The 2026 Minnesota Senate race presents centrist independent voters with an unusually complicated choice.
Democratic-Farmer-Labor nominee Peggy Flanagan, Minnesota’s lieutenant governor, has a substantial record in state government and clearly articulated positions across almost every major policy area. Republican nominee Michele Tafoya, best known for her long career as a national sports broadcaster, has never held public office but has emerged as a comparatively independent-minded Republican with some positions that depart significantly from the national party line.
Viewed through CIVPAC’s criteria, the strengths and weaknesses do not line up neatly.
Experience and Preparation
Flanagan has served on the Minneapolis School Board, in the Minnesota House and, since 2019, as lieutenant governor. Whatever one thinks of her policies, she understands government and has accumulated a record that voters can evaluate.
Tafoya has no comparable governmental experience. But this is not a case in which there is little evidence of broader preparation. She is a Berkeley graduate with an MBA from USC and spent nearly three decades in national broadcasting before spending more than four years as a political and cultural commentator and podcaster. Her political podcast began in May 2022 and has produced hundreds of episodes on politics, culture and world affairs.
That does not substitute for legislative experience, but it provides a broader background than many first-time candidates for major office.
For a Senate candidate without a governing record, however, CIVPAC believes the burden of explaining positions should be relatively high. On several important federal issues, Tafoya has not yet met that standard.
Constitutional Government and Political Independence
Tafoya deserves considerable credit for clearly acknowledging that Joe Biden won the 2020 election. In 2022 she urged Trump not to run again and said that he had been defeated by Biden; she also criticized Republican candidates damaged by election denialism. Asked again in 2026 whether Biden won, she answered that the results showed Biden won and became president.
She supports voter identification, proof-of-citizenship requirements and the SAVE Act. CIVPAC does not support the SAVE Act, but those are legitimate subjects for political disagreement and should not be confused with denying the legitimacy of the 2020 election. Tafoya has also said that she would “call balls and strikes” with Trump—supporting him when she agrees and disagreeing when she does not.
Flanagan strongly emphasizes voting rights, limits on political money, congressional stock-trading restrictions and other institutional reforms. She has also been publicly sharp and combative in her criticism of Trump, accusing his administration of abusing executive authority and threatening democratic institutions. Her commitment to democratic institutions is not seriously in question.
Foreign Policy and War Powers
This is one of Flanagan’s stronger areas under CIVPAC’s criteria. She explicitly supports rebuilding ties with NATO allies and continued American support for Ukraine against Russia’s invasion. She favors a two-state solution in the Middle East and a secure Israel, although she would restrict offensive weapons sales to Israel and favors substantially more aid to Gaza. CIVPAC has not taken a position on restricting offensive weapons sales to Israel.
Those positions can be compared with CIVPAC’s foreign-policy and national-defense framework, which emphasizes alliances, Ukraine, deterrence and disciplined use of American power.
Tafoya has supported the U.S. military campaign against Iran while opposing ground troops and a prolonged “forever war.” She has called for an exit strategy and for using American leverage to secure an agreement. Her public comments have generally defended the decision to use force; we have not found comparable criticism from her of the administration’s planning or conduct of the conflict.
What remains surprisingly unclear is her position on Ukraine, NATO, Russia and America’s broader alliance system. Her campaign’s current issues page offers no developed foreign-policy section addressing those subjects, and independent candidate summaries likewise find little current material.
For a candidate for the United States Senate, that is not a minor omission. Senators vote on foreign assistance, treaties, military policy and senior national-security appointments. CIVPAC applies a higher foreign-policy standard to Senate candidates than it would to candidates for state or even House office.
Neither candidate has yet provided the kind of developed position on constitutional war powers that we would like to see.
Economics, Spending and Labor
Here the contrast becomes much sharper.
Flanagan supports a $17 federal minimum wage indexed to inflation, national paid family leave, universal child care, the PRO Act, expanded federal social programs and a substantially larger federal role in economic policy. She favors Medicare for All and greater federal spending in education, housing and social assistance.
Those positions place her considerably to the left of CIVPAC on economic and labor policy.
Tafoya’s economic instincts are much closer to a market-oriented approach. She calls for lower taxes, less borrowing, reduced regulation and greater reliance on private decision-making. Her campaign summarizes the approach as making Congress “spend less, borrow less and tax less.”
But there is a problem of specificity. Saying government should “spend less, borrow less and tax less” is a philosophy, not a federal budget. Tafoya has not yet explained what substantial programs she would cut, how she would address long-term entitlement costs, or how she would reconcile tax reductions with deficit reduction.
Trade and Tariffs
The partisan pattern reverses somewhat on trade.
Flanagan has strongly criticized Trump’s broad tariffs because of their effects on Minnesota farmers and export markets, while supporting targeted protections against unfair foreign trade practices.
