Tom Emmer spent the week after the 2026 election telling right-wing TV audiences that something is wrong with Minnesota's elections. That is the same election that just sent him back to Congress.
On November 10, House Republicans voted 103–76 to keep Emmer as their whip. That makes him the No. 2 Republican in the new House minority. Over the next three days he did five interviews: Laura Ingraham's Fox show, Fox & Friends, Newsmax, Matt Gaetz and Benny Johnson. A group called MN-06 Watch transcribed all five, and a Minnesota Reformer commentary by Chad Maschke laid out what he said. Not one of the five was with a Minnesota outlet.
Here is what Minnesota's most powerful member of Congress told the country about his own state.
"Corrupt to the core"
On Benny Johnson's show on November 12, Emmer said: "Either fraud doesn't matter or our election process in Minnesota is corrupt to the core. I'll let you decide." Later he added: "Something's wrong with the election process in Minnesota, which I think we're going to hear more about in the future."
He gave no evidence. He did not point to one fraudulent vote. What he pointed to was who won: Attorney General Keith Ellison, Senator-elect Peggy Flanagan, and Abdi Daisane, the first Somali American legislator elected from the St. Cloud area.
On Fox, without naming him, Emmer said Daisane "was guilty of fraud." The Reformer column checked. Minnesota state court records show no criminal case against Daisane, and the reporting its writer found shows no federal charge.
Emmer's own result tells the rest of the story. He won his race by 11.5 points, down from 25 points in 2024. The system he now calls corrupt counted his votes too.
And Minnesota's elections are not some outlier. The state ranked at the top of the country in MIT's 2024 Election Performance Index, which grades how well states run elections. After every election, counties hand-count sample precincts, and the hand counts come out nearly identical to the machine totals year after year.
Emmer knows how to accept a loss when it's his party's. After Republicans lost the House in 2018, he told a Minneapolis TV station: "It is what it is. The voters have spoken." This time the voters spoke again. This time he called it corruption.
He called a charged voting stunt "brilliant"
Johnson asked Emmer about James O'Keefe, the right-wing activist who filmed himself at Minnesota polling places during the August primary. Emmer called the stunt "brilliant." His version: O'Keefe vouched for "five or six people," and "they gave them all ballots. They didn't vote."
That is not what prosecutors say happened. On October 28, Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty charged O'Keefe and Cam Higby with felony unlawful voting and identity theft. Prosecutors say the two men gave election judges the names of real registered voters without permission — names that included residents who had died, and at least one person who had voted. Both men are due in court November 16.
Whether they cast a ballot isn't the point of the case. "I think it's pretty clear they did not intend to vote. That's not the question here," Moriarty said. The charge is pretending to be someone else to get a ballot in the first place.
So the No. 2 Republican in the House looked at two men charged with felonies for impersonating Minnesota voters — some of them dead — and called it brilliant.
He wants burqas banned
Johnson asked whether Emmer would support banning burqas "here in America or at least in Minnesota."
Emmer said yes. "There should be no burqas. I'm sorry. If it covers up your identity, there should be nothing like that allowed." When it came to the religious reasons Muslim women wear them, he said: "It is pure stupidity to say, oh, well, you know, this is what they believe."
Minnesota already has a law on this. It makes it a misdemeanor to hide your identity in public with a mask or disguise — "unless based on religious beliefs". So what Emmer is really calling for is taking away a religious protection that is already written into state law, for one religion.
His reason, he said, was safety: "I want to know who the heck you are." But when Democrats demanded in February that ICE agents identify themselves, Emmer called it "intellectually inconsistent," because Democrats oppose voter ID. The Reformer's writer has asked his office whether the "who the heck you are" rule applies to federal agents. He has never gotten an answer.
Back to "get the hell out of here"
Emmer started the Johnson interview by saying: "I've got basically the Somali civil war that's come to the state of Minnesota." When Johnson listed "rampant fraud," "rampant crime" and "the humiliation of electing these Somalis" and called it "such a scar on the face of Minnesota," Emmer answered: "It really is."
He described Somali residents telling relatives elsewhere: "You're never going to believe how gullible these people are… you can rip them off until the sun comes up the next day."
Then he turned to Rep. Ilhan Omar: "She's said in the past that she's here to represent Somalia. Well, why don't you go back to Somalia?… And if you don't want to be an American, then you should just get the hell out of here."
That "represent Somalia" line comes from a bad translation of a speech Omar gave in Somali in January 2024. A USA Today fact check rated the "loyalty to Somalia" claim False — her speech was about a port deal in the Horn of Africa, not a pledge to put Somalia first. Emmer used that same bad translation back then to demand an ethics investigation. Almost three years later he is still repeating it.
This is not new for him. In June, he told a Faith & Freedom Coalition crowd that Somali immigrants who don't assimilate "should go the hell back to where they came from". In October, he said Omar — a U.S. citizen since 2000 who has never been charged with anything — should "serve time in the gray bar motel" if allegations about her family's immigration papers are proven. The post-election version is the same message, louder.
No middle ground, and no Minnesota
Ingraham asked if Democrats would work with Republicans on things like gas prices. Emmer: "They're not going to be working with us… Where are we going to find middle ground…?" In five interviews he did not name a single issue where he would look for Democratic votes.
On Newsmax he called Democrats "Marxist, socialist anarchists." On Gaetz's show he called the new Democrats "terrorist sympathizers" and told them they would "regret they ever put their name on a ballot."
Meanwhile, the Reformer's writer says he has sent dozens of questions to Emmer's office this year without one response. Emmer's office and campaign did not answer questions about these interviews either.
What the record shows
In the week after Minnesota re-elected him, Tom Emmer told national right-wing audiences that the state's election process may be "corrupt to the core," without citing one fraudulent vote. He accused a Somali American legislator of fraud that no court record shows. He called a voting stunt "brilliant" when it led to two felony charges for using other voters' names, including dead people's. He called for a burqa ban that would strip a religious protection already in Minnesota law. And he once again told Ilhan Omar to leave the country, using a translation that was rated false in 2024.
