elections, Trump and the Republicans who have long tied their political fortunes to him appear to be at cross-purposes as the party struggles to keep the House and Senate in GOP hands.

As Republicans work to distance themselves from the president’s unpopular decisions, Trump is headlining a splashy convention in Dallas this week and has said that voters should “pretend, please, that I’m on the ballot.” As the candidates work to show they are focused on the concerns of everyday Americans, the president is spending much of his time in Washington focused on the construction of a White House ballroom, a 250-foot arch, and a golf course on a public park alongside the Potomac River. And as they brace for the final costly weeks of their campaigns, he has yet to dole out hardly any of the nearly $1 billion he says his political action committee has raised.

“This is my money that I control,” Trump said Friday, suggesting he would spend between $400 million and $500 million on “Republicans that I think are good.” His political operation reported Saturday that it had made its first expenditure, to defend a Senate seat in Texas. But beyond that, Republicans have received little information about when or where the money may come.

For now, Trump appears to be focused primarily on promoting himself and boosting his popularity.

The first 30-second television spot released by his political team, the launch of a post-Labor Day ad blitz, was a case in point. It touted the president as “the toughest, most resilient person” and made no mention of Democrats, the midterm elections, or any Republican candidates.

And as Trump gathers Republicans in Dallas on Wednesday for the unprecedented two-day midterm party convention, the festivities will be as much about boosting his own approval ratings and public self-esteem as it is the candidates who are actually on the ballot, a person involved with the planning said.

“The president called me two nights before Thanksgiving last fall, and he said, ‘Mike, we got to do a midterm convention,’” House Speaker Mike Johnson said. “And I said, ‘That’s not a thing.’ And he said, ‘Make it a thing.’ OK. So we’re going to do a midterm convention.”

‘A ball and chain’

Many vulnerable Republicans are steering clear of this week’s convention, choosing instead to spend time campaigning in their states and districts. And while some see a benefit in the confab as a way to raise money for the party — tickets cost $25,000, including for lawmakers — they also worry that it will do exactly what candidates most want to avoid: turn the election into a national conversation about Trump.

After 10 years of tying themselves to Trump, Republicans have little room to maneuver around him. Candidates up and down the ballot have embraced his lies about American elections, while few have publicly broken with him on signature issues such as spending cuts, tariffs, or the war with Iran.

A White House spokesperson disputed that there was any fissure between the president and his party.

“President Trump is the unequivocal leader of the Republican Party, who is committed to maintaining Republicans’ majority in Congress,” Olivia Wales, the spokesperson, said.

But some Republicans fear the party has little to campaign on after two years that have yielded few legislative achievements and a spare congressional schedule that involved weeks on end at home. Some of Trump’s moves, they argue, have made things worse.

“I’m fearful that the president’s numbers are a ball and chain that will be hard to overcome,” said Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska, a moderate Republican who is not running for reelection in his battleground district. “I’m worried that we’ve lost a lot of our swing voters. In the Midwest, tariffs aren’t popular. Ukraine polls at 70% — why aren’t we doing more for them? Nebraskans don’t like chaos and all the name-calling and treating our allies bad.”

Republicans are banking instead on portraying Democrats as socialist extremists and themselves as the sane and sober alternative. (A handful of democratic socialists have won primaries this year, though their numbers in Congress are likely to remain in the single digits.)

Johnson, who has raised $135 million this cycle, has been leaning heavily on that contrast.

“Imagine a nightmare scenario with these insurgent, Marxist Democrats taking over the Congress,” Johnson said this past week while campaigning in Texas. “They would impeach the president on the first day.”

Placing bets, but when?

The biggest question for Republicans has been when — and if — Trump will begin spending down his political operation’s prodigious resources.

Trump’s super PAC, MAGA Inc., has so far stayed almost entirely on the sidelines and has not communicated its plans, even privately.

Two of Trump’s political advisers, James Blair, a former top White House aide, and Tony Fabrizio, a longtime pollster, briefed Republican senators last month and left a strong impression that money was coming imminently, according to two people who attended the private meeting and spoke on the condition of anonymity. But little has been spent as some Republicans are growing anxious that races in North Carolina and Georgia may be falling further out of reach.

Apart from the new investment in Texas, so far Trump’s super PAC has only spent this year to boost Sen. Darline Graham in last month’s Republican primary in South Carolina. The president had put his reputation on the line in that contest by endorsing Graham, but its outcome in a solidly Republican state was unlikely to affect his party’s chances of holding the Senate.

Trump’s advisers, people familiar with their thinking said, are reluctant to spend his money when House and Senate leaders have yet to drain their own campaign coffers.

Blair has been in regular contact with counterparts in the Republican leaders’ political operations to strategize about how to most effectively use the president’s funds in the midterms.

But there have been some major splits. Trump’s decision to back Ken Paxton, the scandal-tarnished Texas attorney general who defeated Sen. John Cornyn in a primary this year, angered Sen. John Thune of South Dakota, the majority leader, and other Republicans who saw it as making that state far more costly for the party to defend.

Thune has all but begged Trump to put some of his own resources into the race. On Saturday, MAGA Inc. reported it had begun doing so, spending $10 million on television and digital advertising in Texas.

Separation is hard

A handful of vulnerable Republicans have sought to carefully create some distance between themselves and Trump. Unlike previous presidents who have made themselves scarce when politics demanded it, Trump has not made it easy.

Rep. Mike Lawler of New York recently aired a digital advertisement that features the president calling him a “pain in the a—” for advocating the repeal of the cap on the state and local tax deduction. But Lawler is also planning to speak at the convention.

Rep. Tom Barrett of Michigan bought ads on Facebook touting his votes to limit Trump’s war powers in Iran. But in July, Trump held a rally in his district and called the congressman to the stage alongside him. “I’m proud to stand with you today,” Barrett said.

A handful of other Republicans, including the party’s nominees for governor of Georgia and Maine and several running for Congress, have quietly scrubbed photos of Trump from their campaign websites or removed mentions of his endorsement — which they were happy to promote during primary contests.

But there are not many examples of Trump-era Republicans successfully distancing themselves from the president in the eyes of voters. In 2018, the last midterm election with Trump in office, he celebrated the defeat of House Republicans like then-Rep. Mia Love of Utah, who had been critical of him.

“The idea that you can run away from him is silly,” said Corry Bliss, who ran the House Republican super PAC in 2018. “Republicans need to have a thoughtful conversation with their voters about what they’ve accomplished. Some of them won’t have a single thing to say, and they’re the ones who will lose.”

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.