Minnesota Dems Ready To Make 2026 Senate And Governor's Races Their Bovino, We Mean Bitch
Tina Smith's retiring, and Goopers thought 'fraud' might put the seat in play. Hmmm.
Friday, tens of thousands of Minnesotans left work or school to march in protest of the brutal federal invasion by lawless ICE agents. The streets of downtown Minneapolis were full of protesters demanding that ICE get the hell out of their city — and it all happened in below-zero temperatures, with the wind chill making it feel like -40° F.
Then Saturday, Border Patrol thugs murdered Alex Pretti, the White House lied about what everyone could plainly see on video, Senate Democrats may reject funding the Department of Homeland Security, and the nationwide disgust over the murders and lies in Minnesota is still only growing stronger.
All the above is the context in which Minnesotans will be electing a new US senator to replace Sen. Tina Smith (D), who’s retiring this year. They’ll also elect a new governor after Tim Walz announced earlier this month that he won’t be running for a third term.
Hell of a lotta context for a Senate race, huh? Let’s dig in.
Ms. Smith Comes Back From Washington
There are still long months of Crom only knows what next to go before the August 11 primary, but Minnesota being among the bluest of the blue states, the winner of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor primary will be the presumed frontrunner for the November general election.
The top two Democrats in the race are Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan and US Rep. Angie Craig, either of whom would make a bit of history if elected to the Senate. Flanagan, who’s a member of the White Earth Nation, would become the first Native American woman in the Senate (ideally, she should share the honor with Alaska’s Mary Peltola). If Craig wins, she’d become Minnesota’s first out LGBTQ+ person in the Senate.
Generally speaking, Craig is center-leftish, a member of the New Democratic coalition, with endorsements from Sens. Tammy Baldwin (Wisconsin), Ruben Gallego (Arizona), and Andy Kim (New Jersey). Flanagan is a self-described progressive; her endorsements so far come from former Sen. Al Franken (whom Smith was appointed to replace after he resigned), along with Sen. Elizabeth Warren and former Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, who’s running for governor in New Mexico.
Trump’s Invasion Surprisingly Not Winning Support For Republicans
Following December’s manufactured rightwing outrage over supposedly rampant fraud in Minnesota, some Republicans began hoping they might ride the scandal — boosted by a wave of Trump-endorsed racism against Minnesota’s Somali-American community — to win a Senate seat for the GOP for the first time since 2002. That’s when Norm Coleman won following the death of Sen. Paul Wellstone in a plane crash the month before the election.
After Trump’s attempts to bludgeon Minnesota into submission, which led to the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, we’re not so sure the fraud stuff is the winning issue for Republicans it looked like just a few weeks ago.
The GOP primary seems likely to be won by just-announced candidate Michele Tafoya, a former sideline reporter for NBC’s Sunday Night Football who in 2022 jumped into rightwing media. Tafoya announced her Senate bid last Wednesday, as more and more Minnesotans took to the icy streets and ICE ramped up both its outrageous deportation raids and its attacks on Minnesotans who are sick of it.
Tafoya promised in her announcement video that she would “protect what’s fair and safe, standing with our law enforcement officers, deporting dangerous criminals, and keeping female sports for female athletes.” Why yes, even with Trump threatening to invoke the Insurrection Act and send the Army into American cities, Goopers can’t stop hating on trans people. It’s about priorities.
You’d think that by now Minnesotans would know better than to vote again for any Republican woman named Michele with one l.
Tafoya couldn’t bring herself to express any empathy for Alex Pretti or his family, but she did know whom to blame for his killing: Democrats, obviously (Archive link).
Tafoya also said in an interview on Newsmax that everyone should just take a deep breath and “get DHS to do an investigation,” because why shouldn’t it investigate itself? She also blamed Walz again, criticizing him for saying on social media, “Minnesota knows how to keep our people safe.” Tafoya griped, “If that was the case, governor, where have they been the past two weeks?” (Mostly the state has been suing the feds to GTFO and stop terrorizing Minnesotans, and is now suing to preserve the evidence from Pretti’s killing.)
Also pretty gross: Last June, when she was only a podcaster and not yet a candidate, Tafoya glommed onto the vile conspiracy theory (archive link) that Melissa Hortman was gunned down as revenge for voting against “providing free healthcare to illegal immigrants.” (She also lied that state Sen. John Hoffmann (D), who was badly wounded in the shooting spree by an antiabortion MAGA creep, had voted the same way.)
Tafoya joins a Republican field that includes Adam Schwarze — yet another friggin’ Navy SEAL, as if that alone matters — as well as former state GOP Chair David Hann and weird creep Royce White, the basketball player who ran against Amy Klobuchar in 2024. You remember Royce White; he’s the dipshit who proclaimed that “women have become too mouthy” and blew campaign money on a limo trip to a Florida strip club, although he explained it away as an “accounting error.”
You can see why national Republicans are all excited about Tafoya getting into the race.
Democrats In Array
Both Craig and Flanagan have called for ICE to get the hell out of the state and have condemned Trump’s racist attacks on Minnesota’s Somali community, and in the days since Pretti’s murder, both have of course condemned the killing and repeated their demands that ICE GTFO. In a social media video Saturday, Flanagan urged Democrats in the US Senate to refuse to give DHS a penny more without significant reforms. In a CNN interview Sunday, Craig also called on Senate Dems to reject funding DHS, even if it risked a partial government shutdown, warning Americans that “this is coming to a city near you if we don’t take a stand.”
