Matt Little had been trailing the Immigration Customs Enforcement agents’ vehicles for a quarter of an hour, careening through traffic across the Minneapolis suburb of Lakeville, when he suddenly realized where they were going. He called Bob Groven, his campaign manager.
“I think they’re headed to my house,” he said.
Mr. Groven laughed. For more than a month, Mr. Little, a 41-year-old lawyer and former mayor of Lakeville who is running for Congress as a Democrat in Minnesota’s Second District, had been spending one or two days a week following federal immigration agents, sometimes posting videos of the encounters on TikTok.
A few minutes earlier, one of the agents had sarcastically blown him a kiss at an intersection. Neither Mr. Little nor Mr. Groven seemed surprised that they knew where he lived.
“I’m going to invite them in,” Mr. Little said. “I mean, we’re all the way here.”
“That’s perfect,” Mr. Groven said. “I love it.”
“Welcome to my house!” Mr. Little called out the window as two of the ICE vehicles blocked the road ahead of him and several agents approached his car. “You guys want to come in for lunch?”
This is what a progressive Democrat’s campaign looks like this year in Minnesota, where several top state and federal offices are up for grabs amid a period of crisis with few if any precedents in the state’s history. Over the past year, Minnesota has been buffeted by a political assassination, a school shooting, a multi-billion-dollar fraud scandal centering on the state’s social welfare programs and, in response to it, months of immigration raids that President Trump described as “retribution.”
That deployment led to the killing of two Minneapolis residents by federal agents and widespread protests throughout January. On Feb. 4, the administration announced plans to draw down the federal presence in the state — though as Mr. Little’s encounter on Feb. 17 made clear, many agents remained in the state weeks later.
Widespread disapproval of these operations, and of Mr. Trump himself, has solidified Democrats’ 2026 hopes for the top races in a state that has been narrowly but reliably blue for decades.
To win statewide, Republicans “need compelling candidates,” a political environment that is not actively tilted against them, “and mistakes by the Democrats,” Tim Pawlenty, the state’s last Republican governor, said in an email. “We haven’t had all of those pieces in place in a long time.”
Early polling shows a commanding Democratic advantage in the governor’s race, in which Sen. Amy Klobuchar is the favorite to succeed Gov. Tim Walz, and a smaller edge in the race for retiring Sen. Tina Smith’s seat, for which Rep. Angie Craig and Peggy Flanagan, the lieutenant governor, are both seeking the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party’s endorsement.
This month, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee added Minnesota’s Republican-held, heavily rural First District to its list of 2026 targets, citing internal polls showing a narrowing contest.
Republicans’ hopes rest on the possibility that outrage over the immigration raids will subside between now and November, and that attention on the fraud investigation will resume. (This week Vice President JD Vance announced that the Trump administration would withhold $259 million in Medicaid funds from the state over the issue.) They welcomed the administration’s Feb. 4 announcement, which has resulted in less national coverage of the ongoing operations in Minnesota.
“I’d be not truthful, or naïve, to say this hasn’t had some effect — of course it has,” said Alex Plechash, the chairman of the state Republican Party. “But you turn on the news now, you don’t see it anymore.”
Some Democrats privately worry about an alternative scenario, in which prolonged anger over the surge pushes Democratic primary contests toward an embrace of policies, or candidates, to the left of the independent voters who may decide some of the state’s closer races.
Mr. Little, who is vying for Ms. Craig’s seat, came out decisively on top of a D.F.L. straw poll this month after campaigning heavily against the federal presence in the state, well ahead of a more moderate rival — a potential sign of how important the ICE issue has become to Democratic voters. But his district is still closely contested terrain. It voted for Mr. Trump in 2016 and was held by Republicans for nearly two decades until Ms. Craig, a moderate Democrat, won it in 2018. Mr. Little represented the Lakeville area in the State Senate for one term but lost his seat to a Republican challenger in 2020.
Republican hopes dimmed
Republicans have not won a gubernatorial election in Minnesota since 2006, a Senate election since 2002, or a presidential election since 1972. But many Republicans believed the party had its strongest hand in years after federal prosecutors issued a wave of indictments in the long-running fraud investigations, which drew renewed attention late last year, prompting Gov. Walz, a Democrat, to announce he would not seek a third term.
After fielding weak candidates in some recent statewide elections, the party had recruited stronger contenders like Michele Tafoya, a former local and national TV sports reporter running for the state’s open Senate seat.
But the ICE surge has, for now, dimmed those hopes. A poll conducted for NBC News and the Minnesota Star Tribune by SurveyMoney in late January and early February found that disapproval of Mr. Trump was widespread even outside of the Twin Cities and their suburbs, and that a majority in the suburbs disapproved of the president. Similar shares in both areas disapproved of ICE’s activities.
“The math isn’t math-ing for the Republicans right now,” said Michael Brodkorb, a former deputy chairman of the state G.O.P., who endorsed Kamala Harris in 2024.
