The race to fill the U.S. Senate seat in Minnesota previously held by Democrat Tina Smith, who is not seeking reelection, could give Minnesota Republicans a voice in the Senate for the first time in 24 years and stop one of the most left-wing Democrat candidates running this year.
Minnesota has not sent a Republican to the U.S. Senate since 2002, when voters elected former Sen. Norm Coleman, but with conservative cultural podcaster Michele Tafoya trailing only a few percentage points behind left-wing Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan, the balance of power could shift in November.
A new TIPP Insights poll conducted Aug. 31–Sept. 02 finds Flanagan ahead of Tafoya by a mere two percentage points, 44 percent to 42 percent, well within the margin of error.
Let’s remember that in mainstream polls, when a Republican is polling this close to a Democrat — well within the margin of error in either direction — it is entirely possible the polls are underestimating Tafoya’s support.
Tafoya, like President Donald Trump, is a political outsider who made a name for herself in sports broadcasting and later launched a podcast where she weighs in on culture and politics.
She is running on a tough-on-crime populist set of policies, including the deportation of illegal immigrants, ensuring funding and top-quality equipment and training for law enforcement, and protecting working-class tax cuts. She supports removing transgender men from women’s sports, strengthening parents’ rights in K-12 education, and pushing for voter ID laws to ensure only U.S. citizens vote.
Despite being a Democrat-controlled state for the most part, there is evidence that at the margins, Minnesota voters are growing weary of the state’s radical leftist leadership.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, who aligned himself with the failed 2024 presidential campaign of former Vice President Kamala Harris, has an approval rating that continues to sink.
The KSTP/SurveyUSA poll from Aug. 20 found Walz’s net approval rating has sunk to -9 points, down from +19 points in June 2025. Only 19 percent of respondents “strongly approve” of the governor’s job, while 24 percent “somewhat approve,” 14 percent “somewhat disapprove,” and 38 percent “strongly disapprove.”
Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan has taken hardline leftist positions on thorny political issues that may be out of step with moderates in Minnesota. She has called for the complete defunding of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), telling Fox 9 two days after winning the Democratic nomination for Senate on Aug. 13 that ICE should be entirely defunded.
“I think that we have to rip ICE apart,” Flanagan told the local Fox 9 after winning the Democratic nomination for Senate. She went on to state, “ICE, as it currently exists, shouldn’t receive one more penny.”
Flanagan was also a vocal supporter of Minnesota’s controversial “Trans Refuge” laws, which allow the state “emergency jurisdiction” over children pursuing gender-altering procedures, even without parental consent.
Speaking on Mar. 15, 2023, about gender-altering care for children specifically, Flanagan declared, “When our children tell us who they are, it is our job as grown-ups to listen and to believe them. That’s what it means to be a good parent.”
In other words, Flanagan is not a moderate Democrat, or even a center-left Democrat; she is about as far left as you can go.
While Minnesota has been in the spotlight for its leftist leadership recently, such as this February when Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey made headlines for telling ICE to “get the f— out of Minneapolis,” the state has actually trended slightly toward the right since 2020.
Minnesota went very blue in the 2020 presidential election, supporting Joe Biden by 7.1 percentage points over President Donald Trump. However, by the 2024 election, Trump had cut that down by nearly three percentage points. Kamala Harris won Minnesota by 4.2 percentage points in 2024, a 2.9 percentage point decline compared to Joe Biden.
With Flanagan’s far-left record, the November race for U.S. Senate will pit an America First conservative from outside the entrenched political environment against a progressive who wants to defund ICE and provide gender transition “care” to children. This will be a hard sell to moderate Minnesotans and could open up the path for voters to elect a Republican to the U.S. Senate for the first time since the early 2000s. That said, the race is far from over.
Manzanita Miller is the senior political analyst at Americans for Limited Government Foundation.
