Peggy Flanagan Is Running for the Senate to “Avenge Minnesota” |
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Peggy Flanagan Is Running for the Senate to “Avenge Minnesota”
The lieutenant governor of the state is ramping up her Democratic Senate primary campaign as her state battles Trump’s brutal assault.
Minneapolis—In 2013, Minnesota Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan was the 34-year-old director of the state chapter of the Children’s Defense Fund. That year, she and the nonprofit’s partners met to discuss strategies for the upcoming legislative session. One question was whether to prioritize funding for the state’s early-learning scholarships, which usually paid for half-day preschool programs, or for its Child Care Assistance Program (CCAP), which provides financial assistance for families for use in daycare programs. Flanagan, who is now running in Minnesota’s US Senate primary to replace retiring Democrat Tina Smith, took the firm position that children’s advocates had to back both.
“Even if you have an early-learning scholarship and your kid can go to preschool, they still need childcare while their parent is at work, right?” she tells me over dinner at Hai Hai, one of her favorite Southeast Asian restaurants in Northeast Minneapolis. “It was very controversial at the time. Now it’s common sense.”
The meeting included community groups and local foundation leaders. “A high-powered lobbyist said to me, ‘Well, Peggy, let’s be honest. People would rather have an early-learning scholarship than CCAP because CCAP is welfare, and people on welfare feel like losers,’” she recalls. “I didn’t know what to do other than say, ‘Time out. You know, my mom used the childcare-assistance program. She used it to go back to school and to get a better-paying job. You know what she didn’t feel like? A loser. She felt like a good mom.’
“And I stood up and walked out of the room,” Flanagan continues, nearly tearing up at the memory 13 years later.
When she returned, the lobbyist apologized. Flanagan told her, “If you want to just focus on early-learning scholarships, it’s absolutely your choice. We are clear that making sure that low-income families have access to childcare is our priority. So we’ll see you at the capital.” Both CCAP and the early-learning scholarships were funded, as they are to this day.
Flanagan’s mother, Pat, who was prominent in local Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party politics, didn’t just receive childcare assistance. After she separated from Flanagan’s father, the renowned White Earth Ojibwe leader Marvin Manypenny, the family relied on a number of government support programs: the Minnesota family-assistance program, food stamps, Medicaid, and Section 8 housing vouchers. Flanagan recalls carrying home boxes of government cheese under her arm “like a football.” To this day, she describes herself as “the girl with the different-colored school-lunch ticket,” proof that she qualified for free lunches.
That conversation with the lobbyist, Flanagan recalls, represented a turning point. “That was the moment where I fully stepped into: ‘I was a kid who grew up on public programs. I am here because of them and not in spite of them, and I will be unashamed that that is part of my identity.’ That has now completely informed how I do policy work, how I try to show up.”
In the years since, that staunch defense of public programs has won her the unflagging support of women like Kris Erickson, a nurse in rural Brainerd caring for her 14-year-old son, Bentley, who lives with hydrocephalus, among other disabilities. Bentley has health insurance through Medicaid, which pays for the specialized medical devices and therapies he needs, but the family is on its own for his daily care. Erickson spoke at Flanagan’s rally last August, after Republicans cut Medicaid in the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act. “One of the things I really admire about Peggy is she has lived experience with Medicaid usage. So she truly understands from within how important that is,” Erickson says.
The working-class Flanagan would be the first Native woman elected to the US Senate, though she faces a competitive primary race with Representative Angie Craig in August. Flanagan’s many years as an activist, which predate her elected work, place her solidly in the state’s progressive tradition, as she’s fought for a higher minimum wage, more childcare funding, abortion protection, a broader social-safety net, rights for Indigenous Minnesotans, and the protection of Minnesota’s large and well-integrated immigrant community. The Twin Cities’ “No Kings” protest, held at the capitol in St. Paul on March 28, was named by national organizers as the flagship event of the day’s thousands of demonstrations, and Flanagan was a keynote speaker.
Addressing a crowd of 200,000, she turned to her Ojibwe heritage, as a member of the Wolf Clan, to explain Minnesota’s resilience: “The role of our clan is to insure that we leave no one behind. You have been showing what it means to leave no one behind.”
The state will have a reliable liberal voice in the Senate if Craig prevails; it will have a battle-tested progressive warrior if Flanagan does. Minnesota Attorney General (and Flanagan friend) Keith Ellison says, “I think she’s the change agent we need right now.”
Itraveled to Minneapolis to meet Flanagan in late February, as the city was still reeling from Operation Metro Surge, the Department of Homeland Security’s aggressive deployment of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection agents to arrest and detain undocumented immigrants in the state. I arrived a month after the murders of the poet and mother Renée Nicole Good and the nurse Alex Pretti at the hands of ICE and CPB agents. The beleaguered city felt like a sacred site of profound grief and trauma. Day and night, there were visitors to the memorials that residents had erected to Good and Pretti.
Flanagan reminded me that the siege of Minneapolis didn’t begin with Operation Metro Surge. In many ways, it goes back to the murder of George Floyd in 2020 and the weeks of protest that followed—Floyd was killed just blocks from where Good was murdered, and within two miles of Pretti’s fatal shooting. In the wake of the unrest in 2020, Minnesota officials had initially resisted President Donald Trump’s demands to call in the National Guard, but as the arson and destruction spread, Governor Tim Walz succumbed, and his call to the National Guard represented its largest deployment since World War II. Then in June 2025 came the fatal shootings of Democratic state House Speaker Emerita Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark, and the mortal wounding of their dog, by an assassin who also had Flanagan’s name on his hit list.
Organizing to resist the coming assault by ICE began in January and February of 2025. A first meeting to train “raid responders,” sponsored by Unidos MN, an immigrant advocacy group, was expected to gather 150 people, Flanagan says; 1,500 showed up. Some 30,000 people have been trained since. It’s been clear from the start of Operation Metro Surge that the administration wanted to trigger violence on the part of the protesters, which would have allowed Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act and let his personal army go wild. Minnesotans never gave him the excuse.
Over dinner in late February, I ask Flanagan whether the administration’s recent announcement that it would “draw down” federal immigration agents felt like........