Democrats are their own worst enemies, but the good news for Republicans is that Democrats don’t seem to grasp that they’re their own worst enemies. And you know what they say: When your enemy is making monumental mistakes, don’t interfere.
That said, Minnesota has not elected a Republican to the United States Senate since 2002. That’s the baseline for understanding what’s happening there now: Peggy Flanagan, the sitting Democratic lieutenant governor, led GOP nominee and former NFL sideline reporter Michele Tafoya by about five points after the primaries, but the RealClearPolitics average now has her up by under two. One survey, from KSTP and SurveyUSA, has the race dead even. Early voting starts in days.
That’s not normal drift. That’s a collapse, and it has a cause with a dollar figure attached.
Minnesota has become the national capital of fraud. Feeding Our Future ran through a quarter-billion dollars in federal money claimed for meals that were never served to children who did not exist. Housing stabilization, autism services, personal care assistance, substance-abuse treatment — one program after another, the same pattern each time: generous reimbursement rules, nonexistent verification, and a blue state government that kept cutting checks until an outsider forced the issue. The total across these mostly Somali-run schemes runs into the billions. Not a rounding error. Billions, in a state of five and a half million people:
WATCH:
MINNESOTA IS NOT A LOST CAUSE. THIS SENATE SEAT IS WINNABLE!
Michelle Tafoya is tied with Peggy Flanagan for a reason. Flanagan took a government paycheck for 20 years, got rich as lieutenant governor, and now wants a promotion after the fraud, the crime, and the collapsing… pic.twitter.com/w1o35vvsEP
— Gunther Eagleman™ (@GuntherEagleman) September 21, 2026
Flanagan spent all of it standing next to Tim Walz. She was his lieutenant governor for the entire run. She attended the ribbon cuttings, defended the agencies, and shared the podium while the money walked out the door. Congressman Pete Stauber put it plainly: she walked side by side with Walz as the fraud took over the state, and now she’s trying to put distance between them. Voters can do that arithmetic without help.
The proximity problem got more personal last week, when reporting connected a fraudulent-billing probe involving autism treatment centers to Nimco Ahmed, whom Flanagan has publicly described as a close personal friend. That case is working its way through the process and everyone involved is entitled to a presumption of innocence. But an election isn’t a trial, and voters are allowed to ask a simpler question than a jury would: why does every thread in this state’s fraud story seem to run back through the same building?
Here’s why this matters well beyond Minnesota. Democrats have spent decades winning the argument that skepticism toward welfare spending is cruelty. Minnesota is the rebuttal, and it’s devastating precisely because it’s not ideological. Nobody looking at Feeding Our Future is debating whether hungry kids should be fed. They’re asking why a state government handed hundreds of millions to operators it never checked on, and why the people responsible have faced no consequence beyond a bad news cycle.
Every dollar stolen was a dollar that never reached a child, a disabled adult, or a family that needed it. That’s the ad, and it writes itself.
Republicans across the country should be paying attention. Tafoya has taken a race that wasn’t supposed to be competitive and pulled it to the margin of error using nothing more exotic than a spreadsheet and a question: where did the money go? That question works in Minneapolis. It works in Seattle. It works anywhere a blue-state bureaucracy has been paying invoices without ever driving out to look.
