One Less Trip to Starbucks

On Monday evening at 5:15 the President of the United States posted that the Republican candidate for Senate in Minnesota cannot lose. "The only way she can lose is if they cheat by playing games with the Ballots as they come in," he wrote, and "The Federal Government will be watching closely," and "I won Minnesota three times, but they didn't give me the Victories." He lost Minnesota by 1.5 points, by 7.1, and by 4.2, and no Republican has carried it since Nixon, which the post also says, in its own way. Michele Tafoya, the candidate, said nothing about it; the Star Tribune asked her campaign and got nothing back. When the President first endorsed her from a stage in Youngstown, Ohio, on October 12, her reaction was "I heard about that," and "Most of the things that the president says are a surprise to somebody," and she did not mention the endorsement on her own social media or in a release. So the state of the race, with three days to go, is this: a candidate who cannot get a dollar out of her party has been given an alibi by her President, and has accepted the alibi the way she accepted the endorsement, by not saying anything.

Here is the woman. Michele Tafoya is 61, from Manhattan Beach, California, Berkeley and USC, five Sports Emmys, the sideline reporter on Sunday Night Football for eleven years until the Super Bowl in February 2022, and the day after she left NBC she was named co-chair of a Republican campaign for Governor. She has a podcast. She describes herself as a "pro-choice conservative with libertarian leanings," which is a real thing and the paper does not doubt she is one. She announced on January 21 with the national party's committee behind her and won the August primary with 52 percent over the candidate the state party had endorsed, a Navy SEAL, who got 24. The paper notes, because the Republicans in Minnesota would rather it didn't, that Peggy Flanagan's vote in her own primary, 411,853, was more than all nine Republicans put together, 406,823. In March 2023, when she was a podcaster and not a candidate, Ms. Tafoya posted, "I'm embarrassed to say I live in Minnesota. This state has gone so far left it's amazing any of the snow still sticks," and when a reader told her to leave, "That's the plan! Have a great day!" She deleted it. In September, running for Senate, she said on the radio, "I have never said that." CNN found it. The paper has a rule about candidates who deny the tape, which is that it writes about them, and it has written about two this week.

The coffee. In March, with the war three weeks old and gas going up a dollar a gallon, Ms. Tafoya went on a radio show in Memphis and said that in past wars "Americans got behind our service men and women," that people should keep "a stiff upper lip," and that "maybe you take one less trip to Starbucks, so that gas goes a little further, until this thing is over." "Whether you agree with it or not, we're there." In May, at a forum in Bemidji, she said of the war, "This one must be done." This thing is not over. Regular gas in Minnesota this morning is $4.10, against $2.88 a year ago, and diesel is $6.17 against $3.63, which on a farm is not a latte. On October 13, with the race tightening, she said no President should have a "blank check" for war and that this one should present an exit strategy. The paper looked for what she did between the stiff upper lip and the exit strategy, a letter, a statement, a sentence about the Russian diesel the President is now buying from Mr. Putin to cover the shortage, and found nothing, which is about what a candidate who holds no office can do, and about what this one did.

The money is the story, and it is a story about her own side. On October 5 Senator Thune, the Majority Leader, came to a farm in Le Sueur to stand next to her, and she said, in front of him, "This is one worth investing in," and "We're going to talk. We haven't had that conversation yet." He said, "We've got a big map this year," and "Minnesota is unique in a lot of ways," and that turning the buzz into money "is something we hope to see happen." A week later she said, "I'm not going to put a dollar number on it. I think they all know what we need and what we'd like." They know. The Senate Leadership Fund, Mr. Thune's super PAC, reserved $342 million in April: $79 million for Ohio, $71 million for North Carolina, $45 million for Michigan, $44 million for Georgia, $42 million for Maine, $29 million for Iowa, $17 million for New Hampshire, $15 million for Alaska, and nothing for Minnesota. Ms. Tafoya's entire campaign, every dollar she has raised since January, is $12.46 million, which is less than the party set aside for Alaska. The national committee's direct contributions to her through October 14 total $62,000. Its independent spending on her, on the federal filings as of this morning, is zero. The independent money that is on the filings is against her: $258,000 of mail and digital ads from a group called Our Heritage Matters in the three days ending Thursday, $175,000 from another the week before. For her, all cycle, one Minnesota committee has reported $19,684. On October 21 a Republican consultant tweeted that the committee had "just dropped ad reservations," with no amount, and nobody has printed one since. On Wednesday the committee sent a fundraising email under the subject line "Democrats just made a huge mistake," which said Ms. Tafoya was "statically TIED," spelled that way, and asked for money. The paper would like the reader to hold those two facts together. The party that will not spend on her is raising on her.

