Doing big things in state government takes time. Few people knew that better than Melissa Hortman.
By the time Hortman’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor (DFL) Party won trifecta control of Minnesota’s state government in 2022, Hortman had been serving as speaker for four years. In her 11th term, she knew the opportunity was a rare one and, in her own light-touch way, oversaw one of the most productive legislative sessions for any party in any state legislature in recent years.
Crucially, say former colleagues and staffers, it was the incremental groundwork that Hortman had helped lay down in the years leading up to the 2023 session that made it so successful, leading to landmark legislation in areas such as abortion, gun control, education spending, transportation and infrastructure.
Hortman, aged 55, became nationally known in a tragic way. On June 14, she was killed at her home in Brooklyn Park, alongside her husband Mark and their dog. The suspected killer allegedly also shot state Sen. John Hoffman and his wife Yvette, carrying a list of other political targets. In his eulogy, Democratic Gov. Tim Walz described Hortman as “the most consequential speaker in Minnesota history.”
Born in Fridley, a suburb north of Minneapolis, Hortman came of age idolizing fellow Minnesotan Walter Mondale, who served as vice president under Jimmy Carter. She studied law and worked briefly for a legal aid group on housing discrimination cases. She first ran for a state House seat in 1998, and then again in 2002, losing both times before eventually winning in 2004.
In her first years in office, Hortman advocated progressive transportation and energy policies. In 2007, after a deadly bridge collapse on Interstate 35 in Minneapolis, the Legislature passed a major transportation funding bill, including a gas tax increase. The bill was vetoed by GOP Gov. Tim Pawlenty. When DFL leaders decided to try to override him, they chose Hortman, then only in her second term, to represent the caucus on the House floor.
“Her talents were recognized early on,” says Frank Hornstein, who led the Minnesota House transportation committee for much of his two decades in office. “She knew the policy inside and out and she was able to communicate it in terms that people would understand. She could take difficult and complex topics and make them understandable for the average person.”
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Hortman was a delegator, entrusting subordinates and committee leaders with broad latitude to develop policies and strategies on their own. She was encouraging with young staff and direct with trusted senior staff. And she had a feel for the diversity of the caucus, sometimes putting the party’s most progressive and most conservative members on the same committees to develop policies that could draw broad support.
Those tactics paid off. Hortman encouraged committee leaders to workshop policy priorities even during years when there was no chance they’d pass. That helped to work out the technical details of legislation, while making lawmakers comfortable with a proposal. By the time the DFL won control of the state Senate in 2022, Hortman was one of the party’s most experienced leaders. “It’s always important to underpromise and overdeliver,” she told a TV interviewer early the following year, “but I think it will be a very productive session.”
In fact, the state DFL all but cleared its own decks. The party’s priorities were widely known in the caucus. They had gained broad familiarity with the legislative details. They were working with a massive budget surplus and still held memories of the party’s-all-too-brief but not-so-productive trifecta a decade earlier. As a result, legislators moved to create a paid family medical leave program, codified reproductive rights, invested in affordable housing, passed new gun-control policies, legalized recreational marijuana and approved the biggest transportation package in a generation.
“You cannot overstate the impact she had in setting the 2023-24 budget,” says Liz Olson, a former state representative who chaired the House Ways and Means Committee during that session. “She had an immense amount of patience with holding [the caucus] together, understanding that there’s no enemies when we’re internally working together. She’s very politically sharp. She’s not a hothead. She led without ego. She was powerful and driven in a way that was never about her.”
Former staffers also applaud Hortman’s commitment to improving the legislative culture. Concerned for the safety of legislators and support staff and security guards who’d spent countless nights at the Capitol until the wee hours of the morning, she instituted a policy that sessions would end by midnight.
As it turned out, Hortman’s last session in the House was one of her toughest. The 2024 election resulted in a rare partisan tie in the chamber, with one winning DFL candidate later disqualified over residency requirements. Republicans sought to assume control of leadership positions, even threatening not to seat another DFL member who’d won re-election by a razor-thin margin. Hortman led the DFL caucus in denying a quorum until Republicans signed onto a power-sharing agreement, with Republican state Rep. Lisa Demuth serving as speaker and Hortman as speaker emerita.
Through an unusually rancorous spring, Hortman helped negotiate a budget deal that protected many of the DFL’s gains from the previous session. In the end, she was the lone DFL vote in favor of a deal that made undocumented immigrants ineligible for the state’s low-income medical insurance program. It wasn’t an easy call.
“I know that people will be hurt by that vote,” she said, fighting back tears at a press gaggle after the session ended. “We worked very hard to try to get a budget deal that wouldn’t include that provision, and we tried any other way we could to come to a budget agreement with Republicans and they wouldn’t have it. So I did what leaders do. I stepped up and I got the job done for the people of Minnesota.”
She was assassinated five days later.
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