Michele Bachmann defeats Tarryl Clark in nation’s most expensive House race

Rep. Michelle Bachmann has won reelection in Minnesota’s 6th Congressional District, the Associated Press reports, defeating Democratic candidate state Sen. Tarryl Clark. Votes are still being counted, but Bachmann leads Clark by a 51-40 percent margin with 40 percent of precincts reporting.

The House race between Bachmann and Clark was the most expensive in the country, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Clark’s $4.2 million raised throughout the election was more than twice the amount of any other Minnesota DFL congressional candidate this year. But her haul paled in comparison to Bachmann’s monstrous $11.1 million raised for this cycle. The combined $15 million raised between the two candidates was over $6 million more than the second most expensive campaign, in Florida’s 22nd Congressional District.

In an election year where campaigns were dwarfed by spending from independent organizations, only $49,000 from such groups was spent in the 6th district, with most of that sum devoted to support for Bachmann.

Bachmann will likely enter a new political world when she is sworn in for her third term in the House. Results from the rest of the country are still rolling in, but it appears likely that the Republican Party has retaken the House of Representatives. Bachmann was first elected in 2006, replacing former Rep. Mark Kennedy, who ran an unsuccessful Senate campaign that year. Entering the House at the same time as the 2006 wave election that favored Democrats, Bachmann has only been a member of the minority party to date. She has offered minimal amounts of legislation during her two terms, with much of it symbolic gestures rather than actual legislation which could have passed given the chamber’s party split.

As Republicans regain control of the House, Bachmann may rise to a prominent place in the party caucus. She is one of the stars of the tea party movement, and many GOP candidates ran campaigns this year seeking those voters. She leads the Tea Party Caucus in the House, which had 52 members when it was formed in July. Bachmann appears to be already testing the waters of her clout among newly-elected representatives, as she was unwilling to commit her support to Rep. John Boehner for House Speaker during her debate against Clark last week.

Earlier in the season, Democrats had eyed the 6th district as a potential seat ripe for a switch. Though the district skews Republican — John McCain defeated Barack Obama by a 53-45 percent margin in 2008 — many thought that Bachmann’s far-right views made her susceptible to a centrist challenge. Clark secured the DFL nomination and financial backing of national Democrats over the summer when Dr. Maureen Reed dropped out of the DFL primary. But as election prospects for Democrats turned grim with the shift from summer to fall, the 6th district largely faded into the background for the party as they focused on supporting incumbents.

Patrick Caldwell is the American Independent’s Minnesota correspondent.