What she is for. On tariffs, August 2025: "tariffs seem to be working." At the debate: "What we're asking for is to level the playing field." The Farm Bureau endorsed her anyway, and the paper would ask it about the $6.17. On the big bill, in May: "I'm thrilled the Big Beautiful Bill reaped some results for a lot of Minnesotans." On the fraud, which is her campaign, the Feeding Our Future money and the rest of it, as much as $9 billion by the prosecutors' top line, and she is right that it happened: "You and I are on the ballot and only one of us let $9 billion walk out the door to fraud." Her ad says, "When Trump is right, I'll work with him. When he's wrong, I'll stand up for Minnesota." The paper applied its test, which is to list the times. She said the ICE surge in the Twin Cities "didn't need to happen" the way it did and that Secretary Noem was "appropriately fired." She said the President's talk about Somalis was "not appropriate." Asked at the debate whether she would share a stage with him if he came, she did not answer. That is the list. On the war she went from "must be done" to "exit strategy" without a document in between. On the post that says she can only lose by fraud, which is a statement about the state she wants to represent, the paper has found no word. "Donald Trump isn't on the ballot," she told the debate. "You and I are on the ballot." He has since corrected her.

Peggy Flanagan is 47, from St. Louis Park, a citizen of the White Earth Nation, the Lieutenant Governor since 2019, and the paper will give the reader the worst of her because it has done that for everyone this week. The fraud happened under the administration she was second in, and her answer, "I was not tasked with the fraud response," is true and is not what people want to hear; her better answer, at the debate, was "I know that Minnesota taxpayers are angry, and I am angry, too," and that the Governor "has been very clear that the buck stops with him." He did not run again. In 2016, at a legislative hearing, she said she had "graduated Phi Beta Kappa," and on October 20 her campaign told the Wall Street Journal that she had been nominated and never joined, the fee being $99 she did not have. The next day the society's chief operating officer said she was inducted in 2002, and the campaign said someone must have paid the fee, as happens. The paper has no use for a campaign that gave two answers to one question and some use for the $99. Her ad against Ms. Tafoya got a D from the Twin Cities station that grades them, for a Trump button pasted onto her lapel and claims out of context, which the paper reports because it would report it the other way. The other way, for the record, got a B-minus. What she is for: reversing the Medicaid and food-stamp cuts she says put 170,000 Minnesotans at risk; Congress, not the President, setting tariffs; ending the war; a seat on the Agriculture Committee. She beat a Congresswoman who outraised her two to one and had $20 million of outside money against her, by twenty points. She has $993,000 in the bank to Ms. Tafoya's $2.8 million and leads every public poll anyone has taken: by three or four in the earlier ones, 47 to 43, 45 to 42, 48 to 45; by seven in KSTP's final poll, 48 to 41; and by fourteen in the Times/Siena poll of October 19 to 26, 54 to 40, which the Republicans call an outlier and the paper calls a poll. Cook moved the race to Lean Democrat on October 20 and the Republicans celebrated, which tells you what the month was.

The Daily Buffoon endorses Peggy Flanagan for Senate from Minnesota. It does so knowing the fraud is real and her answer on it is thin, because the alternative is a candidate who told the state to skip a coffee for a war she now wants out of, who denied a tweet that exists, who asked her party for money twice in public and got a fundraising email, and who has let the President of the United States declare in advance that her defeat will be a theft without saying a word. Minnesota had accepted 728,961 early and absentee ballots as of Thursday, 483,520 of them in person, against 451,992 at the same point in 2022, which was the record until this week, and it may pass a million before the polls open. The paper's forecasts, dated October 31, so they can be checked: no Republican committee or super PAC will report an independent expenditure of a million dollars for Ms. Tafoya before the polls close. The President will not come to Minnesota; he told Newsmax on October 16 he had asked his staff to set up "one or two" events there, and his last weekend, rearranged twice, is Iowa and Kansas on Sunday. Ms. Tafoya will not say, before November 3, that the President's post is wrong. And if she loses, he will say the word "cheat" within a day, and she will not contradict him then either.

Three clowns. The paper rates the candidate and not the company, and Ms. Tafoya is a competent person who has said two or three true things against her own side, which is two or three more than the paper got from Wisconsin. The other two clowns are standing just off the sideline, where she used to work: a party that recruited her, abandoned her, and is now mailing her name for money, and a President who endorsed her twice and then told Minnesota what to think when she loses. She knows exactly where they are. She has the best eyes on the field. She is not looking.