Republican Senate candidate Michele Tafoya must have forgotten the internet always keeps its receipts while on the campaign trail earlier this month.

Asked about her past criticisms of Minnesota while talking to local station WCCO earlier this month, the former NFL reporter claimed she’d never said she was embarrassed to live in the North Star State.

But not long after, a since-deleted March 2023 tweet of Tafoya saying exactly that resurfaced.

“I’m embarrassed to say I live in Minnesota. This state has gone so far left it’s amazing any of the snow still sticks,” she was caught writing in an archived version of the post.

Even if Tafoya wanted to pretend like she never said those words, there are plenty of other examples of her dissing the state or vowing to skip town that were still on the record.

In August 2024, she told X she’d be “fleeing soon” and later called herself a “future former-Minnesotan” online that October.

She struck the same tone on the podcast, “Beyond the Polls with Henry Olsen,” last September, where the Daily Beast quoted her saying, “When I first moved to Minnesota, I really liked it here. It was safe and clean and beautiful and culturally diverse. And now it is not as safe, it is not as clean, it is not as beautiful, and we have Ilhan Omar and Tim Walz. So, suffice to say, I won’t be here for the long haul.”

That history alone was enough for Minnesota’s Democratic Farmer Labor Party to dub Tafoya the state’s “biggest hater” in a press release this August.

Nevertheless, the Republican tried to make a dubious distinction between feeling ashamed about being from Minnesota versus finding what’s happening in her home state embarrassing during her interview with WCCO.

“I hear it every day,” she maintained. “And this state deserves better.”

Tafoya will face off with Democratic Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan in November’s midterm election to replace retiring Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minn.). If successful, she’d be the state’s first GOP senator since Sen. Norm Coleman left the chamber in 2009.

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