Minnesota voters are poised to elect the state’s first person of color to the U.S. Senate, and possibly the country’s first Native American woman to serve in the chamber.
Democratic Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan and Republican Michele Tafoya easily swept their primaries Tuesday to advance to the Nov. 3 general election. Either one will make history this fall. If Flanagan is elected, she could become the first Native American woman to serve in the U.S. Senate.
“It is meaningful that the top two candidates for the U.S. Senate and one of the candidates for governor are women of color,” Flanagan said in an interview Thursday with Sahan Journal. “That’s a big deal.”
Flanagan spoke about what’s to come in the next few months of her campaign, and her intentions to advocate for President Donald Trump’s impeachment and the dismantling of U.S Immigration and Customs Enforcement, should she win in November.
Flanagan handily defeated U.S. Rep. Angie Craig by 20 percentage points in the Democratic Farmer-Labor primary for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Tina Smith. Flanagan triumphed despite polls showing a tight race between the two, and Craig spending $20 million compared to Flanagan’s $5 million.
“We had an incredibly strong ground game in the last four days of the campaign,” Flanagan said. “We knocked 66,000 doors and over 200,000 leading up to election day, and have been organizing across the state since March 2025.”
Tafoya’s campaign did not return messages seeking comment.
Flanagan emphasized that “there are no more Native American voices in the United States Senate” since Republican Senator Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma was appointed secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security earlier this year. Mullin is a member of the Cherokee Nation.
“I’m not running to make history, but it is about damn time we have a Native American woman serving in the Senate,” said Flanagan, who is a member of the White Earth Band of Ojibwe. “When our elected officials reflect the communities they represent, I think that’s good for democracy.”
If elected, Flanagan said she would like to follow Smith and former Senators Paul Wellstone and Al Franken by serving on the Senate Indian Affairs Committee.
“The work that we’ve done in Minnesota to strengthen tribal-state relations is a really strong foundation to build upon,” Flanagan said.
Flanagan also expressed interest in the Senate Agriculture Committee, where Sen. Amy Klobuchar is currently the ranking Democrat, as well as the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.
Mainly, Flanagan talked about her plans to use a potential Senate seat aggressively against Trump’s administration.
“He has to be impeached,” Flanagan said of Trump, adding that “there’s a long list of reasons why this guy shouldn’t be in office.”
“I’m an organizer, so we have to go in with a plan,” Flanagan said. “With having folks have a real strategy and determining the best way to hold Trump accountable. Impeachment is absolutely on the table and I will absolutely be on board for that.”
Flanagan’s organizing career started with her time on Wellstone’s 2002 reelection campaign, working for Wellstone Action and leading the Minnesota chapter of the Children’s Defense Fund. Voters elected her in 2005 to the Minneapolis school board.
She served in the Minnesota House of Representatives from 2015 to 2018, and as Gov. Tim Walz’s lieutenant governor starting in 2019.
Flanagan casted Tafoya, who is positioning herself as a moderate Republican, as part of “Team Trump.”
“In her campaign launch video, she had footage of ICE agents in the streets,” Flanagan said. “That to me shows that you are completely out of touch with Minnesotans and what we have endured.”
Tafoya, who is Hispanic, is best known nationally for her role as a sideline reporter for NBC’s Sunday Night Football, where she worked from 2011 through 2022. She also covered Monday Night Football for ABC and ESPN, and provided Olympics coverage for NBC.
Earlier in her career, she covered sports in Minnesota for Midwest Sports Channel, KFAN radio and WCCO-TV.
Tafoya’s major campaign themes include combating fraud and crime, cutting taxes and barring transgender women from women’s sports.
Throughout her campaign, Flanagan has pledged to “dismantle ICE.” Flanagan said that means replacing the agency with “an immigration system that is grounded in public safety, dignity, and a pathway to citizenship for folks.”
An influx of 3,000 ICE and U.S. Border Patrol agents swarmed Minnesota during Operation Metro Surge earlier this year. The operation, which began slowly rolling out in late 2025, saw widespread racial profiling, excessive use of force and the fatal shootings of two Minneapolis residents.
ICE announced this week it would give its agents gloves that can deliver electric shocks to people they handle during detainment operations.
“We need to make sure that we can absolutely have secure borders,” Flanagan said. “But the fact that we are literally talking today about ICE spending millions of dollars on a new tool of electric gloves to shock people, what are we doing? This agency is completely broken and out of control.”
Perhaps the most popular attack against Flanagan has been connecting her role as lieutenant governor to the financial fraud that plagued social services programs under Walz’s administration, an issue Tafoya has already leveraged in her campaign.
The Feeding Our Future scandal involved several nonprofits and private businesses exploiting federal food aid programs that gave them money to feed underprivileged children during the COVID-19 pandemic. Organizations reported feeding far more children than they actually served, or reported feeding children when they never did, in order to receive a total of more than $250 million in federal funding.
Minnesota has also seen fraud investigations into adult and child daycare providers, autism therapy providers and the state’s housing stabilization program, which Walz shut down earlier this year in response to suspected fraud.
“The governor has said the buck stops with him and that more should have been done sooner, and I agree with him,” Flanagan said.
Flanagan said she was “angry” about the fraud, and that her prior work leading the Children’s Defense Fund made her feel “horrific” about people stealing money earmarked for vulnerable children. She said it’s important to note that several suspects have been indicted in many of the fraud investigations, and that dozens of defendants have been convicted in the Feeding Our Future case.
The Republican focus on the issue is disingenuous, she said.
“Republicans are going to go after every Democrat on fraud because folks are struggling to afford their lives,” she said. “There’s this illegal war in Iran that is jacking up the cost of gas and fertilizer prices. We are still recovering from Operation Metro Surge, and Minnesotans remember.”
Flanagan cited Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison’s Medicaid fraud unit and the state’s new Office of Inspector General as accomplishments in countering fraud. She said Trump has been inconsistent on the issue, pardoning fraudsters in other states, including Philip Esformes, who was convicted for playing a leading role in a scheme that stole $1.3 billion from Medicare and Medicaid.
“If the Trump administration was really serious about this, they would have sent 3,000 forensic accountants and not 3,000 ICE agents to Minnesota,” she said.
