Sideline Susie is rich.
From the start of the item:
When Michele Tafoya said Americans could handle higher gas prices caused by the war in Iran with a “stiff upper lip” and “one less trip to Starbucks,” she likely wasn’t talking about herself.
The retired sportscaster and Republican candidate for U.S. Senate has assets worth between $10.7 million and $37.9 million, according to her financial disclosure, putting her near or in the top 1% of wealthiest Americans.
Conventional wisdom says an electorate deeply concerned about the cost of living doesn’t want to be told by a multimillionaire to buck up and buy fewer lattes — especially after years of inflation going back to the pandemic and now exacerbated by President Trump’s tariffs, war in Iran and cuts to safety net programs.
“If (candidates) can’t understand and show some connection with voter worries, they’re not going to get very far,” said David Sturrock, a political science professor at Southwest Minnesota State University who has been active in Republican politics.
But Sturrock also said he doesn’t think voters are casting ballots based on a close review of financial disclosures. They’re persuaded by “fleeting impressions” of candidates and their platform.
Cut down on the lattes and make it through tariff times rings hollow from a millionaire.
That is the message, nationwide, to not be an asshole in what you say to paycheck to paycheck voters, unless you don't get called out for it. Given opposition research, expecting to not be called out for that kind of trash talk, particularly from a Republican, where feelings of privilege and entitleent are more prevalent while Dems hid such things as a policy, as best they can, or they speak more sensitively.
Tafoya also is pushing that bogus $9 billion in fraud bullshit, so, her mouth might be her biggest problem.
But, in fair judgment, Tafoya has a snowball's chance in hell with Peggy Flanagan as her general election opponent. Flanagan's been in government before, and done things well, while not blathering on the sideline while viewers are bellowing in frustration at their TVs, "Show the fucking field! The game's going on. Show the field"
(Or is that just me?)
______________UPDATE____________
Debunking that $9 billion alleged fraud game is important to having a fact based election. Citing for that a Dan Burns' left.mn post from a few months ago about the $9 billion fraud about fraud, is bolstered by left.mn's Steve Timmer on Sept 1, 2026 writing:
Looking for fraud in not all the right places
I wrote back in January about a December ’25 press conference held by Acting United States Attorney Joe Thompson to offer a briefing, with seven other members of his office standing in a phalanx, to describe what he said was perhaps $9 billion in social services fraud committed by the local ethnic Somali community. I thought it was frankly racist and speculative, and I also believe it violated ethical rules about prejudicial pretrial publicity and conduct prejudicial to the administration of justice.
My story was a lonely voice for a long time, and federal and state Republicans candidates have tried to fatten up on the Thompson presser ever since it was given, including recently in ads for Démuth for governor. The fallout has been immense and odious. Here’s part of what I said in January about the fallout:
A month of right-wing social media bloviating, a mainstream media that ran with the nine billion dollar fraud figure as a fact, Donald Trump’s ranting that Somali people are “garbage” and initiating and exacerbating Metro Surge, Nick Shirley’s puerile, defamatory video (extolled by the Ovoid Sorehead, Tom Emmer), Tim Walz being driven from a re-election campaign, the fact that Somali and Latino U.S. citizens have to cower in their homes, and the sad little bullshit performance [his first one] in Minneapolis by Jake Lang on Saturday, January 17th, can all be laid at the feet of Joe Thompson. It’s quite a legacy.
It obviously only got worse from there. The Republican vocabulary has been reduced to two words: “nine billion.” It’s a good thing for them that it isn’t a tongue twister, or they’d be in big trouble.
But mirabile dictu, in recent weeks even somnolent media have begun to catch on.
Tom Hauser quote
[...] Based on all the gibbering Republicans, including Donald Trump, one would think that Minnesota was the only place where pandemic-era fraud took place and that Somalis (who Trump calls “garbage”) were the only people to have committed it. You would be wrong if you thought that. It was a widespread national problem. Here is just a small collection of other examples I have found.
