Before closing his victory speech after winning back the DFL majority in the Minnesota Senate, a teary-eyed DFL Senate Minority Leader Tom Bakk grabbed the arm of one of his first-time candidates and lifted it high. “I want to introduce you to Senator-elect Melisa Franzen,” Bakk shouted to an exuberant crowd of DFLers gathered in downtown St. Paul at the Crowne Plaza Hotel. “They didn’t lose because they are Republicans; they lost because they are wrong.”

House Speaker Kurt Zellers said he won’t seek the caucus’s top leadership position when they hold their post-election meeting on Saturday. Less than 24 hours after both houses of the Legislature flipped from Republican to DFL control, Zellers said he thought it best for him to step aside.

Leaders from all four legislative caucuses are spending the waning days of the 2012 campaign barnstorming key districts around the state.

GOP House Speaker Kurt Zellers will make stops in suburban and rural areas of Minnesota in the days leading up to next Tuesday’s Election Day. Among his stops will be races where a Republican incumbent is either retiring or running for Senate. He also plans to stop in districts that were created by redistricting.

If misleading ads are one index of a hotly contested political race, then the battle for House District 11B is surely among the most vigorous in the state.

House Republican leaders have registered their opposition to a state-administered health exchange with a letter of protest to Gov. Mark Dayton.

Timothy Coon could spend his whole life confined to the Minnesota Sex Offender Program for actions he committed as a juvenile. And there are more than 50 others like him inside the walls of MSOP.

The Republican takeover of a Minnesota House seat that’s home to cities like Cottage Grove and St. Paul Park was one of the more surprising turns among the many upheavals in the 2010 election.

Embattled DFL Rep. Kerry Gauthier shocked nearly everyone in the Minnesota political firmament on Wednesday morning when he announced that he plans to seek reelection to his seat in the state House of Representatives. The announcement came one week after it was publicly reported that Gauthier had been investigated by Duluth police following an incident in which he used a Craigslist ad to meet and have oral sex with a 17-year-old male at an area rest stop.

DFL Duluth Rep. Kerry Gauthier is telling a Duluth television station that despite bipartisan calls for him to either resign from office or stop his bid for re-election following a well-publicized sex scandal, the first-term member still plans to seek re-election to his seat in the chamber.