Rep. Linda Runbeck and three other plaintiffs contend one aspect of the special sources limit effectively violates the free speech rights of both the candidates and donors.

At the GOP’s state central meeting in Blaine last Saturday Saturday, Johnson proved himself the most popular candidate among roughly 400 Republican Party activists in an early, nonbinding straw poll for the governor’s race. But Johnson’s appeal among activists has been building for years, most recently through his position as RNC committeeman and as one of the lead players in an audit of the party's post-Tony Sutton finances.

Republican candidates and activists filed into the National Sports Center in Blaine on Saturday to participate in a preliminary straw poll of candidates in the gubernatorial and U.S. Senate races. Hennepin County Commissioner Jeff Johnson won the gubernatorial poll with 35 percent of the vote, and state Sen. Julianne Ortman won the U.S. Senate poll with 37 percent of the vote.

True story: Collin Peterson used to have a tough time getting elected to Congress. It took Peterson four tries before he finally defeated Republican incumbent Arlan Stangeland in 1990. Then Peterson faced back-to-back challenges from Republican Bernie Omann. In 1992 and 1994, Peterson held his seat, defeating Omann by a combined tally of fewer than 9,000 votes.

Amid a summer of choreographed campaign roll-outs for the governor’s office and Congress, a number of candidates are quietly preparing for next year’s legislative election, when the House DFL Caucus will look to defend its majority.

In a press conference in the State Office Building, House Speaker Kurt Zellers lauded the slate of candidates they have recruited for the fall elections and railed on DFLers and Gov. Mark Dayton's administration for trying to raise taxes, "force" unionization of daycare providers and for putting state government spending on "autopilot."

Fallout has been almost constant since release of the state's redistricting maps last week, and over the weekend a few more incumbent-on-incumbent match-ups became clear, some House members switched to run in open Senate seats and new candidates emerged to take their place.

In one of his first moves as chairman of the Republican Party of Minnesota, Pat Shortridge has appointed a slew of activists to lead efforts like photo ID, finances and fundraising ahead of the 2012 election.

On Wednesday one of the GOP attorneys on the recount, Tony Trimble, told PIM that then-RPM Chairman Sutton signed an agreement legally obliging the party to cover the full cost of the recount legal fees, reportedly around $450,000. And late Wednesday afternoon, Sutton confirmed the existence of an agreement that he says he does not recall disclosing to other party officials. But Sutton went on to claim that he believes the party is only responsible for the debt in the event that the recount fund in question, incorporated as Count Them All Properly Inc., ceases to exist.

In late November, a group of roughly two dozen Republican activists gathered at a residence in Edina to discuss the future of the state Republican Party. The meeting included a broad cross-section of the GOP’s notoriously fractious base.