Tafoya has been more accepting of Trump’s tariff strategy, arguing at Farmfest that the trade conflicts would ultimately produce better agreements.
On this issue, Flanagan’s position is closer to CIVPAC’s trade policy, which favors free trade, targeted action against unfair practices and greater congressional control over broad executive tariff authority.
Health Care
Flanagan explicitly supports Medicare for All, along with expanded Medicaid and Medicare benefits and much broader federal drug-price negotiation.
That represents a significant departure from CIVPAC’s health-care framework, which seeks near-universal coverage while relying substantially on regulated private insurance, consumer incentives and explicit limits on open-ended federal financial commitments.
Tafoya rejects turning health-care decisions over to government bureaucracies and emphasizes patient control, lower drug prices and reducing both governmental and corporate middlemen.
That sounds closer to CIVPAC’s approach in principle. But Tafoya has not provided enough detail about the Affordable Care Act, Medicaid, guaranteed coverage for preexisting conditions or premium subsidies to determine what her alternative would actually look like.
Immigration
Flanagan’s immigration position contains elements both close to and far from CIVPAC’s approach.
She acknowledges the need for a strong and secure border, improved technology and staffing, orderly asylum procedures and a path to legal status for long-term undocumented residents. But she also advocates dismantling ICE and rebuilding the federal immigration-enforcement system from the ground up.
Tafoya takes the opposite emphasis. She strongly supports ICE, border enforcement, cooperation between federal and local law enforcement and deportation of undocumented immigrants convicted of crimes.
What she has said much less about is legal immigration, DREAMers, asylum and the eventual status of long-term undocumented residents who are otherwise law-abiding.
CIVPAC’s immigration policy combines credible border enforcement with expanded legal immigration, asylum reform and a realistic path to legal residency for many long-term undocumented residents. That combination is not fully represented by either candidate.
Energy and Climate
Flanagan treats climate change as a serious policy problem and supports wind, solar, biofuels, green hydrogen, climate adaptation and Minnesota’s transition toward carbon-free electricity. Her preferred method relies heavily on subsidies, mandates and government-directed investment.
Tafoya advocates an “all-of-the-above” energy strategy emphasizing affordability and reliability. Her campaign says it supports all U.S. energy sources while repeatedly emphasizing energy that continues operating when “the sun sets or the wind stops blowing.”
But her campaign provides much less information about whether she regards climate change itself as an important externality requiring public policy.
Neither candidate therefore matches CIVPAC’s climate policy, which would price greenhouse-gas emissions through a technology-neutral carbon tax and then allow markets to determine the resulting mix of fossil fuels, renewables, nuclear power, carbon capture and other technologies.
Reproductive Rights
Flanagan strongly supports nationwide abortion rights, contraception and IVF protections and would repeal the Hyde Amendment. She supports the Women’s Health Protection Act and federal legislation modeled on Minnesota’s broad reproductive-rights law.
Tafoya is unusual among Republican Senate nominees in describing herself as pro-choice. She supports legal abortion during roughly the first 12 weeks of pregnancy and opposes an outright ban.
Her position after 12 weeks, including the exceptions she would require and the precise federal legislation she would support, remains insufficiently defined.
The disagreement here is real, but considerably narrower than in many Senate races involving a Republican nominee. CIVPAC’s abortion policy supports broad legal access in early pregnancy, later restrictions with exceptions, contraception and no taxpayer funding for abortion.
Education, LGBTQ Rights and Guns
Flanagan favors a larger federal role in education, expanded public pre-K and special-education funding, and opposes vouchers. Tafoya’s campaign calls for restoring “parents’ say,” greater transparency and accountability and improved student performance, but provides much less detail about vouchers, charter schools, teacher tenure or federal education policy.
CIVPAC’s K–12 education policy supports increased teacher compensation and funding but pairs it with performance incentives, structural reform and experimentation with charter and voucher approaches under common accountability standards.
Flanagan also supports the Equality Act. The current federal bill would expressly prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity across employment, housing, education, public accommodations, federally funded programs, credit and jury service.
CIVPAC supports broad protection against discrimination and agrees with the Supreme Court’s holding in Bostock v. Clayton County that existing federal employment-discrimination law protects gay and transgender employees. But the Equality Act extends beyond employment into areas in which nondiscrimination requirements can collide with other constitutional interests. In 303 Creative v. Elenis, for example, the Supreme Court held that a public-accommodations law could not be applied to compel protected expressive speech.
CIVPAC’s LGBTQ+ policy therefore favors broad civil equality while preferring that conflicts involving speech, religion, shared facilities and related competing rights be reconciled cautiously and, where appropriate, through case-by-case judicial review rather than sweeping uniform legislation.
