On a sweltering summer morning, Senator Amy Klobuchar was making small talk with merchants at the St. Paul farmer’s market when a cheesemaker expressed a sentiment that has kept coming up as Ms. Klobuchar campaigns for governor.

“We’re going to miss you in Washington,” the cheesemaker, Brenda Carlson, told the senator while bagging a piece of Tilsit.

Ms. Klobuchar acknowledged having mixed feelings about leaving her seat as the chamber’s third highest-ranking Democrat. “But we need to get this sorted out,” she said, frowning slightly.

By this, Ms. Klobuchar meant the current condition of Minnesota, which has become a punching bag in the Trump administration’s quest to portray Democratic-run states and cities as hopelessly dysfunctional.

As she gears up for what could be the capstone of a decades-long political career, Ms. Klobuchar is pitching herself as uniquely qualified to clean up the messes at home and reset the state’s poisonous relationship with the White House.

Her reputation makes the case, supporters say: She is known as both a hard-charging workaholic who scrutinizes program details to a fault and a centrist with allies on both sides of the aisle in Washington, including in the Trump administration.

But both qualities could also cause friction. Minnesota agencies are bracing for turbulence as Ms. Klobuchar vows to audit every state program. And many residents remain shell shocked from the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown early this year, which paralyzed the Twin Cities for weeks and left two U.S. citizens dead.

When it comes to relations with the president, some residents say they want a fighter in the governor’s office, not a conciliator.

Nekima Levy Armstrong, a civil rights lawyer who is facing trial over her role organizing an anti-ICE protest at a church, said Ms. Klobuchar did not speak out stridently enough about the wintertime deportation campaign.

“Many of us felt abandoned by our elected officials during Operation Metro Surge,” Ms. Levy Armstrong said. “We felt abandoned by Amy Klobuchar in particular.”

In an interview, Ms. Klobuchar said she was “as angry about some of the things Trump has done as anyone.”

“But I have decided that I’m going to get us to a higher place and not act like him,” she said. Her first goal, she added, “is to earn back the trust of the people of Minnesota in state government.”

For now, Minnesota Democrats have expressed almost uniform relief that Ms. Klobuchar is their nominee rather than the current governor, Tim Walz.

They began 2026 in panic mode as a scandal over widespread fraud in state-run safety net programs dogged Mr. Walz’s bid for a third term. State lawmakers openly fretted that his name at the top of the ballot in this year’s midterm elections would give Republicans a strong shot at winning the governor’s mansion for the first time in two decades and controlling the tightly divided Legislature.

“I would definitely be lying if I said that the worry meter wasn’t ticking up, up, up by the week,” said State Representative Mike Howard, a Democrat from the Twin Cities.

They exhaled when Mr. Walz dropped his re-election bid in early January, as the Trump administration was sending thousands of immigration agents to the state in what the president called a campaign of “RECKONING & RETRIBUTION.”

Ms. Klobuchar announced her run for governor later that month as Minnesotans were reeling from the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, two American citizens shot by immigration agents in Minneapolis. “These times call for grit and resilience,” Ms. Klobuchar proclaimed.

The announcement amounted to a reversal of fortunes for Democrats, making Ms. Klobuchar the clear favorite in the general election race against Lisa Demuth, the Republican speaker of the Minnesota House. Even far-left lawmakers in the State Capitol — where the party has a one-seat majority in the Senate and is tied in the House — have emerged as enthusiastic surrogates for Ms. Klobuchar.

“People in the Democratic Party here in Minnesota understand she’s our best path to winning a majority and defending ourselves from Donald Trump,” said State Senator Zaynab Mohamed, a member of the democratic socialist wing of the party.

Ms. Klobuchar kicked off her run by calling all 101 Democrats in the Legislature, keeping several on the phone for more than an hour. There was talk of campaign strategy, lawmakers said, but Ms. Klobuchar was most interested in their policy goals.

