Editor’s note: This is the first of two stories on Lisa Demuth and her rise to the candidacy for governor.

Lisa Demuth and I sit at school-style desks designed for kindergartners. 

“Yeah, you can have them,” she says with a smile to a child eyeing the bucket of crayons in front of her. 

It is another day of gross heat at the Minnesota State Fair. We are stationed in a kids drawing area, between the Lisa Demuth for Governor booth – with its requisite prize wheel, fans and flyers – and an exhibit hawking apparel for the Minnesota Aurora soccer team. 

In the adjacent booth, young men in Xfinity shirts implore passersby to enter a raffle for a car driven in a “Fast and Furious” movie.

Demuth, who is 59, has served in the Minnesota Legislature since 2019. She has led the House Republican caucus since 2023. For the last two years, she has found herself in the rare predicament of being speaker of a House split equally between DFL and Republican members.

So, in some ways, Demuth is familiar. 

She publicly mourned in June 2025 when an assassin killed her DFL counterpart, state Rep. and Speaker Emerita Melissa Hortman. She had negotiated a two-year state budget just weeks earlier with Hortman, Gov. Tim Walz and Senate Majority Leader Erin Murphy, DFL-St. Paul. Republican voters desired her for governor even after Kendall Qualls won the party’s convention endorsement and President Donald Trump trumpeted Mike Lindell.

And in August, Demuth decisively defeated Qualls and Lindell in the primary.

“She developed a reputation as a problem solver instead of a bomb thrower,” said Larry Jacobs, a political science professor at the University of Minnesota’s Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs. “To me, it signals a very significant shift in the Minnesota Republican Party toward nominating candidates that can win in the general election.”

Related: Snubbed by the state GOP and Trump, Lisa Demuth rallies to win the GOP nomination for governor

But Demuth’s discipline in sticking to a few simple messages can also make it hard to get to know her. It is a contrast with DFL nominee Amy Klobuchar, a U.S. senator who has held high-profile elected positions since she was elected Hennepin County Attorney in 1998.

For example, I noted during my interview with her at the fair that she never attended college while Klobuchar graduated from Yale. Is this revealing or irrelevant? 

Demuth’s reply managed to hit on social services fraud during the Walz administration — her campaign’s number one, two, and three talking points — by the third sentence:

“I went directly from graduating high school to the workforce. What I would say is that I relate to the majority of Minnesotans, meaning hard working, involved in community, raising a family, starting a business and just working for what we have. Most Minnesotans that have worked so hard in their life, they’re angry about fraud.”

While Klobuchar has authored two memoirs, Demuth keeps her private life mostly between her God and her family. 

“She is very much interested in staying connected with the Lord,” said state Sen. Jeff Howe, R-Rockville. “That is where her guidance comes from.”

Demuth can also resort to simple, fairly evident answers in describing the decision-making behind her public life, like why she ran for House Republican caucus leader in 2022 and why — in a stunning turn of events — she won:

“I think our caucus was looking for something different. I knew that I could help us move forward and be respectful on both sides of the aisle to get things done.”

An underdog facing a political lion in a blue state, Demuth is doing her absolute darndest to make Klobuchar guilty by DFL association for not stopping fraud. But her political journey — and case for governor — is a far richer story.

Family and a better life

In the 1990s, Demuth discovered a faith community in Cold Spring, a Stearns County town of just over 4,000 people that is an hour-and-a-half drive northwest from St. Paul. 

In 2007, Demuth, in a Cold Spring Record survey of school board candidates, said, “I am married to Nick and we have four children, two of whom have graduated from Rocori, and two are still attending Rocori schools. We have lived in Cold Spring since 1998. I am active at River of Life Assembly of God, serving as a worship leader for 14 years and as a current board member.”

Founded in 1914 in Hot Springs, Arkansas, the Assemblies of God is a form of Pentecostalism that emphasizes the supernatural gifts of the Holy Spirit, especially speaking in tongues, said John Schmalzbauer, chair of the Protestant Studies Department at Missouri State University. It claims 3 million adherents in the United States.

Seventy percent of its U.S. followers identify as Republican and 63% say they are conservative while just 4% call themselves liberal, according to the Pew Research Center’s 2025 Religious Landscape Study. 

Messages left with River of Life’s pastor, Kirby St. John, were not returned. Generally, Assemblies of God leaders preach a conservative message.

“Political commitments are tied to more individualistic and less communitarian views of religion and public life,” Schmalzbauer noted. “Assemblies of God clergy are less likely to embrace a social justice approach to Christianity and more likely to emphasize individual salvation.”

Demuth was born Lisa Marie Pittman in 1967 in Paynesville, a Dickensian-named town her family left partly because of racism, though Demuth recently told the West Central Tribune that she had great friends and family living there as a child. 

“She grew up in rural Minnesota, and she had curly hair and got teased and harassed,” state Rep. Marion Rarick, R-Maple Lake, said. “She experienced the difficulties that come when your mom is white and your dad is Black.”

Related: Demuth will run on fraud to beat Klobuchar, but their anti-fraud proposals are similar

Demuth said her stepdad became more like her real dad, and they hopscotched between Twin Cities metro addresses during childhood. 

