Minnesota Democrat Peggy Flanagan held off former NFL sideline reporter Michele Tafoya in a closely watched Senate race Tuesday, overcoming questions about her handling of multiple fraud scandals while serving as lieutenant governor in the administration of Governor Tim Walz.
Flanagan led Tafoya by a 10-point margin when the race was called at at 12:20 a.m. She will become the first Native American woman to be elected to the Senate. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.), who campaigned with Flanagan, claimed during her senatorial campaigns a decade ago to be of Cherokee heritage, but DNA tests showed she was at most 1/1,056th Cherokee ancestry.
The race proved uncomfortably close for Democrats, thanks largely to scrutiny of the Walz-Flanagan administration's handling of the Feeding Our Future fraud scandal, in which state agencies doled out hundreds of millions of dollars to a network of Somali-American nonprofit groups as part of a federally funded food program for schoolchildren.