Last night, voters in the northern reaches of Hennepin County, Minnesota, just 10 miles north of Minneapolis, went to the polls to elect a new member for State House District 34B. This deep-blue seat easily elected Democratic nominee, Xp Lee, a state employee and former Brooklyn Park city council member, to the state legislature. You can read more about the campaign here.
The result for this solidly blue seat leaves the State House at a 67-67 tie. However, that is not why I am highlighting this seemly-random election. I am highlighting it because this election was the result of the incumbent, Democrat Melissa Hortman, being gunned down in a political assassination back in June, an event that has been nearly completely forgotten.
On June 14th, Hortman and her husband were shot and killed in their home. At the time Hortman was the co-leader of an evenly divided Minnesota State House. Until last year, she was the Speaker of the chamber.
Hortman and her husband were killed by Vance Luther Boelter, who that same day shot State Senator John Hoffman and his wife, though both of them survived. When he was eventually captured, Boelter had a long list of several other Democratic lawmakers that he presumably planned to kill.
I wanted to use this article to quickly touch on Melissa Hortman, her life and tragic death, and how America reacted to the shooting.
From Lawmaker to Speaker
Melissa Hortman was involved in Minnesota politics for over two decades. She was first elected to the State House in 2004, defeating a Republican incumbent. She held a competitive suburban district that sat north of the city of Minneapolis, often facing contested races every two years. She quickly gained a reputation as a policy wonk and a shrewd negotiator, able to bring Republicans on to different projects. Reflecting her skills, Democrats named her their leader in 2017, at a time when the party did not control the House.
After the 2018 midterms, which saw Democrats sweep into the lower house, Hortman was elected Speaker of the Chamber. In that time, she worked with the Republican Senate and newly-elected Governor Tim Walz. After the 2020 murder of George Floyd, Hortman worked with the Republican Senate to come to an agreement on a police reform bill that banned practices like chokeholds, as well as setting up an independent review board around deaths in police custody.
After the 2022 elections, Democrats in Minnesota enjoyed control of both chambers for the first time in over a decade. In the House, the margin was just five seats, and in the Senate it was just one. Despite this, the Democratic leadership worked to pass a serious of major legislation. These included….
Paid family medical leave
Universal free school meals
Expanded voting rights
Expanded abortion access
Hortman would serve as Speaker until the 2024 elections, which saw a unique scenario unfold. That year, the Minnesota House elections came in as a direct tie, 67 seats each. Btw if you want a sense of the geographic polarization that is modern Minnesota, this should tell you everything you need to know.
Political folks will often site a place like Illinois - and go “its blue Chicago and red everything else.” Well in Minnesota its “blue Twin Cities and red everything else”.
Of course, Minnesota is more complicated than that, and if you went back a decade or so, you’d see far more Democratic seats in the northeast and south, and more Republicans in the suburban ring around Minneapolis and St. Paul. The era of modern polarization, however, is what we see above. If you look at the northern edge of the blue blob of the Twin Cities, you will see District 34B, where Hortman was re-elected too.
Hortman herself won re-election with 63% of the vote, her highest share of the vote to date. Her showing was right in line with Harris’ margin in the seat. This region of Minnesota has only grown more Democratic with time.
Democrats found themselves with a tie thanks to losing 6 seats that voted for Harris the same day. Most of those seats were in the suburban ring around the twin cities.
Thanks to one Democrat managing to win a Trump seat, the Democrats did not lose control of the House entirely.
There was a complication, however, which I am going to vastly summarize here. After the elections, one Democratic elected member, Curtis Johnson, was disqualified from taking his seat due to residency issues. A special election was scheduled, and considering his seat had backed Harris with 68% of the vote, there was little doubt Democrats would hold it. However, Republicans insisted the House needed to be organized immediately, and that with a 67-66 vote margin, they would get to elect the speaker. Democrats, led by Hortman, protested this move and boycotted the organizing session, which did not have a quorum of 51%, so no legislative session could begin.
