Weirdly, There’s One Blue State the Blue Wave Might Not Reach

In this run-up to the midterms, Democrat-Farm Labor party candidate Brad Tabke has knocked on thousands of doors in order to keep his seat as the state representative for Shakopee, Minnesota. “It’s going really well,” he insists. “Best doors I’ve ever knocked on.” It probably doesn’t hurt that late October Minnesota is putting on a particularly gorgeous autumn show. Cornflower blue skies and rich-hued tree leaves, the kind of postcard weather that makes you forget what it’ll be like here in a month or two.But Tabke would be out there in the middle of a blizzard. In 2024, he won his office by fourteen votes out of about 20,000. With the Minnesota House then temporarily tilted toward the Republicans by a single vote, the DFL and Republicans parried legislative and legal tactics for weeks over whether Tabke would even be seated. “My community voted heavily for Trump in 2016. Then I won in 2018. I lost in 2020. Then I won big in ‘22,” he tells me. “And then, last year, it was that close.”You may think of Minnesota as deep blue, but Brad Tabke and every other pol in the state are acutely aware that it is purple, and only just. Full disclosure: I’ve known DFL senate candidate Peggy Flanagan for several years and introduced her at a campaign fundraiser in 2025. This piece draws on conversations with political allies of Flanagan, Klobuchar, and Ellison, though none who are currently working on state-wide campaigns.Sealed in the national consciousness as the center of resistance to Trump’s brutal immigration policies, Minnesota has crept under the radar as a place where the blue wave could fizzle or even fail. Republicans sense a once-in-a-generation chance to flip at least once state-wide seat and perhaps make gains in the precariously balanced legislature. Their spending reflects that optimism: For the first time in recent memory, they’ve spent more than the Democrats in the state, even pouring millions into relatively obscure down-ballot races. They’ve pinned their hopes on voters wanting to punish Democrats for failing to contain a multi-million dollar federal welfare scam that is still producing arrests and prosecutions. And their hopes are Democrats’ concerns. “It’s a real problem that [they’re] hitting on,” one senior Democratic staffer told me. Worse, the story lines up with pre-existing liberal stereotypes: “It’s proving the Republicans right.” There’s another dangerous stereotype at play that Minnesota Democrats have had to handle more delicately. Republican ads overtly communicate that Democrats weren’t just loose with the welfare purse-strings in general, they let Black people raid the people’s coffers. Many of the embezzlement web’s ringleaders were white, but the grainy images in Republican ads are of the arrestees from Minnesota’s large Somali community. Conservative influencers propagate vivid footage of associated FBI raids taking place in Somali neighborhoods. Add to this potent mix a handful of well-covered incidents of violence involving Somali young people in the summer and it’s easy to understand why the GOP feels lucky this year. After all, running on welfare fraud, crime, and Black people have been a winning combination for the GOP for almost a century.This is the week we learn if fraud is a rallying cry potent enough to erase memories of masked stormtroopers in suburban streets and armed men hustling away a little boy wearing bunny rabbit ears.The polls may not seem particularly close to an outsider. Sen. Amy Klobuchar has been leading her challenger for the governor’s post, state representative Lisa Demuth, by about 7-9 points—but that’s within the four-point margin of error. Lieutenant Governor Flanagan has been locked in an even closer race against former NFL commentator Michelle Tafoya, edging out Tafoya by just a point or two, or even losing. A Siena/New York Times poll last week should have brightened gloomy Democrats’ perspective: Klobuchar jumped to an eighteen-point lead and Flanagan to fourteen. Democrats can take encouragement as well from record midterm turnout favoring the DFL despite the palpable exhaustion of an electorate pummeled by a constant stream of negative ads. But Minnesota, like other sparsely populated Midwestern states, is notoriously difficult to poll and Democrats have been burned before: In 2016, Clinton was beating Trump by double-digits right up to Election Day, when she won by 1.5 percent. Minnesota also has the smallest swing toward Democrats in the country, just 3 points, according to election analyst Lakshya Jain. A 58 percent Trump disapproval rating hasn’t translated into the Democratic advantage one might expect. The vibes are off. As Tabke told me: “No one thinks Peggy is going to win by 14 points.”National Democrats paying attention might be most alarmed by Flanagan’s position. After all, a loss to Tafoya would almost certainly dissolve the gossamer dream of senate control. But Minnesota Democrats are just as jumpy about the Attorney General contest. Incumbent Keith Ellison won in 2022 by less than a point. Currently he’s ahead by between 7-8 points, also within the wide margin of error. “I