Minnesota last voted Republican statewide in 2006. Is its next senator a Democrat?
Democrat Peggy Flanagan faces Republican Michele Tafoya for an open US Senate seat in Minnesota on 3 November. A new poll has her 14 points ahead.
What happened
A new New York Times and Siena University poll shows Democrat Peggy Flanagan 14 points ahead in the Minnesota Senate race.
Minnesota elects a new US senator on . Democrat Tina Smith, who has the seat now, decided not to run again. Democrat Peggy Flanagan, the state’s lieutenant governor, or deputy governor, faces Republican Michele Tafoya, a former NFL sports reporter who has never run for elected office.
Republicans have not won a statewide election in Minnesota since 2006. On a New York Times and Siena University poll put Flanagan 14 points ahead. Earlier in October a Minnesota Star Tribune poll had her lead at four points.
Flanagan works in the government of Governor Tim Walz, which is linked to a large fraud scandal in the state’s social services. Walz decided not to run for a third term because of the fraud. In the week to the Cook Political Report, which rates US races, moved this one from “likely Democrat“ to “lean Democrat“.
President Donald Trump has backed Tafoya. She did not rush to welcome it, saying only “I heard about that“. At the only debate she would not say whether she would go to a Trump rally in the state, and in her latest advert she says she will stand up to Trump if she needs to.
Votes are counted on election night, and the official result comes from the State Canvassing Board, which meets 16 days after the vote, on .
Within three days after completing the canvass, the State Canvassing Board shall declare the result and declare the candidates duly elected who received the highest number of votes for each federal office and for each state office voted on in more than one county.
Minnesota Statutes, section 204C.33, subdivision 3
Sources: nytimes.com
The Pattern
We looked for cases where a party that did not hold the presidency defended an open US Senate seat in a midterm, the election halfway through a president’s term, in a state where its rivals had not won any statewide vote for at least eight years. We found five such races from 2010 to 2022, in the official US Congress election statistics.
Show the other 3 cases
The Read
Like the five parties before it, Flanagan’s party does not hold the presidency and is defending an open seat in a state its rivals have not won for years. Each of those five parties kept its seat, four of them by more than 26 points. The closest was Georgia in 2014, at 7.7 points, a race the Guardian had expected to be close since May that year.
There are reasons for doubt. The polls this time are closer than most of those results. The Star Tribune poll had Flanagan four points ahead, less than the 7.7 points in Georgia, and the New York Times poll had her 14 points ahead, far below the other four wins. All five past seats were Republican seats under a Democratic president, and three of the races were on the same day, .
Disclaimer
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