Amy Klobuchar

Amy Jean Klobuchar ( KLOH-bə-shar; born May 25, 1960) is an American politician and lawyer serving as the senior United States senator from Minnesota, a seat she has held since 2007. A member of the Minnesota Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party (DFL), Minnesota's affiliate of the Democratic Party, she previously served as county attorney of Hennepin County, Minnesota. She is running for governor of Minnesota in the 2026 election.

Born in Plymouth, Minnesota, Klobuchar graduated from Yale University and the University of Chicago Law School. She was a partner at two Minneapolis law firms before being elected county attorney of Hennepin County in 1998, making her responsible for all criminal prosecution in Minnesota's most populous county. Klobuchar was first elected to the Senate in 2006, succeeding Mark Dayton to become Minnesota's first elected female United States senator. She became Minnesota's senior senator in 2009, when Norm Coleman left the Senate following his defeat. She was reelected by a landslide in 2012, winning 85 of the state's 87 counties, before being reelected again in 2018. Klobuchar's political positions align with modern liberalism. She has focused on healthcare reform, consumer protection, abortion rights, agriculture, and climate change.

On February 10, 2019, Klobuchar announced her candidacy for the Democratic nomination for president of the United States in the 2020 election; on March 2, 2020, she suspended her campaign and endorsed Joe Biden. In 2021, she became the chair of the Senate Rules Committee. She was reelected to a fourth Senate term in 2024, defeating Republican nominee Royce White. In January 2026, she announced her candidacy for governor of Minnesota after incumbent Tim Walz withdrew from the race.

Early life and education

Born in Plymouth, Minnesota, Klobuchar is the daughter of Rose (née Heuberger) and Jim Klobuchar. Her mother taught second grade until she retired at age 70. Her father was a sportswriter and columnist for the Star Tribune. He was of Slovene descent and her mother of German-Swiss ancestry.

Klobuchar's parents divorced when she was 15. The divorce took a toll on the family; her relationship with her father was not fully restored until he quit drinking in the 1990s.

She attended public schools in Plymouth and was valedictorian at Wayzata High School, where she was also class treasurer and secretary. She received her Bachelor of Arts magna cum laude in political science in 1982 from Yale University. While at Yale, Klobuchar spent time as an intern for former Vice President and former Minnesota senator Walter Mondale. Her senior thesis, Uncovering the Dome, a 250-page history of the ten years of politics surrounding the building of the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome in Minneapolis, was published by Waveland Press in 1986. After Yale, Klobuchar enrolled at the University of Chicago Law School, where she served as an associate editor of the University of Chicago Law Review and earned her J.D. degree with high honors in 1985.

Early career

After law school, Klobuchar worked as a corporate lawyer. Before seeking public office, besides working as a prosecutor, Klobuchar was a partner at the Minnesota law firms Dorsey & Whitney and Gray Plant Mooty, where she specialized in "regulatory work in telecommunications law". Her first foray into politics came after she gave birth and was forced to leave the hospital 24 hours later, a situation exacerbated by the fact that Klobuchar's daughter, Abigail, was born with a disorder that prevented her from swallowing. The experience led Klobuchar to appear before the Minnesota State Legislature, advocating for a bill that would guarantee new mothers a 48-hour hospital stay. Minnesota passed the bill and President Bill Clinton later made the policy federal law.

Klobuchar was first a candidate for public office in 1994 when she ran for Hennepin County attorney. But she had pledged to drop out if the incumbent, Michael Freeman, got back in the race after failing to win the endorsement of the Minnesota Democratic–Farmer–Labor (DFL) Party for governor. Keeping this pledge, she quit the race in June 1994 and supported Freeman for reelection. Before running for office, Klobuchar was active in supporting DFL candidates, including Freeman in 1990. The county attorney election is nonpartisan, but Freeman, like Klobuchar, is a Democrat.

Hennepin County attorney

Klobuchar was elected Hennepin County attorney in 1998, running after Freeman declined to seek an additional term. In the nonpartisan election, she defeated Republican Sheryl Ramstad Hvass by a margin of less than 1%. Klobuchar was reelected unopposed in 2002.

In 2001, Minnesota Lawyer named her "Attorney of the Year". Klobuchar was president of the Minnesota County Attorneys Association from November 2002 to November 2003.

In 2002, Klobuchar spearheaded an effort that resulted in state laws being altered to allow felony charges to be brought against repeat drunk driving offenders. In 2003, Klobuchar dealt with one of her highest-profile cases when the Hennepin County Attorney's Office brought several charges against former professional baseball player Kirby Puckett related to an alleged sex crime. Puckett was acquitted by a jury of all charges brought against him.

Klobuchar took a "tough-on-crime" approach. At the time she took office, there was a crime wave in Minneapolis, with the city's murder rate much higher than the national rate. Klobuchar had won election on the slogan "More Trials, More Convictions". She pursued heavier sentencing and less favorable plea deals, and sought to bring more cases to trial. By the end of her first year, she had significantly increased the number of cases brought and convictions secured. Under Klobuchar, the Hennepin County Attorney's Office prosecuted people for possession of khat. At the time, it was rare in the United States for prosecutors to pursue prosecution on such charges. Klobuchar also brought felony charges against a number of men for failure to pay child support.

Klobuchar pursued tougher sentencing in hopes of deterring crime. For some smaller offenses, such as vandalism, she regularly sought sentences that exceeded the recommended duration. This was true for both adult and minor defendants. For property crime offenders who had five prior convictions, Klobuchar's office similarly pursued longer sentences than had been recommended. Klobuchar declared that she intended to scrutinize judges who were "letting offenders off the hook too easily". In 2000, a successful appeal by Klobuchar lengthened by two days a sentence that a judge gave an immigrant defendant, which placed the defendant at a greatly increased risk of deportation. The judge had originally imposed a sentence of 364 days. A sentence of 365 days or greater was likely to lead to the defendant's deportation, and the two days Klobuchar added placed the defendant over that threshold. An analysis by the Vera Institute of Justice found that during Klobuchar's tenure, there was a 20% increase in the number of prison inmates in Hennepin County, which the analysis attributed to the harsher sentences Klobuchar sought.

During Klobuchar's tenure, there was a decrease in the disparity between the rates of African American and white rates of imprisonment, but the disparity remained pronounced, at quadruple the national average (per the Vera Institute of Justice).

Klobuchar successfully prosecuted teenage defendant Myon Burrell for the 2002 murder of 11-year-old Tyesha Edwards by gunshot. Both Burrell and Edwards were African American. For much of her subsequent career, Klobuchar highlighted this case, framing it both as an example of her toughness on crime as well as an example of her fighting to provide justice for African-American communities affected by gun crime. Burrell remained steadfast in claiming that he was innocent. In late January 2020, during Klobuchar's presidential campaign, the Associated Press called attention to flaws in the case against Burrell, and quoted a co-defendant in the trial as having admitted that he, not Burrell, had actually fired the shot that killed Edwards. APM Reports also uncovered further consequential flaws with the case against Burrell. Due to these circumstances, his sentence was commuted by the Minnesota Board of Pardons in December 2020.

In 2004, Klobuchar supported the presidential campaign of U.S. senator John Kerry, traveling across Minnesota as a campaign surrogate.