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Former NFL sideline reporter Michele Tafoya is considering running for U.S. Senate in Minnesota as a Republican.
OutKick reports that Tafoya, 60, has met with top Republican committees and expects to make a final decision in early 2026.
“Tafoya met with the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC), Senate Leadership Fund, and other stakeholders in Washington, D.C. last week,” the outlet stated.
Former NFL sideline reporter Michele Tafoya weighs run for Senate from Minnesota https://t.co/qPwB2wnH3w pic.twitter.com/1BBtzV5oQz
— New York Post (@nypost) December 16, 2025
OutKick shared further:
The NRSC has been recruiting her to run for the Senate race in Minnesota, where the Democratic primary has pitted progressive favorite Peggy Flanagan against Chuck Schumer-backed Angie Craig.
Tafoya gave up her NBC career so she could speak more openly about her conservative political beliefs. The breaking point for Tafoya at the media giant came in December 2021 when she appeared on “The View” and served as the conservative panelist. The rest of the cast on the show supported Colin Kaepernick’s national anthem protest, and his assertion that the NFL resembled the slave trade, while Tafoya raised some important counterpoints.
“I’ve been covering the NFL for 25 years,” Tafoya said at the time. “Nobody forces these guys to play. I thought comparing it to the slave trade was a little rough. These guys enter willingly, they are the most well cared for people. Yes, they play a hard sport. And every one of them — black, white, Latino, whoever’s playing the sport — will tell you how much they love it, and they’re willing to do it, and they make a d**n good living.”
Tafoya announced in February 2022 that she wanted to pursue other career opportunities. Shortly after, she became the co-chair for Republican Minnesota gubernatorial candidate Kendall Qualls when he ran against Tim Walz in 2022.
Tafoya would be seeking the seat being vacated by Sen. Tina Smith (D-MN), who announced earlier this year that she would not run for another term.
The former reporter has been a fierce critic of top Democratic figures in Minnesota.
“Dear @Tim_Walz — please deal with the horrendous fraud you allowed in Minnesota before anything else. Please. Our money was stolen,” Tafoya recently said, referencing an alleged $1 billion fraud scheme.
Dear @Tim_Walz — please deal with the horrendous fraud you allowed in Minnesota before anything else. Please. Our money was stolen. https://t.co/Tkl0a9U6nL
— Michele Tafoya (@Michele_Tafoya) December 10, 2025
More from the New York Post:
A California native, Tafoya worked as a host and reporter for Minneapolis sports radio station KFAN before being hired by CBS Sports in 1994.
Tafoya later worked for ABC Sports and ESPN before spending more than a decade at NBC as the sideline reporter for the network’s top-ranked “Sunday Night Football” broadcasts. She departed the Peacock Network following the 2021-22 NFL season, with Super Bowl LVI between the Los Angeles Rams and Cincinnati Bengals serving as her final assignment.
Days after her depature from sports media, Tafoya told former Fox News host Tucker Carlson that she was not forced out, but rather had “been waking up every day with a palpable pull at my gut that my side, my view, my middle-ground moderate viewpoint, is not being represented to the rest of the world.”
In November 2021, Tafoya had appeared on “The View,” where she defended people hesitant to get the COVID-19 vaccine and complained that her children’s schools had separated kids of different skin colors into “affinity groups.”
“My son’s first best friend was a little African-American boy. They were inseparable,” Tafoya said on the ABC panel show. “Get to a certain age, and they start having what’s called an affinity group, which means you go to lunch with people who look like you. Suddenly, my son wasn’t hanging out with him anymore.”