MN-2 · House

The district, in brief

Minnesota's 2nd district is based in the southern Twin Cities suburbs, including Burnsville, Eagan and Lakeville. The lines are unchanged for 2026; the map was first used in 2022.

The seat is open: the incumbent, Democrat Angie Craig, re-elected with 55.5% of the vote in 2024, is retiring to run for U.S. Senate. The DFL nominee is Matt Little, a former state senator from the 58th district, who won the DFL primary with 47.2% over state senator Matt Klein (30.4%) and state representative Kaela Berg (16.7%); state senator Erin Maye Quade declined to run and endorsed Little. The Republican nominee is Eric Pratt, a state senator from the 54th district since 2013, who was unopposed after Tyler Kistner, the party's 2020 and 2022 nominee, withdrew and Joe Teirab, its 2024 nominee, declined. As of July 22, 2026 Little had raised $923,277 with $127,543 on hand; as of March 31, 2026 Pratt had raised $259,426 with $139,691 on hand.

Every rater listed calls the seat D: Decision Desk HQ (July 14, 2026), the Cook Political Report (April 30, 2025), Inside Elections (December 5, 2025) and Sabato's Crystal Ball (March 26, 2026). Two polls of the general-election matchup are recorded: Impact Research (D) for Little's campaign, September 9–13, 2026, had Little 52%, Pratt 40%; Harper Polling (R), June 18–21, 2026, had Little 45%, Pratt 40%.

A paragraph quoting a model forecast from the day this brief was written is omitted; the current forecast is at the top of this page.

The facts, each beside its sentence

Not in the source: The text gives no presidential results for the district.; The model's basis says no district polls, but the text has two general-election polls of Little vs. Pratt; the polls are on Wikipedia and not in this project's poll corpus.; Republican fundraising figures are as of March 31, 2026 only, and there is no post-primary fundraising table.; The text names no third-party or independent candidates and has no general-election results table.; The endorsements sections are empty.

Read from the district's section of Wikipedia's state page (CC BY-SA), archived as f61d1cbce5da; written by claude-fable-5-1 (batch reader) on 2026-09-30 and checked mechanically: every quote occurs verbatim in the archived text, every number in the brief occurs in the inputs. No probability here is the reader's.

Who holds the seat now

Angie Craig (Democrat), in this chamber since 2019, 4 terms. Committees: House Committee on Agriculture (Ranking Member).

From the congress-legislators dataset (CC0), archived as ae8cb9477c48. For a Senate race this lists both of the state's senators; the one whose term ends in the election year holds the seat on the ballot. For a House district redrawn for 2026 it is the member elected under the old lines with this number, who may be running elsewhere; the dossier above names who is running here.

How it has voted for president

A shift of 7.0 points toward the Democrats from 2016 to 2024. county returns placed on the current lines by 2020 block population; MEDSL county file (2016), an MIT-licensed county file (2020, checked against certified state results) and MEDSL precinct returns (2024). For a district split across counties this is an estimate, and where the state published the exact 2024 figure for these lines, that exact figure is the one the model uses.

Who are the voters?

Of about 476,120 adults 25 and over. In 2020 the district voted 53.7% Democratic (two-party) for president. With the same preferences and a 2022-style midterm turnout, it would vote 55.2% Democratic: the midterm electorate alone moves the margin 2.9 points toward Democrats. Group shares are estimated from how results vary across the state's census tracts (ecological inference, anchored to Pew's 2020 validated-voter figures) and calibrated to this district's actual 2020 vote; turnout is the Census survey's state rate by race and national rate by education, whose state samples carry margins of several points.

Not answered here: how each group will vote in 2026. These are 2020 preferences; this profile is description, not yet an input to the forecast.

The money

FEC bulk candidate summaries through July 22, 2026; $3,966,379 of independent expenditures for or against these candidates this cycle (FEC Schedule E, types 24E and 24A), which is the parties' and outside groups' own revealed view of whether this seat is in play.

The district in numbers

ACS 5-year 2023, the Census Bureau's own tabulation of this district (118th Congress lines). Unemployment is the BLS county series placed on the district by block population, not seasonally adjusted, so changes are same-month comparisons. Income, transfers and jobs are BEA county accounts placed the same way, compared with the average district. Every other figure is a named column of a named table in the Bureau's summary file, archived before it was read. This is what a reader knows about a district before looking at a poll; the model does not yet use it, and whether it should is a registered question.

Who is favoured, and by how much?

The 90% interval runs from +4.2 to +34.1 points, D-R. It is wide because this district has never been polled.

What is this built on?

A model trained on every contested House race 2012-2024 predicts this district's lean from its own record: presidential and House results on the current lines, incumbency, both candidates' prior offices, outside and party money before 1 October, demographics and public-assistance shares from the Census release before the election, local unemployment and income, and religious tradition. The national margin comes from presidential approval, the economy, the midterm penalty and the generic ballot corrected for its measured lean. Draws share national and state errors, so the seat total and this district come from the same simulation.

Not answered here: district polls, which are not yet folded in.

Why does the model say this?

Each figure is how far this district's predicted lean moves when that one feature is set to the typical value across 2026 districts, everything else held: 2024 presidential lean (D+7.5): 10.3 pts toward the Democrat; PAC money balance: 5.1 pts toward the Democrat; 2024 House lean (D+16.5): 2.3 pts toward the Democrat; total outside/party money: 0.9 pts toward the Republican; hispanic share (8.1%): 0.8 pts toward the Democrat.

How sure is it, and of what?

Total sd 9.05 points, made of the seat's own volatility 90%, correlated polling error 10%. The decomposition is stored with the forecast rather than reconstructed, so a probability whose dominant input is a placeholder is visibly that.

Not answered here: a nowcast. 'If ballots were cast today' needs something that observes today, and for a House district nothing does. Publishing the election-day figure under both labels would make one forecast look like two.

How was this number made?

Run 00a09d4b-7980-4ec5-ada0-077968a87242, house_district_prior/0.2.0, as of 2026-10-02. Promoted by a pre-registered gate: on 2016-2022 its Brier score was 0.036 against 0.049 for the previous method, and on a single 2024 run 0.023 against 0.032 (experiments/district_gate_result.md, with an independent review).