At the Minnesota State Fair last month, WCCO Radio host Jason DeRusha asked Michele Tafoya whether she’d ever said she was embarrassed to live here.
Her answer was about as clean as a denial gets: “If I were embarrassed to be from Minnesota, would I be running for the United States to represent Minnesota? … I have never said that.” Notice how vehemently she said that? She sounded offended.
But she had said she was embarrassed to be from Minnesota. In writing. More than once.
On Wednesday, CNN’s KFile laid out the deleted posts, and Courier Minnesota followed with the archive links.
Catching a candidate in a lie is a one-day story, though. The more interesting thing is what happens when you line her statements up next to her résumé. Put the two on the same timeline and a pattern shows up that the denial was meant to hide.
The Timeline
1994: Tafoya, a California native, moves to Minnesota for a sports broadcasting job. Over the following decades she builds a local following through WCCO-TV, WCCO-AM and KQRS, while her national career climbs through CBS, ABC and ESPN.
2011–2022: She becomes the sideline reporter for NBC’s Sunday Night Football, one of the most visible jobs in sports media. Her last broadcast is Super Bowl LVI in February 2022.
2022: She leaves NBC and pivots to politics and conservative commentary. She launches a podcast on the Salem Podcast Network and becomes a MAGA influencer in a media ecosystem where Minnesota is a reliable villain.
March 16, 2023: “I’m embarrassed to say I live in Minnesota.” When a user replies “You can leave,” she answers, “That’s the plan! Have a great day!” Asked if she promises, she says yes, to make the user “and your 35 followers happy.” Offered a home in Tennessee: “TN is under consideration!”
August 2024: Agreeing that Minnesota is the “California Midwest”: “As a native Californian who moved to Minnesota in 1994, I know. Fleeing soon.”
October 2024: She describes herself as a “future former-Minnesotan.”
August 2025: Replying to Gov. Gavin Newsom, she writes that she was born in California and left, then “moved to Minnesota and will be leaving.” CNN also surfaced audio of her saying she expected to be one of the people leaving the state “in the near future.”
2026: She runs for Minnesota’s open U.S. Senate seat and wins the Republican nomination in August.
August 2026: On Fox News, she says Minnesotans are “quite frankly … embarrassed.” Days later, at the State Fair, she tells WCCO she never said she was.
September 23, 2026: CNN publishes the deleted posts. Her campaign’s response: Minnesotans are fed up, and she loves the state.
And in August, on C-SPAN, she said it more directly than any tweet: “The last people I’m going to answer to are the Minnesotans who send me there.” She followed up with something about bringing “Minnesota common sense” to Washington, which didn’t really clarify anything.
So Un-Minnesotan
In response to Tafoya’s tweets expressing her embarrassment of being from Minnesota, Minnesotan’s took to Threads and elsewhere to publish hilarious posts about how “un-Minnesotan” Tafoya is.
The Michele Tafoya is so Un-Minnesotan meme was so popular, it was trending for a couple days. I pulled the 45 most popular posts; here are the stats:
So, of course, I created a song using the memes.
The Stepping Stone
But seriously, here’s where the timeline stops being a list of embarrassing posts and starts explaining something.
Sideline reporting gave Tafoya a national face. Leaving NBC let her turn that face into a political brand. And the conservative media economy she stepped into runs on a particular kind of content: The blue-state refugee. Complaining about Minnesota, promising to flee to Florida or Tennessee, sparring with Gavin Newsom. That material performs. It builds an audience, and an audience is the currency of the MAGA influencer business (see Alex Jones & Charlie Kirk).
A Senate campaign is the next rung on that same ladder. It’s the biggest platform available to someone in her position, and it pays off in attention whether she wins or loses. (Racket has already asked the obvious follow-up: Will Michele Tafoya leave Minnesota if she loses?)
The trouble is that the two jobs want opposite things. The podcast rewards contempt for Minnesota. The Senate race requires affection for it. For three years she was paid, in followers and bookings, to tell a national audience this state was beyond saving.
Now she needs three million Minnesotans to ignore the contempt she’s show us and to believe she’s in it for us and not for herself.
As the So Un-Minnesotan memes demonstrate, we’re not buying it.
David
Chaska Protests
Every Friday from 3:00–4:00 p.m. at the corner of Chaska Blvd. and Chestnut Street (Highway 41) [Map]
Every Saturday from 1-2 pm at the corner of Hazeltine Boulevard and Highway 41 (Chestnut) [Map]
Chanhassen Protests
Every Saturday: 1st & 3rd Saturdays from 10-11am at Pedestrian Bridge over Highway 5.
Park at Discovery United Methodist Church. We have permission to park there.
2nd, 4th and 5th Saturday from 10-11am at W 78th and Kerber Boulevard.
Sign library is available.
Norwood Young America
Every Sunday, 11 a.m.–12 p.m. (Line up at the bike path south of Highway 212 and Faxon.)
Victoria
Every Wednesday from 4:30-5:30 pm on the corner of Highway 5 and Victoria Drive/County Rd 11.
Waconia
Every Saturday from 11:30-12:30 pm at Highway 5 and County Road 10 in front of the Starbucks and Jersey Mike’s. [Map]
SW Protectors
Every first and third Tuesday from 6:30 – 8:00 pm. It’s no cost and come and go as you like.
Please do buy something to eat or drink, though, to support our venue, which is The Golden Kitchen and is located at 207 N Chestnut Street #110 in Chaska. [Map]
Super overview on the real Trafoya