NBA player-turned-MAGA acolyte Royce White was projected to win his Minnesota Republican Senate primary Tuesday, setting him up for a long-odds matchup against Democratic incumbent Sen. Amy Klobuchar this November.
With more than three-quarters of the votes counted Tuesday night, White, 33, had notched 38 percent of the vote to his opponent Joe Fraser’s 29 percent, according to The New York Times, via the Associated Press.
“I thank every Minnesotan who voted in tonight’s primary election,” White wrote on X, formerly Twitter, after the race had been called. “I’m deeply honored to have your support during this critical time in our nation’s history.”
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“For many years, Republicans have talked about expanding our tent and focusing on the Twin Cities Metro. I am committed to growing the base, bringing disenfranchised democrats into the tent, and unifying all conservatives in Minnesota,” he added. “By doing this, we will deliver a victory for President Trump this November. Together we will bring the battle to unseat Amy Klobuchar.”
White’s victory is the latest development in a whipsaw public career that began with a trailblazing campaign to focus more on mental health in sports—and even included protesting with Black Lives Matter demonstrators in his hometown of Minneapolis after the 2020 death of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
The former star athlete took a harsh rightward turn in recent years, however, and has carved out space in Donald Trump’s populist movement following a series of inflammatory comments about women, LGBTQ+ people, Jews, and vaccines, among other things.
Recently, he declared himself “the new gold standard of American badass, smash-mouth, nationalist populism.”
White counts among his allies the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon, among a host of other far-right figures.
Not so, however for the Star Tribune, whose Politics and Government Editor Laura McCallum said it would not feature a photo of White on its front page after he allegedly said, “No Star Tribune, no communists,” to its photographer during White’s election-night watch party.
On Saturday, White even guest-hosted Bannon’s War Room podcast while he sits in jail for contempt of Congress.
Tuesday’s results were a sea change from his reception in 2022, when he lost a Republican primary for Rep. Ilhan Omar’s 5th Congressional District to Cicely Davis.
The Daily Beast first revealed that shortly after his loss, White dropped $1,200 at a Miami-area strip club called “Gold Rush Cabaret”—an expense that quickly became the subject of a complaint filed with the Federal Election Commission by the nonpartisan nonprofit Campaign Legal Center (CLC).
“This takes us well outside the realm of FEC fines,” Brendan Fischer, a specialist in campaign finance law, told the Daily Beast at the time. “This looks a lot like the kind of thing that people go to jail for.”
White, however, explained away the expense by claiming that he’d done a campaign-related podcast in the area, telling the Beast in an interview, “I like the food there.” He later claimed to have reimbursed the campaign for “non-authorized expenses.”
He also faces a host of other legal and financial problems, including over $100,000 in overdue child support payments, as revealed to The Daily Beast by the mother of one of his children earlier this summer.
White denied the woman’s claims, telling the Daily Beast, “I’m current on child support payments.”
Despite these troubles, White stunned Minnesota politics watchers by securing the state Republican Party’s endorsement at its May convention—setting him up for Tuesday’s victory.
University of Minnesota political scientist Larry Jacobs told the Associated Press at the time that low participation numbers played a huge part in swinging the vote in his favor. He called it a “shocking example” of what can happen when the general public is not engaged in the political process.
“Royce is clearly unprepared to be a U.S. senator and a candidate,” Jacobs said. “His record in the past is shameful and will be easy pickings for Amy Klobuchar.”
