A candidate embarrassed

Most of us up here have a complaint or two about Minnesota. We grumble about the weather, the mosquitoes, or summer road construction. But there is a difference between grumbling about the place you love and announcing to the world that you’re ashamed to live there.
Michele Tafoya, the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate, crossed that line more than once. When she was asked about it, she denied it, pointing to an undeniable fact: she can’t be trusted.
Earlier this month, a radio interviewer on WCCO asked Tafoya whether she was embarrassed to live in Minnesota. She responded, asking whether someone embarrassed to be from Minnesota would be running to represent it in the Senate, and then flatly denied ever saying such a thing.
The trouble is that the internet has a long memory. In a since-deleted March 2023 tweet uncovered by CNN’s KFile, Tafoya wrote, “I’m embarrassed to say I live in Minnesota,” and added a crack about the state having drifted too far left for the snow to stick.
It didn’t stop there. When another user told her she could leave, Tafoya replied, “That’s the plan!” and said she was considering a move to Tennessee. In August 2024 she posted that she’d be fleeing soon, and two months later she called herself a “future former-Minnesotan.” As recently as September 2025, four months before launching her campaign, she told a podcast audience that Minnesota was no longer as safe, clean or beautiful, and that she wouldn’t be here for the long haul. CNN counted at least four occasions over three years when she told followers she intended to leave, often calling herself a part-time Floridian and holding up Florida as a conservative model.
Yet by most measures, Minnesota is doing significantly better than Florida, which makes one wonder whether it’s quality of life or simply her partisanship that has Tafoya so down on the North Star State. Minnesota has a far higher per capita GDP ($83,984 vs. $69,815), a lower unemployment rate, far lower poverty and child poverty rate, and higher workforce participation rate than Florida. And that’s not just a reflection of Florida’s large number of retirees. Minnesota’s workforce participation rate is the third highest in the country. As for safety, Minnesota has a lower violent crime rate than the Sunshine State, even though both states do fairly well on that score. Tennessee, where Tafoya said she was considering relocating, the violent crime rate is more than twice as high as Minnesota.
In fact, Minnesota is doing so well that the State of the Nation Project out of Tulane University, earlier this year, ranked Minnesota first among the 50 states overall on dozens of measures ranging from civic participation, education, health, and the economy. Florida, Tafoya’s model of success, ranked 35th. The study’s board included multiple scholars from some of the most conservative think tanks in the country, so no one can claim a liberal bias.
Tafoya’s choice of a governance model speaks volumes about her priorities— and they sure don’t square with your average Minnesotan.
Oh, but what about fraud, which Tafoya has tried to make a centerpiece of her campaign? Minnesota has certainly experienced more than we’d like, but nowhere near the level cited by Republicans in their politically motivated attacks on our state. Yet Tafoya talks like it’s still an ongoing issue that the state has ignored, which is patently untrue. The state shut down the high-risk Medicaid-funded programs almost a year ago and the Walz administration and the Legislature adopted new rules, new data analysis, and created a new inspector general position to serve as a watchdog over state programs.
You’d be hard-pressed to find a state that has tougher standards than what are now in place in Minnesota.
Even before these aggressive steps, the state’s Medicare and Medicaid fraud problem paled in comparison to Florida’s. Just this past June, the Department of Justice leveled federal charges in south Florida alone that involved more than $4 billion in fraudulent claims, and one defendant there was charged in a $3.76 billion scheme. A single Florida case dwarfs everything charged in Minnesota’s Medicaid programs and Florida produces cases like it year after year. Most of Florida’s fraud hits Medicare, which Washington runs, so Tallahassee can’t take all the blame. Still, fraud isn’t a Minnesota disease or a blue-state disease. It thrives wherever oversight is weak, and the evidence says it thrives in Florida—not to mention Texas— on a scale Minnesota has never experienced.
In her attacks on our state, Tafoya sounds far too much like her political mentor, Donald Trump, who hates the state for having rejected him three elections in a row. If Michele Tafoya is embarrassed by that, perhaps she isn’t a good fit for a state we’re proud to call our home.