Tafoya supports excluding transgender women from women’s athletic competition and locker rooms. CIVPAC treats questions involving transgender athletics and shared facilities separately from the broader principle of LGBTQ nondiscrimination and favors more context-specific approaches in those areas. For the most part, we shy away from government intervention in either direction.
On guns, Flanagan supports banning assault-style weapons, high-capacity magazines and ghost guns. Tafoya emphasizes the Second Amendment, enforcement of existing laws and background checks rather than additional restrictions on lawful gun owners.
CIVPAC’s gun policy recognizes an individual Second Amendment right while also accepting significant government authority to regulate firearms. Neither candidate precisely matches that position.
Some of Tafoya’s stated positions fall within CIVPAC’s framework and some do not. The recurring problem is that important pieces of her policy agenda remain undefined.
Fraud and Administrative Competence
Minnesota’s serious social-services fraud scandals deserve consideration because Flanagan has been lieutenant governor throughout the Walz administration. Federal prosecutors and state investigators have pursued fraud involving Medicaid-funded and other social-service programs, and the issue has become a central subject in the Senate campaign.
There is no evidence that Flanagan was personally involved in the fraud. Reporting also notes that Minnesota lieutenant governors have relatively few independently assigned statutory responsibilities, and Flanagan did not directly administer the state agencies responsible for most of the affected programs. Her official portfolio has instead included areas such as homelessness, housing, Capitol planning and other administration initiatives.
But membership in an administration carries some collective responsibility for governmental competence, and the scale of the failures makes oversight a legitimate issue. Flanagan herself has since said that more should have been done sooner.
Tafoya has made fraud and administrative accountability central to her campaign. Her proposals include mandatory minimum sentences for federal fraud offenses and withholding federal funding from states that refuse specified anti-fraud controls, audits or recovery practices.
CIVPAC would be particularly reluctant to give the executive branch broad discretion to determine when a state has failed those standards. Once that authority exists, it creates an opportunity for a president to use federal funding decisions selectively against states controlled by political opponents. The underlying demand for much stronger fraud prevention and oversight is nevertheless legitimate.
Divided Government
Finally, Donald Trump occupies the White House.
CIVPAC has argued that divided government can itself have value because Congress is frequently the most effective institutional check on presidential power. Why CIVPAC Sometimes Favors Divided Government
That consideration weighs differently here than in races involving Republican candidates who have demonstrated little independence from Trump.
Tafoya accepts the 2020 election result, previously said Trump should not run again, and has publicly said that she would disagree with him when she believes he is wrong. Those facts provide meaningful evidence that she is not simply a party-line surrogate.
Individual independence matters, but it is not a substitute for institutional control. The partisan composition of the Senate determines control of the chamber, committee leadership and much of Congress’s ability to conduct oversight. Even a senator willing to criticize a president of the same party may provide only a limited check if that senator’s election helps preserve the president’s party’s control of the Senate.
No Clear Choice Under the Full Set of Criteria
This is not a case in which the two candidates are equally similar. They are not.
Flanagan provides far more information about how she would govern. Her positions align more closely with CIVPAC on Ukraine and NATO, reproductive freedom, recognition of climate change, portions of immigration policy and the institutional value CIVPAC assigns to divided government. She differs substantially from CIVPAC on Medicare for All, organized labor, the minimum wage, federal spending and the general scale of government intervention in the economy.
Tafoya’s stated positions align more closely with CIVPAC on market economics, reduced taxes and regulation, law enforcement and fraud prevention. She accepts the legitimacy of the 2020 election and has demonstrated more independence from Trump than many Republican candidates. But she has never governed, and her positions remain inadequately developed on several subjects of particular importance to a United States senator—notably Ukraine and NATO, constitutional war powers, health-care specifics, immigration beyond enforcement and climate policy.
Those differences do not point consistently in one direction.
A voter who assigns greatest weight to the international order, reproductive rights and divided government will tend to favor Flanagan. A voter who assigns greater weight to market economics, reduced taxes and regulation, law enforcement and fraud prevention, and limiting federal spending will tend to favor Tafoya.
Two centrist independent voters could agree with every one of CIVPAC’s policy positions and with every judgment in this evaluation, yet reasonably reach different conclusions about which candidate to support. The difference would not necessarily be one of principle or fact, but of how much weight each voter assigns to the competing considerations.
That is precisely the circumstance in which a centrist voter guide can be more useful by identifying the tradeoffs than by pretending that a multidimensional comparison necessarily produces a single correct answer.
On the information presently available, CIVPAC’s criteria do not produce a sufficiently clear overall choice between Peggy Flanagan and Michele Tafoya. The responsibility therefore falls to individual voters to decide which of these competing considerations should carry the greatest weight.
If you are aware of positions that the candidates have taken on these issues or other key issues, let us know by commenting below. Perhaps with that help we could move to an actual endorsement.