Corporate Dem Angie Craig outspent Flanagan by roughly four to one. But Flanagan’s ground game, and her promise to “avenge Minnesota” after ICE’s cruelty, gave her a 20-point win.
“When we work together, when we organize together, and when we fight together, we are unstoppable,” Minnesota Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan told an ecstatic crowd Tuesday night, after she crushed her centrist, crafty, monied opponent Representative Angie Craig. But there was no talk of crushing anybody Tuesday; she graciously welcomed Craig’s support.
“To everyone who voted for Angie, I appreciate that you made your voice heard,” said Flanagan. “But know this, I will bust my tail to earn your votes and most importantly, your trust. I need you in this fight. Minnesota needs you in this fight.” Craig had called Flanagan to congratulate her fairly early, in an evening when it was clear from the very first votes that the progressive lieutenant governor had the edge. “Peggy’s story is one of grit, of determination and resolve.” Craig said in a speech. “To every person that supported me, I ask you tonight to support and elect Peggy Flanagan.”
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The White Earth–Ojibwe and Irish Catholic activist ran a campaign progressives everywhere can learn from. She had hundreds of volunteers who knocked on 200,000 doors, including 66,000 just to get out the vote in recent weeks. “That’s bananas,” Flanagan comments, “and the largest number of volunteers ever turned out in August.” Her campaign hosted events big and small all over the state, and in June she won the Democratic-Farmer-Labor party nomination by acclamation. She cruised to victory in large part because of her early, angry opposition to former Customs and Border Patrol head Greg Bovino’s brownshirt occupation of Minneapolis, her city. Craig never recovered from her 2025 vote for the Laken Riley Act, which liberated ICE to hunt down undocumented immigrants for even nonviolent crimes. Flanagan and her supporters grabbed the issue, and Craig refused to apologize for her vote until March, when it was too late.
This spring, Flanagan told me she wanted to “avenge Minnesota.” It turned out to be a winning message; I saw it on posters and T-shirts. Minneapolis was still a haunted, hurting place when I visited, with memorials to the murdered Renée Good and Alex Pretti still getting visitors 24 hours a day, and exhausted neighbors, who provided mutual aid to undocumented Minnesotans ranging from hot meals to childbirth help for pregnant immigrants who were afraid to seek hospital care, still fighting ICE.
To spend time with Flanagan is to spend time with her late mother, Pat, a renowned DFL activist, and with her late father, Marvin Manypenny, a revered Ojibwe leader, who fought both US leaders and tribal elders he thought weren’t doing enough to recover his people’s land rights. She is an extraordinary combination of the two. A devout Catholic, who went to see Beyoncé and Lady Gaga with her beloved pastor Father Dale Korogi, she embodies the American story in a way I hadn’t quite encountered before.
Early in her career, a colleague inadvertently embarrassed Flanagan, briefly, for growing up relying on government programs. But Flanagan quickly embraced her identity as “the girl with the different colored lunch ticket,” proof that she got free school lunch, and it’s driven her career in the years since. She ran her Senate campaign for girls and boys like her, and for women like her single mother, who eventually went back to college so she could lift her daughter into the middle class. And soon, into the United States Senate, where she would be the very first Native woman to serve (although she might be joined by Alaska Democrat Mary Peltola).
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Flanagan attributes her win to her army of volunteers, and to the fact that in Minnesota, “elections can’t be bought. It’s an election, not an auction,” she told me on the phone Wednesday morning.
Apart from her volunteers, Flanagan assembled a group of national backers that gave her campaign a backbeat of joy and fun. I’d watch videos of Representative Ilhan Omar, Attorney General Keith Elllison, Senators Tina Smith and Elizabeth Warren, along with Flanagan, rambling along the streets of Minnesota, laughing and joking, and I felt like I was watching some kind of John Hughes movie for grown-ups. Senator Bernie Sanders was another regular. He scared the bejesus out of me last weekend when he told CBS’s Face The Nation he wasn’t sure Flanagan could beat Craig. One friend told me he was legitimately horrified at the money coming Craig’s way; another said the unexpectedly close results in Michigan, where Abdul el-Sayed had a huge lead in pre-election polls but only narrowly beat Representative Haley Stevens, also rattled Sanders. However anxious he felt, he worked his heart out for Flanagan, there is clear affection between them, and she will be a powerful ally to him and Warren when she gets to Washington.
Speaking of Haley Stevens, as well as Angie Craig, I’d like to put them in charge of Third Way, the money-hungry centrist group that has declared war on the Democratic Party’s left. Third Way is still running this war even though centrists in Michigan and Minnesota immediately closed ranks behind the left-wing victors in their senate primaries. In Wisconsin, Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley came from behind to defeat democratic socialist candidate Francesca Hong in the Democratic governor’s primary; like Stevens and Craig, Hong immediately backed her opponent, in this case a centrist. I’d like to find Hong a place at Third Way too, if she’s willing. (Wednesday morning, Crowley told a press conference that he and Hong would campaign together as a “unity tour.”)
“Well, I have to agree with you, Joan,” Flanagan told me, about the importance of Craig’s quick endorsement. “Congresswoman Craig was incredibly thoughtful and gracious in her speech last night, and we had a lovely conversation as well. And I think that just speaks to the fact that she understands the assignment. That assignment is to make sure that we do not send another loyal soldier to Donald Trump.”
Flanagan will face former NFL commentator Michele Tafoya, the Republican nominee, in November. “Michele Tafoya was all in with Trump when ICE was terrorizing our neighbors,” Flanagan said Tuesday night. “The last thing this country needs is to give Donald Trump another ‘yes, sir’ senator.” Tafoya is promising to campaign against the fraud issues that beset Minnesota in the wake of Covid relief funding (which both President Joe Biden and Governor Tim Walz have dealt with, albeit incompletely). It’s preposterous to blame the state’s lieutenant governor, but to be honest, Craig tried, and we can see how well it worked.
Minnesota hasn’t elected a Republican to the Senate since 2002, the year the great progressive Senator Paul Wellstone, one of Flanagan’s mentors, died in a plane crash on the eve of an election he would have won easily. National Republicans have more easily achievable wins than the Minnesota Senate race, so we’ll see how much money they shake loose for Tafoya.
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For her part, Flanagan thinks they’ll shake loose plenty. “Candidly, I think we’re gonna continue to run an organizing campaign the way that we have from the very beginning, because corporate special interests are gonna support Michelle Tafoya. MAGA billionaires have their candidate in this race, it’s Michelle Tafoya.” But Flanagan also notes the incredible Democratic turnout Tuesday night. She alone got more votes than all the Republican Senate primary candidates put together.
“We need to continue to hustle,” she says, “but I am confident that we can keep this seat.”
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