Republicans once looked forward to the prospect of a steady drip of further fraud cases coming out of the U.S. attorney’s office in Minneapolis, strengthening their case against Mr. Walz’s oversight of the state. But a number of the office’s most prominent prosecutors have quit in protest amid the federal surge, and those who remain are contending with heaps of new cases related to the raids.
Chris Madel, a Republican candidate for governor who dropped out of the race in January over the raids, likens Mr. Trump’s decision to launch the surge to a poker game in which “you were sitting there with a royal flush, and you said, ‘You know what? I’m going to get rid of three of these cards and just see what happens.’”
Minnesotans remain broadly opposed to the deployment, and Democratic officials and candidates in the state have cheered on efforts to resist it, sometimes participating themselves. Al Franken, the state’s former Democratic senator, was among the participants in a recent training in St. Paul for ICE observers hosted by a local nonprofit.
But what kind of official resistance should be expected of politicians has become a point of sharp contention in the Senate primary contest between Ms. Craig and Ms. Flanagan. Ms. Craig, who has campaigned on her electability as a moderate, now supports the impeachment of the Homeland Security secretary, Kristi Noem.
Ms. Flanagan, who hails from the left wing of the party, has criticized Ms. Craig for her vote last year for the Laken Riley Act, which expanded detentions and deportations of undocumented immigrants accused of crimes, and has said the only appropriate course of action for the agency is “to rip it apart and start over.”
“I want to go to Washington to avenge Minnesota,” she said in an interview. “There is an absolute need to restore and repair and heal what they’ve broken.”
But in the First Congressional District, which Mr. Walz represented in Congress before running for governor in 2018 and which is now represented by a Republican, Brad Finstad, Democrats have to balance the demands of the party’s base with a narrowly split November electorate.
Jake Johnson, a local teacher and first-time Democratic candidate who is challenging Mr. Finstad, described ICE as a “well-funded, poorly trained militia,” but he steered away from talk of abolishing the agency. “I don’t see that as the best way of moving forward, to be honest,” he said.
“We need to win over voters that voted for Trump, so we’re not running against Trump,” he said.
A focus on fraud scandal
For Republicans, the best hope for the 2026 election may be the simple fact that it is still more than eight months away. They say they intend to refocus attention on the fraud scandal as a central issue of the campaign, though they acknowledge this will be more complicated with Mr. Walz out of the race.
“Maybe it’s not rising to the level at the top of the newsfeed for everybody, but we didn’t get our money back,” said Lisa Demuth, the state House speaker and a Republican candidate for governor, who won the state G.O.P.’s straw poll this month.
Day Pahl, a nursing assistant in Rochester, a small city in Mr. Finstad’s district, who voted for Mr. Trump in 2024, said that she had not paid attention to this year’s races yet. Many of the issues swirling around them seemed distant to her, too.
The fraud scandal had not made much of an impact — “I just saw a little bit about it on TikTok,” Ms. Pahl, 22, said — and she was ambivalent about the ICE raids.
“I agree with it to an extent, you know?” she said. Still, she went on, “I feel like they probably have gotten too trigger happy.”
For others, however, it is hard to forget the events of the past several months.
Argy Goodfriend, an oncology nurse in Lakeville and a registered Republican, voted for Mr. Trump in 2016 and Mr. Biden in 2020. Unhappy with her choices in 2024, she wrote in Mickey Mouse on her ballot.
She was still undecided in this year’s elections, but the ICE deployment loomed large in her thinking. A daughter of Greek immigrants, Ms. Goodfriend, 55, now carries a copy of her passport, even though she was born in the United States.
“You just don’t know what cars they’re in, what they’re going to pull people over for,” she said. “It kind of seems like they’re just targeting everyone and everything.”
The region’s unsettled politics were visible through the windows of Mr. Little’s S.U.V. on the morning he went looking for ICE agents in the Lakeville area.
“Hey man, you do me a favor and turn off your car real quick?” one of the masked agents asked after they stopped his car near his home.
“I can put it in park,” Mr. Little replied.
“Can you turn it off for our safety, man?” the agent asked.
“I’m not going anywhere, dude,” Mr. Little said.
“Yeah, that’s what everybody says, though.”
At that moment a man pulled up alongside the agents in an S.U.V. and rolled down his window. “Thank you guys for what you do,” he told them. “You take a lot more [expletive] than you deserve.”
The agents told Mr. Little that he had impeded an investigation and that local law enforcement officers were on their way to take down his information. But no police arrived, and after five minutes the federal agents drove off.
It was Mr. Little’s second encounter of the morning. Earlier, driving through a nearby residential neighborhood, he had seen a driver idling at an intersection and pulled up alongside the vehicle to investigate.
The man at the wheel turned out to be watching for ICE himself, and recognized Mr. Little.
“I know who you are,” he said, “and I appreciate what you’re doing.”
