MN Attorney General Race Live Results: Keith Ellison Leads Jim Schultz

ST. PAUL, MN — Minnesota's Democratic Attorney General Keith Ellison currently maintains a small lead against Republican challenger Jim Schultz.

Republicans have not won a statewide race in Minnesota since 2006, and Schultz may be their last, best chance to break that streak Tuesday night.

Live results last updated: 11:38 p.m.

Republican
Jim Schultz
1,043,744
48.28%

Democratic-Farmer-Labor
Keith Ellison
1,116,082
51.62%

Write-In
WRITE-IN
2,135
0.10%

In the weeks leading up to Election Day, polls consistently showed Schultz tied or leading Ellison among likely voters.

Schultz will hope that Minnesotans, concerned about rising violent crime and government waste and fraud, show up to the polls and demand change.

Schultz has spent much of his campaign criticizing Ellison for supporting the 2021 ballot amendment to dismantle and replace the Minneapolis Police Department. The ballot amendment was rejected by Minneapolis voters in the last general election.

"While Keith Ellison desperately tries to run away from his dangerous defund-the-police record, public safety officials from across Minnesota are endorsing our campaign in historic numbers,” said Schultz on Oct. 27.

"The voters of Minnesota are going to hold Keith Ellison accountable for his extremely reckless embrace of the defund-the-police movement that has created skyrocketing violent crime in our communities."

Meanwhile, Ellison hopes that his support for abortion rights and his record of prosecuting criminals — including the four former Minneapolis police officers involved in the killing of George Floyd — will propel him to a second term in office.

Ellison has painted Schultz — an attorney specializing in business and compliance law — as extreme on abortion and unqualified to be the state's top prosecutor.

"I beat Big Pharma to protect access to free emergency insulin so moms like Nicole Smith-Holt never have to bury their kids bc they couldn't afford life-saving drugs," Ellison tweeted on Nov. 1.

"My opponent, a Wall St. lawyer wants to gut the consumer protection division stopping Big Pharma."

Before he was elected to the attorney's general office in 2018, Ellison represented Minneapolis in the U.S. House for more than a decade.