[...] The Paycheck Protection Program. While Feeding our Future was intended to keep kids from going hungry during school closures – and the program did feed a lot of kids – PPP was intended to help employers meet payroll and keep employees on. It was administered by the Treasury Department and the SBA: the feds. [Timmer than catalogs PPP frauds in millions of dollar amounts documented via links]
Medicare/Medicaid fraud. These have always been the big ones, and since they involve white collar criminals, Donald Trump has a soft spot for them. Here are some of his pardons and commutations.
Lawrence Duran – American Therapeutic Corp, Medicare (psychiatric partial-hospitalization fraud), ~$87 million ordered in restitution. Trump commuted his sentence in May 2025, and the clemency order itself states Duran would be subject to “no further fines [or] restitution” related to his case.
The WellCare Five – (Todd Farha, Thaddeus Bereday, William Kale, Paul Behrens, Peter Clay), a Medicaid case. Convicted of a scheme involving widespread Medicaid overcharging of at least $35 million, in a case that began with a 2007 FBI raid on WellCare’s Tampa headquarters. They were convicted in 2013 and granted full pardons in January 2021, as Trump was headed out the door of his first term.
Philip Esformes — The largest figure by far. He ran nursing homes in Florida, Illinois, and Missouri used to perpetrate a Medicaid fraud scheme involving about $1.3 billion in fraudulent claims. His sentence was commuted by Trump, but he’s been arrested for new crimes.
Trump has pardoned plenty of other white-collar crooks, not involving medical or social services.
Michael Milken – The “junk bond king” pleaded guilty to securities fraud and related charges from his 1980s Drexel Burnham Lambert insider-trading scandal, and was pardoned in February 2020, during Trump’s first term.
There are many more. Trump seems to favor financial criminals and crypto crooks, especially.
-oOo-
It is obvious that Donald Trump does not like Minnesota. Well, we don’t like him either. The Lisa Démuths, Michele Tafoyas, and Ron Schultzs of Minnesota not only bray the Republican line, but they’d also leave the state supine in the face of the hyenas in the Trump administration. We’d be complete fools to put these Republican pimps in charge.
[...] There that has never been an ethnic group that moved to the United States in numbers and didn’t encounter difficulty in fitting in for a generation or two: Irish, Polish, Eastern European Jewish, Italian, Chinese, Mexican, Jamaican, Vietnamese, Hmong. [...] These are eternal themes in the American experience, but I don’t think you can build an immigrant nation without them. Well, I know you can’t.
The law-abiding Somali residents of my hometown, most of whom are citizens, and their kids who work at the grocery store after school, who certainly are citizens, have a job made more difficult for them because of the Lisa Démuths, Michele Tafoyas (who shares my hometown), and Ron Schultzs. These tightly packed balls of grievance and resentment do not deserve support and lifting up from us. Quite the opposite.
[...] One note Johnny Republican politicians do it because it’s all they have. On virtually every national and state issue: war, the economy, tariffs, immigration enforcement, guns – and this list goes on, too – the Republicans cower behind the quivering Donald Trump.
Moreover, the managing editor of MinnReformer days ago opined:
The most pressing issue for the next Minnesota attorney general will be the ongoing fight to force the Trump administration to govern by the rule of law and the U.S. Constitution.
When Trump’s minions were withholding evidence from state and local law enforcement in the federal killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, Attorney General Keith Ellison and Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty sued the feds. Last month, they announced that the feds had turned over key evidence, like Good’s car.
After prosecutors charged ICE agent Christian Castro, alleging he shot an innocent man in the leg and then lied about it, Trump’s ally Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has been holding up Castro’s extradition. Ellison again sued.
On another front, when Trump assumed monarchical powers and levied tariffs, which has raised the price of nearly everything for American consumers, Ellison was among the attorney generals who successfully sued to stop him (though Trump is at it again on that front).
