For the Independence Party's Tom Horner, September was a window of opportunity. He reached 18 percent in one gubernatorial poll, setting off speculation about a repeat third-party ascension to the governor's mansion; he lined up an impressive array of Republican endorsements, including those of former Republican Gov. Arne Carlson and 13 past GOP legislators; and midway through the month he was raising money at the impressive rate of $40,000-plus a day.

Tom Emmer is losing the governor's race. Of the 12 polls released since June, only one showed the Republican gubernatorial nominee with a lead - and that was a statistically meaningless one-point edge.

Few political issues have been as intractable in the last half-century as redistricting, according to University of Minnesota political science professor Larry Jacobs.

State House candidate Tom Heyd doesn't relish the idea of extending the state sales tax to clothing. And from what he's heard door-knocking in the conservative District 16B, voters aren't excited about it either.

A slate of prominent Minnesota Democrats gathered at a private home Tuesday evening to appeal to DFLers who are thinking about voting for Independence Party gubernatorial candidate Tom Horner in November instead of DFL nominee Mark Dayton. The event, hosted by top-drawer DFLers like House Speaker Margaret Anderson Kelliher, Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak and former House Minority Leader Matt Entenza - all of them one-time 2010 candidates for governor themselves - was billed as question-and-answer session in a mass email sent out to Democrats.

At a Catholic Charities gathering last fall, Tom Horner and Stephen Imholte began chatting about the looming 2010 governor's race. They knew each other casually from years spent working on Republican campaigns and causes. But as they talked, it also became clear that they shared a growing frustration with the increasingly rightward tilt of the GOP in recent years. Both believed that there was an opening in 2010 for a centrist candidate to exploit the polarization of the two dominant political parties and the resulting gridlock at the Capitol.

Independence Party gubernatorial nominee Tom Horner started the week gone by looking like a candidate destined to fulfill his party's customary spoiler role in the Minnesota governor's race. By Thursday, however, Horner had:

The only thing that marks Peter Idusogie's Brooklyn Park office space as a campaign headquarters is a single sign perched in his back window: "Elect Peter Idusogie for governor of Minnesota. People are everything."

Ecumen CEO Roberts has changed the former nursing home provider into market-rate senior housing developer - despite no prior experience with housing or seniors.

In October 1933, the 21 members of the Constitutional Convention of Minnesota unanimously agreed that the 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which had established Prohibition 14 years earlier, should be repealed.