Gov. Mark Dayton isn't advocating changes to Minnesota's freshly passed minimum wage hike legislation, a spokesman clarified on Monday.

A number of Republican legislators received a perfect vote rating from the Chamber.

House Speaker Paul Thissen told business leaders at the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce Session Priorities event Tuesday that a repeal of the new top income-tax bracket is unlikely.

Longtime Republican donors Stanley Hubbard and Tom Rosen are mounting a campaign of their own this year. The broadcasting magnate and beef processing CEO are trying to get a vast and complicated web of GOP donors, operatives and activists to march in step when it comes to the 2014 elections.

State lawmakers are introducing a workers’ compensation proposal that business and labor leaders alike regard as the most significant change to the system in 18 years.

No fewer than half a dozen major players have emerged among the ranks of pro-Republican business PACs in this election cycle. But while their 42-day pre-general election campaign finance reports are now available for all to see, they continue to play it close with respect to their big-picture plans.

The Minnesota Chamber of Commerce has been flummoxed in recent legislative sessions not so much by their usual sparring partners in the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party but by a new coterie of conservative Republicans.

When so-called right-to-work legislation came up for a floor vote in March, Sen. Jeremy Miller was the only Republican to vote against the proposal. Although it was merely a procedural vote to send the proposed constitutional amendment to a different committee, organized labor was grateful for the freshman legislator’s public opposition.

In surveying the 2012 campaign cash landscape in Minnesota, it’s not immediately obvious who’s going to help Republican legislators defend their majorities.

The change in Minnesota politics wrought by the 2010 election created equal measures of optimism and concern among the business groups that lobby state lawmakers.