Minnesotans have been in the fight of our lives against the Trump administration, which has to rank among the most lawless in American history. It’s gotten so bad that — as ProPublica reported recently — federal judges across the country have called Trump’s Justice Department at various times “unlawful,” “unethical,” “unseemly” or otherwise dishonest.
Which is why it wouldn’t make any sense to elect a Trump ally to the job of attorney general, who is Minnesota’s chief legal officer. [...]
And, to be sure: Republican nominee for attorney general Ron Schutz is very much a Trump ally.
The Republican Attorneys General Association is dropping a seven-figure ad buy against Ellison. Check out this photo of Don Jr. Trump with association leaders.
RAGA, as it’s known, is connected to the mastermind of the Trump Supreme Court, Leonard Leo.
Leo, who is co-chairman of the board of the Federalist Society, is closely connected to RAGA and various big money GOP groups, which shrewdly see state attorneys general as a key policy, political and legal lever.
Schutz, a successful trial lawyer and fixture of the Minnesota conservative legal establishment, has been a member of the Federalist Society for more than 30 years.
The group has successfully implanted their right-wing judicial philosophy on the federal bench, including the current supermajority on the U.S. Supreme Court.
We’re talking overturning Roe v. Wade, giving President Donald Trump immunity from criminal prosecution and gutting the Voting Rights Act.
Beyond the company he keeps, what Schutz has said he’ll do as attorney general is not comforting — insofar as he’s said anything.
How did Schutz react to ICE’s lawless assault on the constitutional rights of Minnesotans? He attacked Ellison for “wasting taxpayer money suing the Trump admin to block ICE from doing their job — enforcing immigration laws in Minnesota.”
[...] I asked Schutz’s campaign what he would do as attorney general to get Castro back here to face justice. And which, if any, of the more than 70 lawsuits filed by Ellison against the Trump administration that Schutz would drop or continue.
Schutz didn’t respond.
I also asked about another high-profile Ellison case, in which he alleges Big Oil defrauded Minnesotans by lying about what they knew about climate change. As multiple investigations have found, the oil companies knew humans burning fossil fuels were causing climate change but then seeded the information atmosphere with phony doubt while the problem only worsened.
Again, no response from the Schutz campaign, but he did tweet that the lawsuit was part of a “radical green agenda.”
Crabgrass notes that Schutz was a Tabacco lawyer back when Tabacco firms were in denial over the connection between smoking and lung cancer, and Schutz sang the song. It light of that, Coolgan continues to opine:
There’s nothing radical about expecting the world’s largest and most powerful corporations to be truthful with the public.
I’ve written critically of Democratic-Farmer-Labor elected officials’ lackadaisical initial response to the raiding of our state and federal treasury by fraudsters. Including Ellison’s foolish decision in the fall of 2021 to meet with people who sought his help getting the executive branch to go easier on what we politely call program integrity, just weeks before the raids that finally put an end to the Feeding Our Future debacle.
[...] Every year the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General puts out a statistical report on states’ Medicaid fraud control units, and Minnesota has ranked in the top 10 in fraud convictions, despite our relatively low population compared to places like other top-ranking states like Florida and California.
[...] As for Schutz, here’s what he said during a TV interview when asked what he would do in the case of an “unlawful decision” on the part of the Trump administration.
“What I can tell you is my goal is to protect the citizens of Minnesota.”
[...] But then this: “I, I doubt if President Trump is going to be, you know, taking some action that would be blatantly illegal. I know Dems think he has done that. I can tell you from having spent a lot of time in the courtroom, there can be differences of opinion on this.”
With a man who gives two consecutive non-answers in a row to a direct question, what's good about him?
There can be differences of opinion, he said that. True enough. But the guy will not directly tell you his opinion, because it is Trump speaks, saying whatever, that's great, move along, nothing to sue here.
Or prove me wrong.
