"This historic fraud happened under her watch, and suddenly, she’s looking out for Medicaid and SNAP? Sell it to someone else, Peggy." With this debate response to Minnesota Democratic Senate nominee Peggy Flanagan’s protestations of concern over access to benefits for the very poor, Republican nominee for Senate Michele Tafoya sealed her status as "rookie of the year" in American politics.

A longtime NFL broadcast professional, Tafoya demonstrated decades of quick on-camera thinking in her debate last week with Flanagan and combined it with a deft slash at Flanagan’s greatest vulnerability: Flanagan’s apprenticeship as lieutenant governor to Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz during the tidal wave of fraud that swept across Minnesota after Covid-era "look-the-other-way" policies became a feature, not a bug, in Minnesota’s vast system of "safety net" programs.

A federal prosecutor estimated the amount of fraud in Minnesota’s spending at as much as $9 billion — that’s a "b" as in "billion." That is a remarkable sum given the Gopher State’s population of fewer than 6 million souls and an annual budget of about $67 billion. To squander an amount equal to close to 15% of a state’s budget on thieves and con artists is staggering.

That level of corruption forced Walz to drop his planned campaign for re-election and now dogs Flanagan in her head-to-head campaign with Tafoya for the Senate.

As does the rising fear of gangs of Somali-American youths and the sort of violence that recently stunned suburban Twin Cities voters when a shootout occurred at an Eden Prairie high school homecoming game.

Eden Prairie is a standard-issue affluent suburban town of about 65,000 people. Fewer than 3,000 Somali-Americans live in Eden Prairie, but the gang shootout on October 2 at Aerie Stadium, during Eden Prairie High School’s game against Minnetonka High School, shocked voters across the entire state.

Tafoya was quick to note that everyone arrested in the incident — which left two youths wounded and crowds quickly evacuated from the canceled game — was out on bail within days. That shootout plus the fraud have dominated Gopher State media coverage of the Senate race this month.

Tafoya’s knockout line — "Sell it to someone else, Peggy" — was a wake-up call for the electorate. Even longtime Democrats in Minnesota are looking around their beloved state and cannot fathom why it has been engulfed in corruption and crime.

Tafoya would have been a good candidate in any cycle. She’s a terrific one for a midterm statewide campaign when her matchup is among the most watched in the country.

Polls in the race are within the "margin of error," which, to remind readers, means the pollsters conducting the surveys acknowledge it’s a toss-up. There may also be a silent and thus hidden-from-pollsters anti-establishment vote lurking beyond downtown Minneapolis, and the very liberal Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party ("DFL"), Flanagan’s brand, is the establishment in Minnesota.

The DFL is not the DSA, but Flanagan is most definitely "DSA-adjacent." She is as "woke" as "woke" gets. One obvious "tell": Flanagan has repeatedly branded Israel’s battle against Hamas in Gaza — which was triggered by the terrorist invasion and massacre of Oct. 7 — as a "genocide," which is not only a slander but an exceptionally stupid slander.

The "genocide" slogan is popular among the radicals chanting "from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free," but it’s an "idiot wind," to borrow from Minnesota’s Nobel laureate bard Bob Dylan. To level that charge against the Jewish state should earn whoever utters it an immediate exit from American politics, not a six-year seat in the most powerful legislative chamber on the planet.

Flanagan isn’t the most radical Democratic nominee of the 2026 election cycle. That is clearly Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan.

But Flanagan is tied with Maine’s Democratic Senate nominee Troy Jackson for the "never going to win the spelling bee" title and with Texas’s Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico for the gold in the "weird" Olympics this fall. (That’s very fitting since Walz popularized calling then-Senator and now Vice President J.D. Vance "weird" in the 2024 campaign.) Meanwhile, the very smart, very telegenic and very professional and prepared Tafoya has worked and worked every crowd, large and small, across Minnesota with the simple and direct appeal that Minnesota voters deserve better than the hot mess that Walz and Flanagan have left the state in after eight years of hapless indifference to the biggest fraud story in the nation, marching right alongside spiraling violence.

Minnesota elects Republicans, just not often. Tafoya isn’t in the lead, but she’s certainly very close to scoring the biggest upset of 2026. Why? Because sometimes even liberals get sick of the left when the left imposes enormous costs on their lives and on the safety of their children and grandchildren.

Hugh Hewitt is a Fox News contributor and host of "The Hugh Hewitt Show" heard weekday afternoons from 3 PM to 6 PM ET on the Salem Radio Network, and simulcast on Salem News Channel. Hugh drives Americans home on the East Coast and to lunch on the West Coast on over 400 affiliates nationwide, and on all the streaming platforms where SNC can be seen. He is a frequent guest on the Fox News Channel’s news roundtable, hosted by Bret Baier weekdays at 6pm ET.

A son of Ohio and a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Michigan Law School, Hewitt has been a Professor of Law at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law since 1996 where he teaches Constitutional Law. Hewitt launched his eponymous radio show from Los Angeles in 1990. Hewitt has frequently appeared on every major national news television network, hosted television shows for PBS and MSNBC, written for every major American paper, has authored a dozen books and moderated a score of Republican candidate debates, most recently the November 2023 Republican presidential debate in Miami and four Republican presidential debates in the 2015-16 cycle.

Hewitt focuses his radio show and his column on the Constitution, national security, American politics and the Cleveland Browns and Guardians. Hewitt has interviewed tens of thousands of guests from Democrats Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump over his 40 years in broadcasting. This column previews the lead story that will drive his radio/ TV show today.