Michele Tafoya, a Republican former television sports reporter turned conservative media commentator, announced on Wednesday that she was running for an open Senate seat in Minnesota.
In her announcement video, Ms. Tafoya took jabs at Gov. Tim Walz, a Democrat, for the state’s major fraud scandal and Representative Ilhan Omar, another Democrat, for her criticism of the police. Ms. Tafoya also attacked what she suggested was a “radical ideology” fueling transgender youths’ participation in sports.
“As Minnesota’s senator, I will clean up the system, fighting corruption, ending the fraud and protecting your tax dollars,” she said. “I will protect what’s fair and safe, standing with our law enforcement officers, deporting dangerous criminals, and keeping female sports for female athletes.”
She only briefly nodded to the fatal shooting of Renee Good in Minneapolis this month by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer, which set off protests in the city and sent tensions soaring amid President Trump’s immigration crackdown. “The pressure is mounting again,” Ms. Tafoya said as images of chaotic demonstrations flash onscreen, “and the stakes could not be higher.”
Ms. Tafoya spent most of her decades-long journalism career on the sidelines of N.F.L. games, reporting for NBC, ABC and ESPN, while also helping with Olympics coverage and at other sporting events. She retired from NBC in 2022, saying that she wanted to pursue other activities.
Her final broadcast that year was Super Bowl LVI. The next day, she was announced as the co-chair for the campaign of a Republican candidate for governor in Minnesota (the candidate, Kendall Qualls, later dropped out).
A California native, Ms. Tafoya joins a fledgling Republican primary field in the race to succeed Senator Tina Smith, the retiring one-term Democratic incumbent. David Hann, the former chair of the Minnesota Republican Party and former state senator, announced his candidacy in mid-December. Also running are Royce White, a former professional basketball player who lost to Senator Amy Klobuchar in 2024, and Adam Schwarze, a retired Navy Seal, among others.
On the Democratic side, Representative Angie Craig and the state’s lieutenant governor, Peggy Flanagan, have both announced Senate campaigns, setting up what is expected to be a tightly contested battle for the Democratic nomination.
Democratic politics in Minnesota were scrambled recently, however, by Mr. Walz’s announcement that he would not seek another term, and the news that Ms. Klobuchar might run to succeed him, potentially opening up the state’s other Senate seat.
Though Minnesota has reliably voted Democratic for a generation and has not had a Republican senator since 2002, the National Republican Senatorial Committee has put the state on its target map for 2026.
“We see real reasons to be optimistic,” Senator Tim Scott, the chair of the N.R.S.C., the campaign arm for Senate Republicans, said in an interview with Fox News in December. “President Trump was very close in Minnesota. It’s a four-point race. We know with the right candidate, we will be successful.”
He didn’t say who he thought that candidate was, but in the same interview, he seemed to tease Ms. Tafoya’s coming news. “The good news is we already have a strong candidate in the race,” Mr. Scott said. “And the better news is, wait and see.”
For most of her career in sports media, Ms. Tafoya kept politics out of her broadcasts, but was vocal on her personal social media accounts. In an interview with Sports Illustrated in 2015, Ms. Tafoya described herself as “a pro-choice conservative” with “some definite libertarian strains.”
She made her political views known on a national stage in 2021, during two appearances on “The View.” Sitting in the seat often held by a conservative voice, she criticized vaccine mandates, critical race theory and the protests of Colin Kaepernick, a former quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers who protested against racial injustice by kneeling during the national anthem.
She departed NBC the next year and quickly became a feature on conservative media, sitting for interviews with Megyn Kelly and Tucker Carlson. She explained her decision to leave sports for a more political-focused career in a 2022 interview with Mr. Carlson on Fox News.
“I’ve been waking up every day with a palpable pull at my gut that my side, my view, my middle-ground-kind-of-moderate-viewpoint is not being represented to the rest of the world,” she said at the time. “So rather than, you know, just banging it out on Twitter or Instagram every day, I thought, I’ve got to do something. I have benefited greatly from the American dream, and I feel like, for the sake of my kids, and because I so love this country, I’ve got to start giving back.”
Soon after, in 2022, Ms. Tafoya started her own podcast, “The Michele Tafoya Podcast,” which focuses heavily on politics. She has recorded more than 500 episodes and has increasingly focused on Minnesota politics, interviewing nearly every Republican candidate running for governor.
Her most recent interview with one of those candidates, Patrick Knight, was titled “Republicans see a lane in Minnesota.”
Nick Corasaniti is a Times reporter covering national politics, with a focus on voting and elections.
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