Republican Senate nominee Michele Tafoya skipped the usual campaign-event backdrop for her final push — a coffee shop in White Bear Lake, talking directly to a room of suburban women about the vote she says could decide Minnesota’s open Senate seat.
What Tafoya told the room
At the White Bear Lake event on October 29, Tafoya told the women gathered, “This is a unique opportunity to speak with women, moms, aunts, sisters, wives, daughters,” according to MPR News. The former Fox Sports sideline reporter turned Senate candidate is trying to flip a seat Democrats have held since 2009, left open by Sen. Tina Smith’s retirement. Her opponent, Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan, spent the same stretch on her own turnout push, holding a roundtable in St. Louis Park built around what her campaign calls “Operation Metro Surge.”
Both parties are knocking on the same doors
The state DFL says its volunteers have already knocked on more than 2 million doors, and both parties launched get-out-the-vote bus tours in the race’s final week. Democrats also turned to star power of their own: Attorney General Keith Ellison, running for reelection against Republican Ron Schutz, headlined a campaign concert at First Avenue in Minneapolis that drew hundreds, where Rep. Ilhan Omar and Sen. Tina Smith also urged the crowd to vote. Smaller-scale organizing continued elsewhere — about a dozen Swing Left volunteers met at Urban Growler Brewing in St. Paul to write letters to voters in competitive congressional districts. One of them, Minneapolis volunteer Laura Pyne, wrote to voters in the 1st Congressional District, where Republican Rep. Brad Finstad faces DFLer Jake Johnson, saying, “I feel personally we’ve got to get away from the madness.” Fellow volunteer Tom Finley, who grew up in that district, wrote that he was voting to help protect democracy.
Why Republicans are betting on suburban women
Americans for Prosperity Action Minnesota, a conservative super PAC, has focused mainly on door-knocking in state Senate districts and expects to spend about $1 million by Election Day. Senior advisor Jake Coleman said face-to-face contact carries more weight than TV ads or mailers, arguing that the state’s fraud scandals could push voters away from Democrats and that national political trends “seem to break on the shores of Lake Superior.” Minnesota Republican Party Chair Alex Plechash told MPR News that this year’s midterm “is going to take a stronger turnout from the people in the middle” — exactly the kind of swing audience Tafoya’s coffee-shop stop was built to reach, one room at a time.
What happens next
Minnesota voters decide the race today. However it lands, the final-stretch strategies on display — Tafoya’s small-room appeals to women voters by name, Democrats’ star-powered rally, and volunteers still writing letters by hand — are a bet that personal outreach can move a race this close in the last days before the polls close.