Adam Schwarze, a retired Navy SEAL running for the open U.S. Senate seat in Minnesota, celebrated winning the GOP’s endorsement over sports broadcaster Michele Tafoya and blasted Washington, D.C.’s “elite establishment class” in an exclusive interview on Breitbart News Saturday.
Speaking with Breitbart News Washington bureau chief Matthew Boyle, Schwarze said that beating Tafoya at Friday’s Minnesota Republican Party convention means he is a shoo-in to win the primary election in August before facing off in the general election to replace Sen. Tina Smith (D-MN).
“The grassroots in Minnesota are undefeated,” Schwarze said. “In the history of the Minnesota Republican Party — zero, never, zilch — it’s never happened where the grassroots MNGOP-endorsed candidate by we the people has lost in a primary, and 2026 is going to be no different.”
Schwarze won the party’s endorsement with 1132 votes, or 62.6 percent of the vote, over Tafoya’s 575 votes, or 31.8 percent.
“There’s kind of a resurgence of this anti-establishment-bought-and-paid-for D.C. class this midterm cycle, and I think it’s great to see that we the people are taking back our nation now down the ballot,” the candidate continued.
Incumbent Sens. John Cornyn (R-TX) and Bill Cassidy (R-LA) both lost on their primary nights to Republicans endorsed by President Donald Trump.
Highlighting how high-stakes this election is due to the possibility of Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) winning her gubernatorial campaign and being able to appoint someone of her choice to her own senate seat, Schwarze said Klobuchar would choose either Gov. Tim Walz (D) or Rep. Angie Craig (D-MN).
“There’s a lot riding on this election cycle in Minnesota,” Schwarze told Boyle, before calling the likely Democrat nominee Lt. Gov. Penny Flanagan (D) a “socialist Marxist.”
“She is the most radical person in government across the nation,” he continued of Flanagan, citing her support for Minnesota becoming a “transgender sanctuary state” that allows for “body mutilation for minors without parental consent.”
Schwarze, who enlisted in the United States Marine Corps on his 18th birthday three weeks after the attacks on September 11, 2001, went on to argue that he is the best candidate to take on the “Washington elite establishment class” that is “no longer serving the American people.”
“I think that’s really on both sides of the aisle,” he said. “Frankly, we are not electing people that represent our values anymore. We’re getting too cavalier with who we send up there. We’re just sending name ID candidates or people that can write big checks. We’re not really doing our vetting to send principled people who care about what our founding fathers stood for.”
The last time a Republican president won Minnesota was Richard Nixon in 1972, Boyle noted.
While Tafoya lost the GOP’s endorsement, she announced on social media that she still intends to run in the August Republican primary:
Olivia Rondeau is a politics reporter for Breitbart News based in Washington, DC. Find her on X/Twitter and Instagram.
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