She graduated from Bloomington Jefferson High School in 1985. That year she also married a 21-year-old man from the Chicago suburb of Joliet. 

Demuth was guarded about her late teenage years other than to say that she worked in title insurance right out of high school.

“I moved out of state for a while, and then had a child and then came back to Minnesota for family and a much better life,” she said. 

Demuth specifically returned to Paynesville, where she met Nick Demuth, the president of a company that makes products like deck boards out of recycled plastic and sells them to retailers. Demuth married Nick Demuth in 1991 and was a stay-at-home mom. 

She was appointed to the inaugural Paynesville Area Human Rights Commission in 1995, which was created to help prevent discrimination in education, employment and housing.

Both Paynesville and Cold Spring are 90% white. 

And Rocori, so named because it draws students from Rockville, Cold Spring and Richmond, has dealt with students saying they were taunted with racist slurs. In 2017, when Demuth was still on the School Board, the district debated how they could stop high schoolers from waving Confederate flags in the parking lot.

Demuth has largely not discussed racism, or her own racial identity. 

“She absolutely never leads with the fact she’s a Black woman,” Rarick said. “She doesn’t go there.”

She does, though, have her limits. Demuth disagreed with Trump’s comments during Operation Metro Surge that Somali immigrants are “garbage.”

“There is no group of people or anyone that is garbage,” she told me during an interview in February. “No one is garbage. No one is.” 

Then why not use her bully pulpit to join other Minnesota lawmakers in condemning the president’s remarks? Demuth said it is not her place to criticize what other politicians say. 

“Each one of us as elected officials has a responsibility to choose the language that we use and how we speak about situations or about each other,” she said. “And the only thing we can do is be individually responsible for that.”

Only ‘silence or positivity’ from her

One person filed in time to run for the Rocori School Board in 2007 even though there were three open seats. Demuth noticed this and asked her husband Nick to toss his hat in the ring as a write-in candidate. Nick replied that Demuth ought to run herself. 

And so at age 40, Demuth entered politics, winning a seat with 1,091 write-in votes. 

“And it wasn’t even thinking about politics,” Demuth recalled. “It was, ‘How can I help my community? How can I help my school, where my kids have gone and are going?’”

Rocori was dealing with the consequences of a 2003 high school shooting that left two students dead. The board mulled over policies like metal detectors at the high school, which Demuth opposed.

Demuth presided over infrastructure improvements for the district’s three elementary schools, the introduction of soccer as an interscholastic sport and the unseemly departure of Rocori’s longtime superintendent, who pleaded guilty to multiple counts of indecent exposure. 

Mike Austreng, who served on the school board with Demuth and is the former publisher of the Cold Spring Record, remembered her as competent and quiet. 

“She did a really good job of observing, listening and absorbing,” Austreng said. 

Amid her 11 years on the school board, Demuth survived a breast cancer scare through surgery. She became a grandmother. And she forayed into commercial property management, purchasing with her husband the Boardwalk Business Center on the outskirts of Cold Spring. 

On Memorial Day 2018, state Rep. Jeff Howe gave her a call. 

Howe was vying for the state Senate because Michelle Fischbach, the conservative district’s state senator, had resigned to run for lieutenant governor. Demuth could replace Howe in the House.

Related: The billionaire backing Lisa Demuth’s run for governor

“My wife Sherry was the one who knew Lisa’s name,” Howe said. “Her youngest and my youngest played hockey together.”

Demuth asked a bunch of questions before agreeing to the challenge, and proved to be a quick study, Howe said. 

Howe and Demuth often campaigned in tandem. 

There is a delightfully wonky 2018 flyer in which a woman with a stethoscope holds printouts that Demuth and Howe peer at with the headline, “Republican reforms succeed at lowering healthcare costs by 27%.” 

(It is a reference to Reinsurance, Republican-sponsored legislation signed by DFL Gov. Mark Dayton that really did lower healthcare costs by subsidizing insurance coverage of certain expensive procedures.)

Demuth’s DFL foe was James Read, a political science professor at Saint John’s University and the College of Saint Benedict. Read had been on the campaign stump since April 2017.

“I raised significantly more than she did,” Read remembered. “And there had been some polling, and the polling showed that I was too close for comfort.”

An Arlington, Virginia-based group called Advance Minnesota began to distribute flyers with headlines like “Jim Read sides with violent protestors — not us.”

Advance Minnesota operated independently of the Demuth campaign, which pledged to be respectful. Its unsolicited help foreshadowed Restore Sanity, a so-called Super Political Action Committee that has narrowed the money gap this year between Demuth and Klobuchar. 

“Adults can disagree without making it personal,” Demuth said at an August 2018 candidate forum. “You’ll only hear silence or positivity coming out of me.”

At our fair interview, Demuth fondly recalled a forum when she and Read collaborated to educate the audience on what was an independent expenditure — like the money spent by Advance Minnesota — and what was a direct campaign contribution. 

Read verified this anecdote, and said Demuth was friendly.

“She’s a very civil person,” he said. “She’s not someone that goes out and rips on people and abuses them.”

Demuth trounced Read 61% to 39%. She would not face another competitive election for House.

Thursday: Demuth rises through the ranks in the Legislature.

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