A few weeks later, with the special election still in the works for Johnson’s seat, both parties came to an agreement. The House would organize, with Republican Lisa Demuth elected as speaker. When the special election took place, and produced a Democratic victory as expected, Hortman was elevated a a co-leader of he House and a power sharing agreement was reached. Hortman was no longer Speaker, with Demuth retaining the title, but she retained more power than a minority leader would.
The Assassination
If the legislative control fight had been the most serious political fight in Minnesota that year, I’m sure the state’s residents would be very thankful. Tragically, the murder of Hortman and her husband brought a dark new tone to politics.
As mentioned before, on June 14th, the couple were killed by Vance Luther Boelter. He did so while wearing a police office uniform and wearing a latex face mask.
The timeline of events, all in the early hours of June 14th, show Boelter seeking to kill several members of the legislature; people who lived in a similar area in the suburbs north of the twin cities. The Hortmans were the last house he visited that night. I am radically summarizing events, so please check out the very detailed Wikipedia page for more information on the events that unfolded.
At 2am, Boelter arrived at the home of State Senator John Hoffman. Knocking on their door saying he was doing a police check, he shot the Senator and his wife, Yvette. Both would luckily survive.
Boelter then went to the house of State Representative Kristin Bahner, but she was out of town on vacation. A coincidence that may well have saved her life.
He then went to neighborhood State Senator Ann Rest, but law enforcement was in the area due to the Hoffman shooting. Boelter moved on.
Boelter finally arrived at the home of the Hortmans around 3am, just as police were arriving to do a security check. Boelter then quickly shot at the cops and shot Mark Hortman dead. He chased Melissa into the House, and she was soon found dead by police shortly after.
Boelter initially escaped and was subject to a manhunt for two days. He was finally apprehended on June 16th in Sibley County, a rural area to the southwest of the Twin Cities.
So why did Boelter carry out such a vile attack on multiple elected officials? Boelter’s motivation has become the subject of several right-wing conspiracy theories and other outright denials by different political actors. Lets separate the truth from the fiction.
Author Disclaimer on Political Violence
Before I begin the next section, which will lay out how Boelter’s attacks were indeed a right-wing act of political violence, I want to make something clear. In the wake of the horrific Charlie Kirk shooting, many on the right have pushed an outright lie that political violence only happens on the left. EVERY study of political violence shows more happens from the right than the left in America. See this study from the CATO institute - a libertarian think tank, if you don’t believe me.
This issue can differ by nation, but in this country, right-wing violence leads left-wing violence by a wide margin. That said, unlike the MAGA movement, I am not interested in collective punishment. I do not say we need to crack down on conservatism, the way MAGA is now saying leftist must be crushed and suppressed. I am not using this article to declare all Republicans as domestic terrorists. I am, however, not going to shy away from the right-wing motive of this shooting, and call out the lies told about it.
So we got it? This was a right wing attack, and no I am not calling for conservatives to be rounded up. Understood? Fantastic.
Boelter’s Motive
Quickly after Boelter was identified as the shooter, it quickly became clear he had significant far-right motivations. Boelter was found to have a list of over 70 targets, assorted Democrats and abortion rights activists. It also included fliers for the “No Kings Protests” taking place later that day, indicating one of these events may also have been a target.
The document found in the suspect’s car listed about 70 targets, including the four victims. Also named were Tim Walz, the Democratic governor of Minnesota who stood as Kamala Harris’s running-mate last year; and the Democratic congresswoman Ilhan Omar; as well as doctors who provide abortions and Planned Parenthood clinics.
Boelter’s history before the shooting lined up with these targets. According to multiple friends and family, Boelter fancied himself being involved in security, but this was largely just something on paper, and most of his work was in the food industry. One friend described Boelter’s claims about being involved in security work as a “fantasy.”
What was clear is Boelter was considered right-wing. Different friends and family gauged his politics ranging from conservative to further right. It is possible he became more radicalized with time. It was not disputed that he voted for Trump in the 2024 election.
