ST. PAUL — From a young age, U.S. Sen. Tina Smith was taught to be civic-minded, but never imagined she'd be where she is now — preparing to close out two terms in Congress and 10 years in public office.
Smith moved around a lot, growing up in New Mexico, Alaska and California. Her parents were always very politically active — her dad on the school board and her mom with the League of Women Voters.
“There was kind of this ethic that there's more to being a good citizen than just keeping your sidewalk shoveled; you have to figure out what more you're going to do to contribute,” Smith said during an interview this month with Forum News Service.
Journey to Congress
When she and her husband, Archie, moved to Minnesota in 1984, Smith said she immediately became involved in grassroots politics — door knocking for state legislative races, and eventually going on to work for Planned Parenthood.
“I never had any aspiration to run for political office,” she said. “I was never like, ‘Someday, you know, I’m going to work hard and I’m going to do everything right, and maybe someday I can be in the United States Senate.’ I never thought that.”
In 2005, after R.T. Rybak won his second term as Minneapolis mayor, Smith was recruited to serve as his chief of staff. In 2010, when Rybak’s bid for governor was unsuccessful, his opponent Mark Dayton asked Smith to stay on as chief of staff.
“Being the chief of staff to the governor was like being the chief operating officer for the state of Minnesota,” she said. “I thought it was so interesting to figure out how to make that big, unwieldy bureaucracy work as well as possible and really deliver results.”
Come 2014, Smith said she still wasn't considering running for public office. When Dayton asked her to run as his lieutenant governor, she said she laughed and walked out of the room. But as time went on, she said it began to make sense to her, and she accepted the position of lieutenant governor in 2015.
When former Sen. Al Franken resigned in 2018, Dayton approached Lt. Gov. Smith to fill the role. Smith said she had roughly 72 hours to mull the decision.
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“After I kind of got used to the idea, and I felt that I really needed to do it,” Smith said, adding that she had an hour and a half to find an apartment in D.C. “It was a bit like jumping off the deep end of the swimming pool.”
Smith accepted the appointment and started campaigning for the 2018 special election that would determine who served the rest of Franken's term. Smith said that at one point, she had considered running for governor in 2018, but that she would have been running against now-Gov. Tim Walz.
Smith won the 2018 special election with 53% of the vote and has since served as one of Minnesota’s two senators in D.C. She won re-election in 2020 with 48% of the vote.
Then it was time to consider running for re-election in 2026.
Deciding against 2026
Smith said that in a normal job, people usually think about the next two or so years, but for the Senate, she was thinking about the next eight years — two for campaigning and six for her next term. She said that if she was re-elected in 2026, she would be 74 at the end of her term.
“74 doesn't feel like it's ancient, but it's not 54 or 44 and there are other things I want to do in my life,” Smith said. “It's a bit of a cliche, when politicians decide not to run and they say, ‘Oh, I want to spend more time with my family,’ but I actually really like my family, and I really do want to spend time with them. I'm a grandmother. We didn't have any grandchildren when I started in the Senate. Now we have four. My father will be turning 95 this year.”
Smith said she knew she'd have to let people know in early 2025 to leave enough time for campaigning. As she talked with her family more, she decided she was "ready to move to the side," and announced to the public mid-February that she wouldn't be seeking re-election.
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"If I wasn't going to run, I wanted to make sure that I left plenty of time for my Democratic colleagues to be able to mount and win a successful campaign," she said.
Smith said she decided not to endorse a candidate for her seat, but added that she isn’t "indispensable" as a senator and that there is “incredible talent" positioned for a congressional run.
As she looks back on her time in office, Smith said she’s particularly proud of her work on the Inflation Reduction Act, clean energy, mental health care, lowering prescription drug costs and making Juneteenth a federal holiday. She said the greatest honor during her time in the Senate was feeling like “Minnesotans invited me into their living rooms.”
“I hope that when people look at my time in the Senate, they will think that I was able to get stuff done ... that I wasn't just a talker, but that I was a doer,” she said. “And I also think, over these next less than two years left in the Senate, that they will see that I was not afraid to speak out loudly and clearly and strongly, and I wasn't afraid to make a little trouble in order to keep our country a democracy.”
Smith said she can’t imagine running for a different public office, but that she has “huge wells” of energy for trying to make her community better, potentially through grassroots organizing.
“I don't know what shape that's going to take,” she said. “I am committed to giving myself a little bit of a break … and I’m really looking forward to that,” something she said she hasn’t truly had since 2010.
Smith said that not having to campaign over the last two months has allowed her to put that energy elsewhere. She said there have been many "traumatic" moments for the country so far in 2025 and that she's grateful she doesn't have campaigning to take up her time.
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“I thought to myself, ‘I wouldn't be able to do what I'm doing right this minute if I were running,’ ” she said.
Working the physical and virtual earth
Smith said she’s “kind of a putterer” in her free time, something she'll have a lot more of after she officially leaves office in January 2027.
She said she likes to garden, hike, snowshoe and bird watch. She’s not so good at sitting around, she said, with one exception: computer games.
The senator said her favorite game right now is called “Terra Nil.” A computer game that tasks players with restoring a polluted wasteland. She said it’s a good “mental break.”
“I find these really obscure games … this game is, this is … very telling,” she said. “The whole purpose of the game is that you go into this wasteland. There's nothing living, there's no animals, there's no plants, and you have to restore it. In like, 45 minutes, I can completely heal this world.”
Smith was showing her son, Sam, the game one day, and when they finished restoring the planet, he asked her, “Where are the people?”
“I said, ‘Oh, there are no people, just me and the animals, just how I like it. I got plenty of people in my real life,’ ” Smith said.
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