Democrats may be sleeping on a U.S. Senate seat they thought they had in the bag.
Minnesota has not given its electoral votes to a Republican presidential candidate since Richard Nixon. Half a century of Democratic muscle memory has trained the party’s operatives to treat the state the way you treat a light switch — you don’t check it, you just flip it and walk away.
They should check it.
The League of American Workers survey, conducted by TIPP Insights and released Tuesday, puts Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan at 40 percent and Republican Michele Tafoya at 38 among registered voters, with a striking 14 percent still undecided. The margin of error is 2.7 points. In plain English: this race is tied, in a state Democrats had already written into the ledger.
Screen the sample down to likely voters and it’s Flanagan 44, Tafoya 42. Same story. Fielded August 31 to September 2, 1,201 likely voters.
Two numbers make this more interesting than a typical single-poll blip.
MINNESOTA POLL By TIPP (A)
SENATE
? Peggy Flanagan: 44%
? Michele Tafoya: 42%
? Other: 4%
——
GOVERNOR
? Amy Klobuchar: 50%
? Lisa Demuth: 40%
? Other: 3%
——@LeagueOfWorkers (R) | 8/31-9/2 | 1,201 LVhttps://t.co/pksgwbYBDK pic.twitter.com/R4hKW4hejo— InteractivePolls (@IAPolls2022) September 8, 2026
The first is presidential approval. President Trump is buried in Minnesota — 36 percent approve, 58 percent disapprove, a 22-point hole. And Tafoya is running dead even anyway. That is not a candidate being carried by a national wave. That is a candidate outrunning her party’s environment by roughly twenty points, which is the single most valuable trait a Senate nominee can have and the rarest.
The second is on the same survey’s ballot line below. In the governor’s race, Amy Klobuchar leads Lisa Demuth 50-40. Tafoya is running eight points ahead of the top of her own ticket. Minnesotans are splitting their tickets — not something you see when voters are simply casting a partisan reflex.
Then there’s the calendar problem for Democrats, and it’s a real one.
Patrick Ruffini of Echelon Insights recently went through more than 3,300 Senate polls across the last four cycles and confirmed something Republicans have long grumbled about without proof: summer Senate polling systematically overstates Democratic support. The distortion peaks in late July at nearly six points, begins bleeding off in late August, and settles at an average of about two and a half points too Democratic by Election Day.
The Minnesota survey was in the field starting August 31 — right at the front edge of the correction window, not the tail end of it. Apply even the residual historical bias and Tafoya isn’t trailing at all.
Now the fair caveats, because conservatives who cheer bad polling for four years and then treat one favorable survey as scripture are not serious people.
This is a Republican-aligned poll. One survey is one survey. Fourteen percent undecided that late in a race is a large, volatile block, and undecideds have historically broken against the party out of power in the White House. Minnesota’s DFL machine is genuinely formidable, and Flanagan will not be outspent.
But the fundamentals underneath the number are not nothing, and Republicans have a clear path to press them.
Start with trade. Minnesota’s economy is stitched tightly to Canada, and it is a major dairy state. The escalating fight with Ottawa is a live wire that can burn either candidate. Tafoya’s opening is to make the argument about Minnesota producers rather than about tariff doctrine — whether the state’s farmers are getting a square deal, and who is actually going to fight for them. That framing also lets her put daylight between herself and a president polling 22 points underwater in her state, which she will need if she wants those 14 percent.
Then there’s the opponent. Flanagan is not a moderate wearing a flannel shirt for the cameras. She is aggressively committed to the trans agenda, hostile to Israel, and her own campaign platform calls for tearing ICE apart — a position that polls somewhere in the basement outside a handful of urban precincts. Even the Minneapolis Star Tribune, no conservative outfit, has described her ideology as unapologetically left. She is also the sitting lieutenant governor in an administration currently marinating in fraud scandals, and lieutenant governors do not get to claim they were in another building the whole time.
Set that against Tafoya, a familiar, non-threatening face to a couple million Minnesotans who watched her on NFL sidelines for years and never once heard her lecture them about anything. That is an enormous asset in a state where Republicans usually lose because voters find their nominee weird before they find him wrong.
None of this means the seat flips. It means the seat is a race — and Democrats budgeting as though it isn’t are about to find out what it costs to assume Minnesota is a light switch.
