Trump Warns Minnesota Senate Race Can Only Be Lost to "Cheating," Drawing Rebuke From State's Top Election Official

President Trump told supporters in a Truth Social post Monday that Republican Senate candidate Michele Tafoya can lose Minnesota's open seat "only" if Democrats "cheat," and said "The Federal Government will be watching closely" once ballots are counted after polls close on November 3. Trump offered no evidence of any irregularity, and the claim, made eight days before Election Day in a state no Republican presidential nominee has carried since 1972, immediately drew pushback from Minnesota's chief election official and the state's senior Democratic senator, who accused him of setting up grounds to contest the result if Tafoya loses.

The post, archived from Trump's Truth Social account, opened with an endorsement of Tafoya — "She's running a great race," he wrote — before pivoting to the warning: "The only way she can lose is if they cheat by playing games with the Ballots as they come in." He also repeated a disputed claim that he "won Minnesota three times" in presidential elections, a state he has in fact never carried.

No Evidence Offered

Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon, a Democrat now seeking a fourth term in the office, rejected the premise directly. Local election officials count the ballots and report results to his office, he said, adding that neither the governor nor the attorney general plays any role in that process and that "there's tons of eyes and ears on the process," including partisan election judges from both parties and routine post-election audits. An examination of the county-by-county returns found no basis for the president's repeated claim that he won the state outright: he lost Minnesota by roughly 1.5 points in 2016, 7 points in 2020 and 4 points in 2024, even while carrying a large majority of its 87 counties, because Democratic margins in the four core Twin Cities counties — Hennepin, Ramsey, Dakota and Washington — outweighed his rural advantage each time. Simon said the repeated, unsupported claims "make the job tougher" for officials trying to maintain public confidence in a system he says has no record of the kind of coordinated fraud the president describes.

The Race and the Numbers

Tafoya, a former NFL sideline reporter making her first run for office, is competing against Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan, a Democrat who defeated centrist Rep. Angie Craig in the primary, for the seat Sen. Tina Smith is vacating after choosing not to seek a full term. Smith, who was appointed to the seat in 2018 and later won it outright, would be succeeded by a fellow Democrat if Flanagan prevails, extending the party's hold on the seat. An average of six recent polls compiled by 270toWin showed Flanagan ahead 48.2% to 42.2%, a 6-point margin, in a state that has not elected a Republican to statewide office since 2006. Early voting is unusually heavy: Minnesota's Secretary of State reported that 419,189 ballots had been cast in the first five weeks of voting through October 22 — 241,348 in person and 177,841 by mail — far outpacing the 282,277 ballots cast over the same period before the 2022 midterms. Statewide, officials had already distributed nearly 700,000 absentee and mail ballots as of that count, with in-person early voting continuing through October 30.

• October 30: in-person early voting ends statewide
• November 3: polls open for Election Day voting; Minnesota's Senate, House and legislative races are decided
• Following days: county canvassing boards review and certify results, the normal process by which razor-thin races are finalized

Part of a Broader Pattern

The Minnesota post was not an isolated remark. Trump has made similar statements questioning the integrity of vote-counting in other contested states this fall as the midterm campaign has intensified, part of a pattern that has alarmed Democratic officials and some independent election administrators who note that documented cases of the kind of organized, coordinated ballot fraud the president describes are exceedingly rare in American elections. The Minnesota comments stood out, however, for naming a specific statewide race and for the explicit threat that "the Federal Government will be watching," language Democrats read as a signal that the administration could intervene if the count does not go Republicans' way. Asked about his broader approach the following day, before departing Joint Base Andrews for campaign stops in Texas, Trump said he would respect next week's results "if they're honest elections" — a qualification that did little to calm Democratic concerns, since it left open who would judge honesty and by what standard.

Minnesota makes an unusual target for such claims. The state has voted for the Democratic presidential nominee in every election since 1976, and Trump's own margins there have narrowed only slightly even as Republicans gained ground nationally. What has changed this year is a state-level controversy over fraud in Minnesota's social-service and housing programs, which federal prosecutors and state auditors have investigated for months and which Tafoya has made the center of her campaign, arguing that Flanagan and outgoing Gov. Tim Walz failed to stop it. That controversy, over program spending rather than ballots, is distinct from the vote-count fraud Trump described in his post, though Republicans have at times blurred the two in campaign messaging.

Officials and Rivals Respond

Sen. Tina Smith, who is retiring at the end of this term, posted a sharp rebuttal on X.

"He's blatantly laying the groundwork to steal an election if his chosen candidate doesn't win. Minnesota will not take kindly to thinly veiled threats from a guy we've rejected three times (soon to be four)."

Simon's office, which has repeatedly clashed with the administration this year over federal demands for voter data and an executive order on mail balloting, took a similar line without matching Smith's rhetoric. His office has spent much of 2026 defending the state's election procedures against claims from Washington, and Simon has said in past statements that Minnesota's results have never been credibly shown to be anything other than accurate. Tafoya's campaign did not repeat the president's language when asked about it, focusing instead on her own argument that lax state oversight allowed fraud in Minnesota's social-service programs — a separate controversy she has made central to her campaign. Flanagan's campaign has pointed to the Trump administration's own record on immigration enforcement in the state rather than responding point by point to the cheating claim.

What Happens Next

With early voting continuing through Friday and Election Day a week away, the practical stakes of Trump's statement remain uncertain unless the Minnesota race turns out close enough for the count itself to become contested. Control of the Senate is one of several competitive chamber-wide outcomes riding on a handful of states this cycle, and Minnesota, long a reliably Democratic state in federal races, has drawn outsized national attention this year because of the fraud allegations surrounding state social-service spending that Tafoya has used to attack Flanagan and the outgoing governor. Election administrators in Minnesota, as in other states, will proceed through the same canvassing and certification steps used in past cycles regardless of the president's statements, a process that includes bipartisan election judges at every polling place and post-election audits of selected precincts. Whether Trump's warning translates into a legal challenge, a renewed push for federal monitors, or nothing at all is likely to depend less on the rhetoric of the past week than on how close the Tafoya-Flanagan contest actually turns out to be when polls close November 3.