‘Far too close for comfort’: An under-the-radar Senate race embodies Democrats’ midterm worries

By Jeff Zeleny, David Wright, CNN

(CNN) — An open Senate seat in Minnesota.

A massive GOP spending advantage in almost every battleground.

A lingering sense of unease that polling could be underestimating Republican support.

With many Democrats awash in optimism, those are just some of the potential obstacles facing the party as it seeks to deliver on expectations of reshaping the political order in Washington.

More than a dozen Democratic campaign managers, strategists and party officials told CNN that a massive spending disparity with Republican forces is their top worry heading into the closing two weeks of the campaign. While Democrats in nearly every Senate battleground raised far more money than their rivals, new campaign finance reports show, a flood of money from outside GOP-aligned groups offsets that advantage.

With Democrats in strong position to capture the House, President Donald Trump and Republicans are working to build a firewall in red states that have become an unlikely battlefield in the fight for control of the Senate. Democratic candidates need to earn at least some crossover support from independents and Republicans, including those skeptical that their votes could help usher in a Democratic Senate majority.

A sour political environment has left almost no Republican on the ballot immune to a forceful challenge. Yet at the same time, Democrats acknowledge they have no room for error as they try to pick up four Senate seats without losing any of the ones they currently hold.

“All the objective indicators for Democrats are bullish,” said David Axelrod, a longtime campaign strategist and CNN’s chief political analyst. “But having been burned before, and given the deluge of money being spent against them, there is a sensible instinct to throttle down expectations.”

A Minnesota sleeper?

Minnesota is often seen as the reddest blue state in America, which places it high on the list of places that Democrats are closely watching that could harbor signs of trouble if a blue wave fails to materialize.

The race to replace retiring Sen. Tina Smith has largely flown under the radar compared to an unexpectedly long list of competitive races in other Midwestern states. The contest between Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan, a Democrat, and former sportscaster Michele Tafoya, a Republican, is “far too close for comfort,” a state Democratic official told CNN.

The two are scheduled to hold their only scheduled debate on Friday.

Since the general election campaign kicked off in earnest this fall, Tafoya has made a deliberate effort to separate herself from Trump and the GOP brand, recognizing the political realities in a state that hasn’t elected a Republican statewide in 20 years.

“I’m a pro-choice Republican. I’m not afraid to stand up to my party,” she said in an ad that went up last week, making a direct appeal to independent and moderate Republican voters. “When Trump is right, I’ll work with him. When he’s wrong, I’ll stand up for Minnesota.”

The president weighed in on the race during a rally this week in Ohio, saying: “You have to vote for Michele Tafoya.” Asked about it the following day, Tafoya became the rare Republican to downplay a presidential seal of approval.

“I heard about that,” Tafoya told reporters. “Look, this campaign is about bringing all Minnesotans together, whether they voted for President Trump or whether they voted for Kamala Harris.”

Trump only lost the state by less than 2 percentage points in 2016 and about 4 percentage points in 2024.

In another ad going up in the closing stretch of the race, Tafoya urges Minnesota voters to try something different.

“Minnesota’s been run by the same political establishment for too long, and it’s not working. This isn’t red versus blue. It’s right versus wrong,” she says in the spot. “I’ll be an independent voice for Minnesota because we don’t need more of the same politicians making the same excuses.”

Tafoya, however, has still made calibrated appeals to conservative voters, emphatically criticizing the state’s welfare fraud scandal while leveraging her unusually high name ID from her days as an NFL sideline reporter and local radio host.

“I spent 30 years covering football and I learned one thing: When you fail this badly, you get fired. Hundreds of millions stolen, money meant for hungry kids gone,” she says in her top-airing ad since September, run more than 660 times in the key Minneapolis-St. Paul media market.

Welfare-fraud scandal looms large

Flanagan has served alongside Gov. Tim Walz, who abandoned his plans to seek a third term earlier this year amid the growing welfare-fraud scandal in his state.

“If Amy Klobuchar was not at the top of the ticket running for governor, this Senate race could be one of our biggest problems on the map,” a top Democrat in the state told CNN.

Flanagan earned the endorsement of Sen. Bernie Sanders and other progressive leaders and won the primary over a more moderate challenger, Rep. Angie Craig.

To move beyond the controversies from her time as the state’s lieutenant governor, Flanagan has worked extensively to tie Tafoya to the president and expose her to the midterm headwinds buffeting Republicans in other parts of the country.

In an ad that’s run more than 1,000 times since the start of last month, Flanagan argues that “my opponent, Michele Tafoya, is all in for Trump’s forever war and these crazy gas prices.”

And she blasts Tafoya over a gaffe from March, when the Republican advices Minnesotans to cope with high costs by keeping a stiff upper lip and “maybe you take one less trip to Starbucks.”

“Michele Tafoya may not get what you’re going through, but I do,” Flanagan says in the ad.

Another top Flanagan ad drives the point home: “She’s the sideline reporter who’s become a Trump cheerleader.”

Since the primary on August 11, Republicans have very narrowly outspent Democrats on the Minnesota Senate race, about $3.42 million to $3.41 million. Outside groups have largely stayed out of the state, with their spending focused on other marquee races in Texas, Ohio, Iowa and Michigan.

One worry expressed by Democrats is Flanagan’s fundraising.

That was borne out in third quarter fundraising reports for their campaign committees that were filed this week. Tafoya out-raised Flanagan during the quarter, $4.9 million to $4.3 million, and the Republican entered October and the critical final weeks with an advantage in cash on hand, $2.1 million to $1.5 million.

It’s a stark contrast to the performance of Democrats in top-flight battleground races. In Georgia, Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff had raised ten times as much as his GOP challenger, Rep. Mike Collins, through the end of June; in North Carolina, former Gov. Roy Cooper out-raised former RNC chair Michael Whatley by three times.

There are no signs yet that national Democrats are allocating resources to an insurance policy in Minnesota, given the breadth of the Senate battlefield elsewhere. Flanagan accounts for $1.4 million of the $1.8 million in Democratic ad time booked for the final three weeks.

Over that same three-week stretch, Democratic outside groups are spending more than $24 million in Iowa, more than $7 million in Kansas, and more than $2 million in South Carolina – three reliably red states that Trump won comfortably in 2024.

This story has been updated with additional information.

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