Unless Ilhan Omar somehow squeaks out the Democratic nomination.

In somewhat surprising news, Minnesota Democrat Tina Smith announced this morning that she would not be seeking reelection to the U.S. Senate. Smith, while not the most popular incumbent in the world, was an uncontroversial headline-dodging Democrat in a state whose voters appreciate the type; absent either scandal or political sea change, the seat was hers for as long as she wanted it. Her decision to step down leaves a seemingly enticing opening in the heart of the upper Midwest for Republicans to target in the 2026 midterm election.

My brief advice: Spend your money elsewhere. Abandon all hope, all ye Republicans who seek statewide victory in the Land of 10,000 Lakes. For Minnesota to elect a Republican senator, all the electoral stars would have to align perfectly; with Donald Trump in office, they are out of joint in a statewide culture that is not only allergic to his style of politics but dispositionally disinclined toward the Republican brand overall. The numbers tell you everything you need to know.

It’s a political commonplace to note that Minnesota is the only state in America to have never voted for Ronald Reagan as president. (In fact, it has voted Republican only once in the presidential ballot since Eisenhower, in 1972 — and Nixon defeated McGovern only narrowly.) More tellingly, Trump received only 46.7 percent of the vote there in 2024 (to Harris’s 51 percent) — and with one special exception that is the best any Republican has performed statewide since 1994. In that year, the year of the Gingrich-led “Republican Revolution,” Republican governor Arne Carlson won reelection with a whopping 63 percent of the vote. Note, however, that this was because he was a liberal through and through, the Lowell Weicker of the Midwest. (Carlson is the last Republican to ever win both Hennepin and Ramsey Counties — Minneapolis and Saint Paul, in other words — and he did it in both of his elections.)

But ever since the parties began to ideologically “sort” into conservative and liberal parties post-1994, Minnesota has demonstrated time and time again that it is a pronouncedly liberal state, not a swing state. Only once during all this time did a Republican ever approach something like a majority of the statewide vote: in 2002, when Norm Coleman defeated emergency fill-in candidate Walter Mondale in one of the wildest Senate races of my lifetime, with 49.53 percent of the vote. (When Coleman narrowly lost in 2008, he managed only 40.1 percent of the vote, a reversion to typical Republican performance.) The last person to garner anything like Trump’s 46.68 percent of the Minnesota vote was Governor Tim Pawlenty, who narrowly won reelection in 2006 with . . . 46.69 percent of the vote. In his first winning race, in 2002, Pawlenty in fact only took 44.4 percent of the vote. (Third parties have been the GOP’s ticket to the governor’s mansion in Minnesota since Duncan.)

This is unfriendly terrain, to say the least, and it is demographically driven: Minnesota is anywhere from 76 to 80 percent white (depending on which source you check) and has a Scandihoovian-tinged working-class and middle-class culture all its own, sui generis to the state and peculiarly allergic to the political flavor embodied by MAGA. This, more than anything else, more even than the numerical dominance exerted by the Minneapolis/Saint Paul region, is why rural Minnesota hasn’t quite leapt to the right the way you might have expected it to, were it simply tracking similar trends in other states like Michigan and Pennsylvania. There’s always a Rochester or Duluth to keep the shifts in places just as Tim Walz’s old congressional district or the Iron Range roughly balance in a way that prevents the GOP from gaining much ground.

So, set aside the fact that 2026 is unlikely to be fertile territory for the Republicans in any event (incumbents’ midterms rarely are). Even in a good year for the GOP, it would still be an extremely heavy lift, requiring a dream candidate. Instead, given that the unelectable (but very MAGA-friendly) Royce White is the most likely Republican nominee for the Senate, you can pretty much write this seat off immediately. White — a former NBA player — is a gadfly and serial candidate who first lost a House GOP primary in 2022: he was trying to win the right to run as a sacrificial lamb against Ilhan Omar, boosting his name recognition and future earnings potential. Then he “lucked out” by securing the 2024 GOP senate nomination, and lost his 2024 race against Amy Klobuchar by a razor-thin 16 percentage points. He has said a number of fascinating things about Jews in the past, and he also has quite the shoplifting record. I’ll leave it at that.

Democrats seem eager to encourage second-district Representative Angie Craig to run for the 2026 nomination, and it makes all the sense in the world: She is blandly boring and uncontroversial, which is apparently the value most prized by Minnesota Democrats. The only thing we can safely rule out is Ilhan Omar as the Democratic nominee, even if she’s too vain to admit that she’s ruling herself out. Omar manages the neat trick of somehow being vastly less popular than the Republican or MAGA brand in Minnesota; her statewide approval rating comes in at at fiercely popular 22 percent. So, it is with regret that I tell you that Minnesota remains well out of reach for Republican ambitions, but console yourself with this: if Omar somehow squeaks out the nomination in an eight-car pileup of a primary, then even the Land of 10,000 Lakes might temporarily become “MAGA country.”