think Amy wins by five or six points,” the staffer told me. “I think Peggy wins by less. Maybe a lot less. And Keith? I don’t know about Keith.”Those narrow margins and Ellison’s specific vulnerability stem from what’s inevitably referred to as “the fraud.” It’s sometimes called the “Feeding Our Future” scandal, after the name of the original umbrella organization that was busted, but ask a Minnesotan about “the fraud” and they will know what you’re talking about. Though Minnesota Republicans and the Trump administration have taken up the case as a cudgel, it was Biden’s Justice Department that uncovered the criminal network. They made the first arrests in the case in September 2022, charging 47 defendants for conspiring to bill the government for millions of non-existent meals provided to tens of thousands of imaginary children, robbing taxpayers of between $250 and $300 million. The investigation scratched the surface of a tangled and deep-running network and alerted authorities to repeated patterns in suspect billing practices; related inquiries continue through today with hundreds of arrests and the discovery of millions more stolen dollars. The scope has grown to encompass multiple investigations of fraudulent childcare providers, autism centers, housing assistance, therapists, and personal care services. “Voters hold Keith responsible,” a strategist told me. “The state auditor, too, because it sounds like monitoring government funds should be his job—but really, the auditor audits cities. He doesn’t have anything to do with something like this.” This misconception is probably what led to Democrats winning the state auditor’s office in 2022 by an even narrower margin than Ellison taking the AG. Still, Ellison is Black and an outspoken progressive. The target on his back is large and inviting. Ads against him feature the mugshots of the Black defendants in the Feeding Our Future case and none of those who are white—a not particularly subtle cue. For his part, Ellison has been aggressive in promoting his cooperation with federal agencies in exposing the Medicaid fraud under his office’s purview. Just this week, his office announced the raid of several autism centers with Ellison releasing a statement lauding “the success of my Medicaid fraud unit, which the federal government has acknowledged is both effective and aggressive.” Democrats’ issues would no doubt be compounded had Governor Tim Walz continued with his campaign for a third term. He started his run before a new wave of national focus last winter halted whatever momentum existed. A Democratic staffer described Walz as a sin eater for the whole party: “Part of Walz getting out of the race is he wanted to jump on that grenade for everybody.” Walz’s decision to step aside in the race was not, however, the only reason that the Feeding Our Future trials and sentencings disappeared from conversations inside and outside the state for some time. Walz announced that he would not seek re-election on January 5. On January 7, an ICE agent murdered Renee Good. There is spiraling irony in how this has all played out. Operation Metro Surge began in December of 2025 under the pretext of rooting out the very sort of fraud that was already being uncovered–only Trump and his goons imagined it as an immigration operation to send “criminals” back “home.” However, only about nine percent of the Twin Cities’ Somali community are non-citizens. The existing legal apparatus was already engaged with processing known fraudsters. Casting about in their tactical pants for ways to knock heads and please the higher ups, ICE shifted to harassing Latino residents and other brown people, which led to neighbors presenting themselves as witnesses, which led to Good’s murder. Which led to Alex Pretti’s murder. There’s a whole tragi-comic chain of causality to follow here, each step a blow to the soul for normal humans and, at the same time, an enormous self-own for Republicans: Good’s murder led to the demand by Trump’s DOJ that Minnesota’s Assistant U.S. Attorneys investigate Good’s widow for ties to domestic terrorism—and to cease investigating whether Good’s shooting was warranted. Six AUSAs resigned in protest, including the lead prosecutor in the welfare fraud investigations. Eight more attorneys resigned a month later, frustrated over the handling of the shootings and by the avalanche of wrongful detention petitions forced upon them. The DOJ has still not filled those positions, and the system remains backlogged as the immigration cases still work their way through the byzantine process. The fraud prosecutions that the Trump department claimed to urgently want to pursue have slowed as the department ropes in attorneys from across the country to deal with cases which they did not build and may not see through to the end. One defense attorney I talked to bemoaned the snail’s pace; despite splashy announcements from the Trump administration, the operation is still running on the juice of the Biden investigations. From the outside, the Trump administration’s particular version of the fraud narrative is blatantly hypocritical, racist, and explicitly partisan. Among some Minnesotan