I’m starting to wonder if “Republican strategists” aren’t really just Democrat strategists who couldn’t find work on the left. I kid. I’m not starting to wonder. I’ve wondered this for a long time.

The latest unforced error that has me pondering this question once again is a campaign ad which makes it clear that Republican Senate candidate Michele Tafoya is pro-choice. The ad also distances Tafoya from Trump. The race pits the media-savvy political outsider against leftist nut job Peggy Flanagan.

According to the RealClearPolitics polling average, Flanagan maintains such a slight edge over Tafoya that it’s largely within the margin of error. Given historical patterns, since most polls are designed to favor Democrats, you have to feel encouraged for Tafoya going deeper into October.

Keep in mind that Flanagan, the state’s current lieutenant governor, has the support of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), and she’s so far to the left, she makes the state's Gov. Tim Walz look like a normal person. Pick any issue, and she’s about as far left on it as you can get.

Tafoya, who made a name for herself as a network football broadcaster, made a splash in Minnesota politics this year by following the same template President Donald Trump has followed, particularly in 2024 – she talked common sense. To establish contrast between herself and Flanagan, really, that’s all she ever had to do. Flanagan talks like a clown, dresses like a clown, and reasons like a clown.

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A good Republican strategist might have told Tafoya that going into the home stretch, the best approach would be to “Keep doing what you’re doing.”

But that’s not what her team told her to do. Instead, the “strategists” decided to deviate from a winning strategy and made some possibly fatal assumptions. They told her to make an ad that distances her from the president and MAGA, and to take a strong stand on an issue that no one was really talking about in Minnesota. She could have finished the campaign without this ad. I’m going to venture a guess on what they assumed when they advised Tafoya to do it.

They likely figured that the Republican base isn’t going anywhere, and that Tafoya has little to lose, but she can pick up votes among Independents and some Democrats who are discouraged by what they see in their state’s Democrat leadership right now. Further, and this is speculation on my part, they may even think that Minnesota is no different than a Maine or Alaska, and that in order for Tafoya to win in Minnesota, she has to be more like a Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), or Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska). Both of those senators have driven conservatives crazy with their unreliability on a number of issues, particularly the abortion one.

Tafoya’s team may even have research that told them this, but I’d contend they’re reading the research wrong. Until this point, the abortion issue was not the one that was going to decide this race. If you’re going to seek to draw a contrast between Tafoya and Flanagan, there are a number of issues that cut across party lines that would give Tafoya the edge. Voter ID, immigration, tariffs, and inflation, energy policy, crime and corruption. Did I mention the massive amounts of waste, fraud, and corruption in Minnesota?

So what does the Tafoya campaign do? They decide to try to out-Democrat a Democrat. They go to the consistently losing strategy of turning the whole tone of the campaign on its head. Tafoya is now Republican-lite. Worse, she’s decided that her bid for senator would die on a hill that no one was fighting over – the abortion issue.

If you’re a Republican strategist and you have any sense of history, and you know how to read a room, you’ll know that pro-lifers, and I’m one of them, see abortion as the murder of an innocent unborn baby. It doesn’t matter the age – 10 weeks, 24 weeks, 9 months – it’s all still a human life. It doesn’t matter whether the mother is a teenager or whether she was raped; that doesn’t change the fact that that unborn baby is still deserving of life, and it’s not for any human being to extinguish that life.

People who feel this way are a huge chunk of the Republican base in every state, including Minnesota.

Tafoya’s campaign team is likely correct in that conservatives will not vote for Flanagan. But they make the mistake of assuming the choice is binary – Flanagan or Tafoya. But there’s a third choice.

It’s the one conservatives exercise every time some RINO campaign strategist pushes the pro-abortion stance: they stay home. They don’t vote. They can’t vote for a pro-choice Republican. To them, that’s almost as bad as voting for an unapologetically pro-abortion Flanagan.

Why? Because they feel that the commonsense Republican should know better, and when she exhibits such a lack of self-awareness and a lack of understanding of her own base, she loses their confidence. They’re disgusted, they’re angry, they’re disenfranchised. All because some “Republican strategist” assumed that the base has no choice and will still vote for their candidate. On many issues, this may be true, but not on the abortion issue.

If you want to see the ad, here it is.

If I lived in Minnesota, I’d still vote for Tafoya. I’d hold my nose, so to speak, and vote for her. I’ve done this more times than I can think of in my own state of Pennsylvania. But I don’t like it. Sadly, the Tafoya campaign’s strategic error could amount to a self-inflicted wound that puts the campaign in a bind.

The only positive is that the campaign still has a few weeks to try to make amends with the voters it just alienated.