2026 ELECTION · GOVERNORS
Minnesota governor: Klobuchar leads reported votes by 363,119
NBC projects Amy Klobuchar as the winner. The official file lists every precinct as reporting, while vote accounting remains distinct from a certified final result.
NBC NEWS: PROJECTED WINNER
The reported result
Democratic-Farmer-Labor candidate Amy Klobuchar leads Republican candidate Lisa Demuth in the Minnesota governor election in the official file retrieved November 4. The Minnesota Secretary of State lists 1,569,692 votes for the Klobuchar–Ben Schierer ticket and 1,206,573 for the Demuth–Ryan Wilson ticket. The difference is 363,119 votes, or 12.83 percentage points of the 2,830,141 votes in that file. NBC News separately identifies Klobuchar as its projected winner.
Reading the whole count
The Green Party ticket of Steven Young and Jane Kirby has 51,402 votes, and write-ins account for 2,474. Those votes remain in the denominator: the Klobuchar ticket has 55.46% of reported votes, the Demuth ticket 42.63%, Young’s ticket 1.82%, and write-ins 0.09%. These are shares of the votes present in this particular official file. They are not shares of registered voters or of everyone eligible to vote.
Why the reporting measure matters
The state file lists 4,105 of 4,105 precincts as reporting. That is 100% of the precinct units in the file. It does not establish that the count is certified, and it does not turn a precinct-completion measure into a guaranteed final-ballot total. NBC’s independently maintained page estimates 98.8% of expected votes counted and about 34,000 votes remaining. The two measures use different denominators and should be labeled separately.
The source clocks
The official text file has no embedded count-update timestamp. Its original HTTP Last-Modified header is November 4 at 20:58:19 UTC, or 3:58:19 PM Eastern; 21CEE retrieved it at 4:04:31 PM Eastern. We label the first as the official file’s modification time, not as the time a particular ballot was counted. NBC’s projection was independently observed in a page retrieved at 4:04:31 PM Eastern. An original projection time is not asserted here.
What to watch next
The next useful update is a revised official vote file or a certification record. A change in the reported total may refine the margin without representing a new race call. This story keeps NBC’s projection separate from the official vote totals and does not call the unofficial count final. The small differences between NBC’s current totals and the official text file are another reason to retain a single identified source for the charted counts.
| Ticket | Party | Votes | Reported share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Amy Klobuchar and Ben Schierer | DFL | 1,569,692 | 55.46% |
| Lisa Demuth and Ryan Wilson | R | 1,206,573 | 42.63% |
| Steven Young and Jane Kirby | GP | 51,402 | 1.82% |
| WRITE-IN | WI | 2,474 | 0.09% |
| Total | 2,830,141 | 100.00% |
Sources and method
Original official vote file; NBC News race page. Vote share = candidate or ticket votes ÷ all reported votes. Margin = leader votes − runner-up votes; margin in points uses unrounded shares. No final certification is claimed.