Boelter’s right-wing views are best seen when he preached at an Evangelical Church in the Democratic Republic of the Congo when he visited there in 2023. In his sermons, Boelter went after abortion rights and LGBT people.
“The churches are so messed up, they don’t know abortion is wrong in many churches,”
“people don’t know what sex they are” because the devil “has gotten so far into their mind and their soul.”
After the shootings, Boelter texted several friends that he might be dead soon. He texted his wife that he had “gone to war.”
"Dad went to war last night … I don’t wanna say more because I don’t wanna implicate anybody."
One notable thing comes up in an interview with one of Boelter’s longtime friends, David Carlson. In an interview, while also confirming Boelter’s right-wing political views, he pointed out Boelter was struggling financially and struggling to find stable work.
Carson, in this interview, is making his own conclusions on motive, but its entirely reasonable. As Carson saw it, Boelter opted to go out in a “blaze of glory.” This is a common issue we see with political attackers - they are often people with no other clear path in their life - at least as they see it.
In the immediate wake of the shooting, several prominent political leaders condemned the attacks. Of course all the Democrats did, but Republicans leaders did so as well. However, as many Republican politicians quickly moved on from the attack, a sinister conspiracy to lie about the attack was hatched online in the hours after the attack.
The Right-Wing Misinformation Campaign
If you go to the Wikipedia page for the shootings, you will see an entire section dedicated to the right-wing misinformation campaign that occurred right after the shooting took place. Almost immediately after the details of the shooting came to light, even before Boelter was captured, far-right accounts aimed to pushed the shooting as a LEFT-WING ATTACK. As The Guardian pointed out, this is part of a broad internet tactic conducted by far-right accounts to gaslight the population about the origins of political violence.
Within hours of the shootings, rightwing social media accounts with millions of followers manufactured false conspiracy theories about the suspect and his motives, falsely portraying the man whose friends say he is an evangelical Christian Trump supporter as a radical leftwing assassin and attempting to paint him as a political ally of Tim Walz, the Democratic governor and former vice-presidential candidate.
One key way the right-wing accounts aimed to tie the shooting to left-wing violence was the Hortman was a deciding vote to pass a state budget; a budget that the Republicans insisted cut out any healthcare aid to undocumented immigrants. Hortman was seen on video emotionally discussing how she did not agree with the move, but her vote was part of the agreement to get a budget passed. Her vote was part of a political compromise in a divided chamber. With zero evidence then, and none that has emerged sense, the right tried to claim she must have been killed over this vote. Again, this is just a flat out lie.
Quickly, far-right accounts also pushed a claim that Boelter was actually hired to assassinate Democratic lawmakers at the direction of Governor Walz himself! The vote on the budget was a key citation, even though this ignores that Senator Hoffman had voted against the same budget. Here the key was the Boelter had been appointed in 2016 to the Minnesota Governor's Workforce Development Board; originally by Governor Mark Dayton. This board is one of many non-paid advisory boards that many state governments have. Thousands of people of different communities and jobs are appointed to advisory boards to meet and offer recommendations. This board had 60 people. In 2019, Boelter was re-appointed by Walz to continue serving. These are appointments where the Governor and the appointee likely never even meet. As a friend of someone appointed to a similar board in Florida, I can tell you they never met the Governor. The idea this appointment showed Walz and Boelter knew each-other has been thorough debunked.
To further help you understand these boards, for those of you not familiar with these offices. A local reporter summed this up best. On the idea that this board made Boelter a “Tim Walz appointee” - the reporter said
“It was the equivalent of calling a Sunday school volunteer an ‘appointee of the bishop’,”
With these flimsy pretexts, the far-right accounts went into overdrive to confuse readers and push a narrative of Boelter as a far-left assassin doing the bidding of Tim Walz. The specifically said Walz had Hortman killed because she voted for the budget - ignoring the fact WALZ WAS PART OF THE BUDGET DEAL AND HE SIGNED THE THING.