voters, however, there’s a philosophy of admirable consistency detached from the uglier aspects of Trump’s Truth Social posts on the subject. If anything, Trump’s overt bigotry is a turnoff among liberals and moderates. I can’t argue that white Minnesota voters are themselves free from harboring racist assumptions. I will note that voters I spoke with were disgusted by the Republicans’ lumping together those arrested in the fraud investigations with, as a woman from Rosemont put it, “our Somali neighbors.” “People don’t like it when you make a racial thing,” according to Tabke.Even more important, perhaps, is the way that upset over government fraud has a different resonance in a state with a long tradition of mutual aid. “For Democrats, and I think to some degree for independents, the idea of the fraud thing damages people’s sense of their pride in Minnesota,” a state-level strategist told me. At the sentencing of one the Feeding Our Future conspirators, U.S. District Judge Nancy Brasel said, “You took the reputation of our state down with you. It’s my hope that one day the words ‘Minnesota’ and ‘fraud’ won’t be spoken in the same sentence, but I fear that day is a long way off.” Voters are not angry about people stealing from the government, they are offended. It’s this umbrage about the failure of government to do what it’s supposed to do that underpins the entire Republican strategy here. But disappointment in corruption may not divide the electorate the way Republicans believe it will.If any of the state-wide offices in Minnesota fall to a Republican, there will be a rush to blame Democrats for running too far to the left. Flanagan and Ellison, both at the highest risk of losing at the moment, are both part of the rising cast of young, diverse, and pugnacious politicians willing to bend the Democratic party to policies outside its comfort zone. But the fight here is not over whether government should do things for its citizens. Minnesotans want government to do things for its citizens. Should Flanagan or Ellison lose, I don’t think it’s because Minnesotans will have withdrawn support for a failing social safety net. Rather, they will have soured on Democrats for allowing it to fail.The biggest piece of evidence that Minnesotans wouldn’t be rejecting liberal policies in general is from the primary, where Flanagan thumped Rep. Angie Craig by double digits despite being outspent by a factor of 4-to-1. Flanagan campaigned on Medicare For All and, even more, forceful opposition to ICE. In Congress, Craig had voted for the Laken Riley Act, which expanded the federal government’s authority to detain immigrants. In that contest, Flanagan didn’t just outperform Craig in the Twin Cities, where ICE’s presence was the most visible. She swept up counties outside the metro area, too. It’s hard to square that result with the idea that Minnesota Democrats’ biggest problem is an electorate desperate for more moderate policies in general. “If Democrats lose,” the strategist told me, “It’s because of the fraud. That’s it, nothing else.”Besides, Tabke tells me that in his travels, “fraud is important, but that’s not what people want to talk to me about.”“They talk about Flock [cameras], they talk about data centers, they talk about the economy, they talk about the price of gas,” he continues. “Democrats dropped the ball on that, meaning fraud. But it all falls under the idea of government just working for people. It’s in the same bucket as protecting folks from surveillance or data centers. Or what ICE did to us.”The last time I was in Minneapolis, it was a hundred degrees colder than it was in late October. And despite the glorious weather, it seemed as if there might have been fewer people out. It was quieter. I didn’t see anyone in yellow safety vests on street corners, stamping their feet to keep warm. There were no crowds safeguarding children as they walked in and out of schools. I didn’t hear whistles shrieking from blocks away. But protest signs were still there. They’re posted in windows now, slightly faded. The neighborhood Signal chats are still going, just less lively than before. Minnesotans still leave fresh flowers at the memorials for Renee Good and Alex Pretti.I lived in the Twin Cities for ten years and never saw as many Minnesota state flags as I saw on a single block in St. Paul on a single day. At a coffee shop, there was a pocket Constitution stuck up next to the espresso machine. On the front door, a warning that law enforcement is not allowed on the premises. Toward the end of my visit, I made the mistake of telling a friend I was in town to cover how the aftermath of Operation Metro Surge might affect the election. My friend was incredulous: “Aftermath? It’s never ended.”The entire Republican attack depends on inciting outrage over Feeding Our Future and successive scandals to such a degree that moderate voters disengage from the trauma of Operation Metro Surge. What they don’t seem to have accounted for is how the two issues reach back to the same set of values: Government is there to help people. And when someone takes advantage of the government’s power for selfish or cruel ends, they should be made to pay.