Olson: House Speaker Lisa Demuth on a future without Melissa Hortman

Opinion editor’s note: Strib Voices publishes a mix of commentary online and in print each day. To contribute, click here.

•••

Just two years after joining Minnesota House leadership as the Republican minority leader, Lisa Demuth of Cold Spring became speaker at the outset of the 2025 session, presiding over a historic tie between the parties.

Her DFL counterpart for all three sessions was Rep. Melissa Hortman of Brooklyn Park — a steady, strategic presence across the aisle — who was assassinated June 14. That morning, as the grim news of the shootings reached Demuth, the loss hit with force.

“My first call in that situation would have been to Melissa and [I would have] said, ‘Hey, how do you wanna? What do you think?’ And I didn’t have that,” Demuth said.

Now, each “first” without Hortman — the first meeting, the first negotiation, the first return to the chamber in February — will carry weight. “The firsts are going to be so hard,” Demuth said. But the work of governing doesn’t pause.

From her early days as minority leader in the 2023 session, when the DFL had the trifecta, controlling both chambers and the governor’s office, Hortman made clear that Demuth wouldn’t be sidelined. She insisted on weekly meetings, a gesture of respect and, eventually, trust.

“She was just very clear, leader to leader, that if there were concerns on either one of our parts, we could bring them up in those meetings,” Demuth said.

They didn’t agree on everything. There were some rough patches. But Demuth said she learned from Hortman’s grace.

That relationship mattered even more on election night in 2024, when it became clear that the House would be evenly split. At 2:30 a.m., Hortman texted Demuth. They needed a plan to govern together, and to studiously avoid the dysfunction that plagued Minnesota’s last tied House in 1979.

It wasn’t always smooth or easy, but Demuth said the two were collegial and candid in private. Publicly, the weeks leading up to the start of the 2025 session were testy as partisan control shifted with election disputes playing out in the courts. The DFL boycotted the Capitol, delaying the start of the House session.

“If you look at the timeline, it sounds like fiction.” Demuth said.

A defining Republican win was the removal of MinnesotaCare coverage for undocumented adults — a devastating blow for Democrats, but a nonnegotiable for Demuth.

There was no time to celebrate. The special session wrapped on a Monday. On Saturday morning, Hortman, her husband, Mark, and their dog, Gilbert, were gone.

The speaker said she heard from elected leaders across the country who expressed condolences and respect for Hortman. “Because of Melissa’s long career, most of them had either met her or knew her,” Demuth said.

Since then, Demuth’s summer has been about balancing time with her large family — she shared photos of two grandsons holding up prize catches from a recent family fishing trip — while managing the grief and aftershocks of the shootings.

This wasn’t Demuth’s first experience in proximity to deadly gun violence. Two of her children were students at Rocori High School in 2003 when a freshman student fatally shot two of their classmates. Her kids returned to school days later when school reopened.

Demuth will remain speaker through the 2026 session regardless of any changes in the House composition through special elections. At some point, the DFL will select a successor to Hortman to lead the party’s House caucus. The question of whether to increase Capitol security will be an early test.

Demuth, meanwhile, is focused on helping the institution recover. She spoke of giving staff and lawmakers space to process, not pushing for quick legislative responses.

“Everybody is going to process and react to things a little bit differently,” she said. “But this is an opportunity for people to pull together and even if you don’t ideologically agree on things, you can still pull together and understand that grief is different.”

She said she’s doing OK, “because you have to be.” She hopes to hold on to the sense of unity that followed the tragedy, however fragile.