Laura Loomer, a powerful conspiracy theory pusher and close ally of Donald Trump, tweeted
Walz’s goons are now assassinating lawmakers who support legislation Walz opposes
Elon Musk tweeted the same day of the shooting, as right-wing accounts pushed their conspiracies, that “the far left is murderously violent.”
Far-right Mike Cernovich tweeted to his 1+ million followers on twitter
“The Vice President candidate for the Democrat party is directly connected to a domestic terrorist, that is confirmed, the only question is whether Tim Walz himself ordered the political hit against a rival who voted against Walz’s plan to give free healthcare to illegals.”
Donald Trump Jr, meanwhile, called the shooter someone on the far-left and said the transgender movement was violent (even though Boelter is not transgender not is anyone involved in this transgender).
Boelter himself may be leaning into the conspiracy world out there. In a letter he left in his car while on the run, which was addressed to the FBI director, Boelter claimed he was an agent of Tim Walz. This letter has been described by all law enforcement agencies and incoherent and likely designed to misdirect the investigation. Whether Boelter got wind of the right-wing lies from social media and decided to lean into it is unclear.
After it was confirmed Boelter did have conservative leanings, several of the far-right accounts began to claim Boelter was never the shooter and that the murders were actually a “deep state conspiracy.” It never ends with these people.
Arguably the most high profile spreader of non-sense, at least in terms of government posts, was Utah Senator Mike Lee. On his personal account, Lee spread the far-right conspiracy on several occasions on the day of the shootings.
At no point did Lee call out the horrific violence, but instead simply post attacks on the left. These posts were eventually taken down, but Lee refused to apologize or even explain his actions. He was cornered by Minnesota Senator Tina Smith, a photo of the interaction was caught by reporters.
In an interview following the incident, Smith said she told Lee
“I want you to know how painful that was for me and for thousands and thousands of Minnesotans, and you have a responsibility to think about the impact of your words,”
Lee’s brash online personality, which shows no care or anything other than scoring political points, had led to a growing divide between him and the Mormon Church in Utah.
Within Minnesota political circles, these conspiracies spread by the far-right did not gain any traction. Harry Niska, the Republican floor leader in the Minnesota House, rejected any conspiracy claims - and Niska is NOT a Tim Walz fan.
National Republican leaders likewise rejected the conspiracies. Speaker Mike Johnson and Majority Leader Steve Scalise called out the horrific attack.
Trump’s Response
Donald Trump, meanwhile, did very little on the shooting. He condemned it on truth social, but did nothing else (especially compared to how he has acted since the Kirk shooting). A few days after the shooting, when asked if he would call Governor Walz, Trump rejected the move, attacking the Governor instead.
“I think the governor of Minnesota is so whacked out, I’m not calling him,”
Just one day ago, as of this writing, Trump, when further questioned about his lack of response to the shooting, said he was “not familiar” with the event at all! You can see the exchange here, per the Guardian. The issue revolved around Trump ordering flags lowered to half-staff after Kirk was killed, but not doing the same for Hortman.
Take your pick for the reasoning here. Did Trump just forget? Did he never really know what as going on at all? Is he just lying now? Who knows.
Final Thoughts
I initially had the idea to write this article for some time. I noticed how quickly the shooting had moved on from the public conversation, even though the murder of a legislative leader is something that should be seen as an unprecedented act of violence for a stable democracy.
We unfortunately live in a political climate these days where acts of violence, which should uniformly be condemned, are instead followed by lies about their cause or pledges for revenge against the other side. While it is a very tense political time, and I considered cancelling this article due to heightened tensions in the wake of Kirk’s death, I resolved to write this to honor Melissa Hortman and not let her legacy and shooting be entirely forgotten.
Rest in Peace Representative.
In reference to Trump saying he didn’t know about the killing of the Hortmans: Toward the end of her life my mother experienced several hurricanes that passed close to her home in Florida. During one she lost power for 3 or 4 days. It was swelteringly hot. Several days later sitting in her den she told me she never lost power. She had the same look Trump did when he said he didn’t know about the Hortmans. My mother had dementia.
Thank you.