Democrat Xp Lee wins special election to fill seat of slain Minnesota state Rep. Melissa Hortman

Democrat Xp Lee won a special election on Tuesday for a seat previously held by the late Minnesota state Rep. Melissa Hortman, who was assassinated in June, and in the process restoring a tie in the Minnesota House.

Lee won the seat over Republican Ruth Bittner with 61% of the vote.

The election to replace Hortman, a former Minnesota House speaker, took place about three months after she and her husband were gunned down in their home by a man impersonating a police officer in Brooklyn Park, a suburb northwest of Minneapolis. State Sen. John Hoffman and his wife Yvette also were shot in their home, but survived.

Vance Boelter, 57, faces federal and state murder, attempted murder and other charges in the June 14 attacks.

Tuesday’s special election between Lee and Bittner also follows another act of political violence, the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk in Utah last Wednesday. The shootings have been a concern among voters in the district — and for both candidates.

Lee said he wants to calm the “charged atmosphere” in the wake of Kirk’s death.

Bittner said the violence briefly gave her pause about running for office, but she concluded that “there’s no way to solve this problem if we shrink back in fear.”

Lee, a former Brooklyn Park City Council member, easily won a three-way Democratic primary in August. Bittner, a real estate agent, was the sole Republican on the primary ballot for the seat in the heavily Democratic district.

Lee’s win restores a 67-67 tie and preserve a power-sharing deal that existed for most of the 2025 legislative session after the 2024 elections cost House Democrats their majority.

Hortman brokered that agreement, which ended Democrats’ three-week boycott. Under the deal, she agreed to end her six-year tenure as speaker and let Republican Lisa Demuth take the position. Hortman then took the title speaker emerita. Most legislative committees became evenly split between Republican and Democratic members, with co-chairs from each party.

The tie in the House meant some level of bipartisan agreement was required to pass anything in this year’s session.

An upset by Bittner would have given Republicans control of the House for the first time since 2018, and put them in an even stronger position to force concessions from Democratic Gov. Tim Walz and a Senate that Democrats control by only one vote. Walz on Tuesday announced his campaign for a third consecutive term, something no governor in state history has achieved.

Nearly three months after Hortman’s killing, the House Democrats chose Rep. Zack Stephenson as her successor to lead the caucus. Stephenson was Hortman’s campaign manager in 2004, and she became his mentor and friend in the ensuing years. He was first elected to the Legislature in 2018.

Two more special elections will be held Nov. 4 in a pair of Minnesota Senate districts.

One is to fill the seat vacated by Democratic Sen. Nicole Mitchell, of the St. Paul suburb of Woodbury. She resigned in July after she was convicted of burglarizing her estranged stepmother’s home. The other is for the seat of Republican Sen. Bruce Anderson, of the Minneapolis exurb of Buffalo, who died in July.

Given that the districts are heavily Democratic and heavily Republican, respectively, control of the Senate isn’t expected to change. But the Democratic candidate for Mitchell’s seat is state Rep. Amanda Hemmingsen-Jaeger, of Woodbury. If she wins, the governor will have to call another special election to fill her House seat.

View the results below.