Democrats scored a big coup over the weekend in Minnesota, as state Sen. Terri Bonoff made a late—and unexpected—entry into the race against GOP Rep. Erik Paulsen. News of a possible Bonoff bid only surfaced late on Thursday; on Saturday, she announced her campaign at a party convention. Lobbyist Jon Tollefson, who had been the only Democrat in the race but had raised little money, immediately dropped out and endorsed Bonoff.
Bonoff ran for this seat once before, when it became open in 2008. However, the Democratic Party's official endorsement that year went to Iraq vet Ashwin Madia, and she declined to challenge him in the primary. Madia went on to lose to Paulsen 48-41 (an Independence Party candidate took 11 percent), and since then, the incumbent has won re-election three times, never with less than 58 percent of the vote.
But Minnesota's 3rd Congressional District, located in the Minneapolis suburbs, voted for Barack Obama by a narrow 50-49 margin in 2012, making Paulsen one of the few Republicans to sit in a seat the president won—and thus a tempting target for Democrats. The problem for Team Blue, though, has always been candidate recruitment, but in Bonoff, they've just landed a legitimate contender with the right sort of moderate profile for a district like this.
What's more, Bonoff's decision to join the race despite the late hour is one of the most concrete signs we've seen to date that Democrats are really starting to feel that a Donald Trump or Ted Cruz nomination could damage the GOP downticket. (Bonoff specifically called Paulsen out for failing to "reject" what the two Republican presidential frontrunners "stand for.") However, while Paulsen is very conservative, he's generally been very smart about avoiding controversy. He's also an excellent fundraiser: He took in a hefty $516,000 in the first quarter and has $2.3 million in the bank.
But Bonoff, unlike many candidates who find themselves startled at how much money it takes to run for Congress, gets it.
In announcing her bid, she said she "won't compete on a shoestring" and promised to "give everything I've got to raising the money to compete." Bonoff’s fundraising for her previous bid is a bit hard to compare directly since she wasn’t her party’s nominee, but she raised $476,000 in about five months on the trail. Paulsen is a tough target, but if Bonoff can follow through, she's capable of making this a real race—and putting a seat in play that Democrats had otherwise largely written off. Because of the strength of her candidacy, we're moving this race from Safe Republican all the way to Lean Republican.