Following the murder of Renee Good, Craig laid into Minnesota Republican Tom Emmer on the House floor for his Facebook comments praising ICE agents for “putting their lives on the line” and calling Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey “cowards who are inciting violence to distract from their own failures.” Craig angrily confronted him, saying that “this political stunt by this administration got a woman killed in Minneapolis today,” as she explained in an interview afterwards. Emmer got his dander up and told Craig to “take a walk.”
Flanagan was quick to point out, however, that last year Craig was among just 48 House Democrats who voted in favor of the GOP’s ugly fearmongering “Laken Riley Act,” which mandated ICE detention, with no opportunity for bail, of any undocumented person arrested — not convicted or charged, simply arrested — for a range of minor crimes, including shoplifting.
“I think that Minnesotans have a really clear choice,” Flanagan said. “Do you want someone who votes along with Donald Trump and the agents who are terrorizing our communities? Or do you want someone who you know believes that we can have secure borders, comprehensive immigration reform, a pathway to citizenship, and have a policy that is grounded in dignity, the safety of our entire community?”
Craig claims that the law is actually good because it protects immigrants’ due process rights, and that most Minnesotans want violent criminals detained. But that was the case before the Laken Reilly Act, which simply made a wider range of minor property offenses subject to detention without a chance of bail, without adding any due process protections to those already in place.
Craig also hopped on the Republican talking points bandwagon to suggest that Flanagan would have trouble in the general election because she’s part of Walz’s administration, which actually prosecuted fraud but has been painted as indifferent to it:
“If I were a lieutenant governor of a state right now, particularly this one, my number one priority would be helping the governor address the fraud issues that we have in the state,” Craig said. ”I don’t believe we can afford for her to be the nominee and put the Senate seat at risk the way she is abdicating all responsibility and accountability for fraud in Minnesota, and pushing Governor Walz in front of that bus by himself, as she has been his partner for seven years, is kind of disgusting.”
For our money, we’d really prefer that Democratic primary candidates not try so hard to push GOP points. That said, Craig has also signed on to House Dems’ call to impeach Kristi Noem, and also voted last week against continuing to fund DHS. At the rate things are escalating in Minnesota, these differences may not matter by September anyway.
In the latest and dumbest rightwing smear attempt, wingnuts are claiming, with no real evidence, that Flanagan has secretly been running all the opposition to ICE in Minnesota, because one member of a Signal group that alerts people to ICE’s presence has the username “Flan Southside.” That’s it, that’s the proof: One user has the first syllable of the Lieutenant Governor’s name. Flanagan’s spokesperson said that account isn’t Flanagan, so of course wingnuts are now flooding Flanagan’s social media posts and calling her “Flan Southside.”
And There’s A Governor’s Race Too!
Following Walz’s decision not to run, it’s looking like Minnesota’s senior senator, Amy Klobuchar, will run for his seat. Klobuchar hasn’t made any formal announcement yet, but last filed paperwork with Minnesota’s campaign finance board, a necessary first step in running. Aides were saying at the time that Klobuchar would announce her plans “in the coming days,” but since Pretti was murdered she has understandably put off any media questions by saying she’s focused on getting ICE the hell out of Minnesota.
If Klobuchar runs for governor, it’s unlikely to mean adding a special Senate election this fall. Minnesota allows sitting officeholders to keep their seats while running for another office, so she wouldn’t have to resign until/unless she wins the governorship. (If she wins, it’s actually not clear yet whether her successor would be appointed by Walz, or by Klobuchar herself after being sworn in; a special election would then be held to fill the remainder of her term.) If Klobuchar gets in, expect other potential Democratic candidates to step aside to improve the chances that Democrats retain the governorship.
On the Republican side, the murder of Alex Pretti prompted Minneapolis attorney Chris Madel to drop out of the governor’s race and apparently out of the Republican Party altogether. In a video message, Madel said, “I cannot support the national Republicans’ stated retribution on the citizens of our state, nor can I count myself a member of a party that would do so.”
Madel had positioned himself as a supporter of police, and provided legal advice to Jonathan Ross, the ICE goon who shot and killed Renee Good, but the latest horror apparently shocked him into a realization of how bad things are. In his message, he said, “Operation Metro Surge has expanded far beyond its stated focus on true public safety threat. United States citizens, particularly those of color, live in fear. United States citizens are carrying papers to prove their citizenship. That’s wrong.”
He also ripped DHS’s new policy pretending that an “administrative warrant” is sufficient for armed goons to bust down people’s doors to search for undocumented immigrants. We can see how a lawyer would find that repugnant. “I have to look my daughters in the eye and tell them, ‘I believe I did what was right,’” Madel said in the video. “And I am doing that today.”
So there goes the last Republican with any principles, we guess. There are already a bunch of primary contenders for the Republican nomination for governor, including House Speaker Lisa Demuth, state Rep. Kristin Roberts, and perennial grifter Mike Lindell, the My Pillow Guy. But in his farewell to the governor’s race and his party, Madel suggested none of them are likely to reverse the GOP’s losing streak in the state, saying, “National Republicans have made it nearly impossible for a Republican to win a statewide election in Minnesota.”
Good luck, Minnesota.
[Guardian / KSTP-TV / The 19th / AP / MPR / Mother Jones / Washington Times / Angie Craig campaign site / Peggy Flanagan campaign site]
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If the headline sounds like Evan, that's because he graciously helped replace my very boring draft hed.
Seriously, mine was bad and I knew it.
FUCK YEAH!
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