When she ran for president in 2020, Ms. Klobuchar was the subject of several critical articles depicting her as a perfectionist and difficult boss whose office had among the highest turnover in the Senate.

Ms. Klobuchar has a tendency to personally tackle tasks most elected officials delegate and to fire off all-caps emails to aides, which often land in inboxes between midnight and dawn.

Some supporters now call that feverish approach an asset.

Representative Zack Stephenson, the Democratic leader in the Minnesota House, recalled being startled by a 3 a.m. email from Ms. Klobuchar in 2006 when he served as a lowly aide in her first Senate campaign.

“The lesson I took away from that race is that to be successful in politics, the secret is to work really hard,” he said.

The sense of relief extends to Democratic voters like Ms. Carlson, the cheesemaker, who says she has soured on Governor Walz, a former schoolteacher and coach who oversaw the adoption of a raft of progressive policies and made a splash on the national stage by running for vice president in 2024.

In recent years, Ms. Carlson said, small business owners like herself have grown frustrated by tax increases and red tape that seem to grow each year. Then came revelations about rampant fraud in state programs meant to feed low-income children, treat minors with autism and help people at risk of homelessness.

“I just think things got away from him when he did the whole run,” said Ms. Carlson, 54, who lives in Center City, a conservative town 40 miles north of the Twin Cities. “He couldn’t keep a watchful eye, and whoever was wasn’t doing their job.”

She said she hoped Ms. Klobuchar would be different.

That is the senator’s pitch. Having enthusiastically backed Mr. Walz’s vice-presidential bid two years ago, Ms. Klobuchar has now distanced herself from him.

She kicked off her campaign in May by announcing a detailed plan to combat fraud. Evoking the years she served as the elected county prosecutor in Minneapolis, she stood alongside the former U.S. attorney in Minnesota against a backdrop of law books.

“You are right to be angry about the fraud,” Ms. Klobuchar said at the time.

Ms. Klobuchar has also questioned how Governor Walz and allied lawmakers spent a $17 billion surplus in 2023. After Mr. Walz granted a pardon in June to a man convicted of child sexual abuse who was facing deportation to Laos, Ms. Klobuchar said she would have let the conviction stand.

A spokesman for Mr. Walz did not respond to a request for comment.

Ms. Demuth, the Republican candidate for governor, has sought to portray Ms. Klobuchar’s bid as a de facto third term for Mr. Walz, questioning why she wasn’t outspoken about the fraud problem before jumping into the race.

“She will not be able to enact the changes that are desperately needed,” Ms. Demuth said in an interview.

Ms. Klobuchar has called Ms. Demuth a “rubber stamp for Donald Trump.”

But how Ms. Klobuchar will approach the Trump administration — and whether that will satisfy Democrats in a state with a strong leftist streak — remains unclear.

Activists have pressed her to adopt a statewide sanctuary policy for undocumented immigrants, which would ban local jurisdictions from signing cooperation agreements with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. One activist recently confronted Ms. Klobuchar about the issue as she marched in a small town parade.

So far she has refused. In the interview, Ms. Klobuchar, who has long championed a broad overhaul of the immigration system, said she intended to make a case that immigrants are vital to Minnesota’s economic growth.

“I cannot tell you the number of small businesses that we have run by immigrants in our state,” she said.

Ms. Klobuchar trounced a handful of little-known candidates in the Aug. 11 primary, winning nearly 90 percent of the vote. That dominance meant she avoided being meaningfully drawn into fraught policy debates playing out in other national races, said Kobey Layne, 26, a democratic socialist who placed a distant second.

Ms. Layne said she worried that as governor, Ms. Klobuchar would prioritize bipartisan cooperation and incremental change over bold overhauls, such as the creation of a state-run, single-payer health care system.

Asked about the growing clout of democratic socialists, Ms. Klobuchar said she welcomed intraparty policy debates and expected pushback from all sides if elected. She also acknowledged rumors that she was considering appointing Republicans to her cabinet.

“Spoiler alert,” she said. “You’re not going to like everything I do.”