Close on the heels of Tuesday’s election, members of the new DFL House and Senate majorities gathered behind closed doors on Thursday to elect their leaders. As expected, the minority leaders who helped steer Democrats back into control — Rep. Paul Thissen, DFL-Minneapolis, and Sen. Tom Bakk, DFL-Cook — were elevated to House speaker and Senate majority leader.

DFL La Prairie City Council member Joe Gould plans to challenge first-term Republican Rep. Carolyn McElfatrick for her Iron Range House seat next fall.

Rep. Bob Gunther doesn't want the Republican rural caucus he helped form this session to be seen as adversarial to suburban and metro legislators. In his view, the bicameral caucus' main purpose is to educate the large number of rural GOP members of the House and Senate, many of them freshmen, on issues of special concern to outstate members.

Today's 2010 campaign finance reports indicate some state legislative races were spendy affairs. We survey some of the marquee races.

Many Republican frosh have records of local civic service HD 15B: King Banaian King Banaian was surrounded by politics growing up in New Hampshire. The state is inundated with presidential hopefuls every four years, and Banaian was recruited at 15 to put flyers on doors for the George McGovern campaign.

When members of the new House Republican majority met last weekend to pick their top two leaders, they selected a slate dominated by the party's suburban strongholds: Speaker-designate Kurt Zellers of Maple Grove and soon-to-be Majority Leader Matt Dean of Dellwood.

In many cases, DFLers simply got caught in an undertow in districts that are fundamentally split in their political allegiances; in some, like rural Senate District 16, they handed back control of districts no one had expected them to win in the first place; in others, it appears, they failed to take steps to protect incumbents who faced discernible pockets of Republican opposition.

Republicans pummeled DFLers in the suburbs and greater Minnesota on Tuesday night to take control of both chambers of the Legislature for the first time since the modern partisan era started in the early 1970s.

Few political prognosticators believed the Republicans had much chance of winning majorities in both the state House and Senate. But when the electoral smoke cleared early Wednesday morning that's exactly what had occurred. The GOP established a 37-30 majority in the Senate and a 72-62 hold on the House (barring any changes via mandated recounts).

There's buzz in the Northland that the battle for the 8th Congressional District seat is making state House Ways and Means Chairman Loren Solberg's re-election bid more competitive than in previous election cycles.