Steve Kornacki went on the Today show Wednesday morning, stood in front of his board, and told Savannah Guthrie that Republicans may finally flip Minnesota.
Not a conservative outlet. NBC’s chief data analyst, on NBC’s flagship morning program.
His reasoning took about twenty seconds and didn’t require a single poll. Republicans have been trying to carry Minnesota for decades, he said, and what’s working for them this cycle is the state’s Medicaid fraud scandal. Tim Walz didn’t seek reelection because of it. And the woman running for Senate is his lieutenant governor.
GOP candidate Michele Tafoya’s pitch, as Kornacki described it: if you’re angry about the scandal, don’t vote for the lieutenant governor. His conclusion — there does seem to be a tide within the state that might be working against Democrats.
The scandal in question is not a rounding error. Federal investigators have described an industrial-scale scheme running to $9 billion, draining Medicaid, housing assistance, and pandemic-era programs. Not one agency. A portfolio of them, looted simultaneously, over years, under a governor who was on a national ticket while it happened.
Nine billion dollars. Minnesota’s entire general fund is roughly twenty-eight.
Peggy Flanagan has no answer for this, and the reason is structural. She was in the room. She was the second-ranking official of the administration that ran these programs, approved these budgets, and staffed these agencies. She cannot campaign as the reformer who’ll clean it up, because every voter already knows where she was sitting while it was being stolen. Walz understood the math and declined to run. She didn’t.
The RealClearPolitics average still shows Flanagan up two, which in a state Kamala Harris carried in 2024 is not a lead — it’s a free fall. Minnesota has not sent a Republican to the Senate since 2002. Democrats should be winning this by double digits and instead they are inside the margin against a former NFL sideline reporter who had never held office.
Kornacki also noted that 13.1 million ballots have already been cast nationwide, roughly 11 percent of expected turnout. Those votes are in the box.
Which brings it back to a theme of the last week. Two polling firms have now confessed to inventing numbers. House Majority PAC is pulling money out of districts it hoped to flip. And NBC’s own numbers guy is telling morning-show viewers that Minnesota might go red.
The surveys can be fabricated. The behavior of people with money and reputations on the line cannot.
