OPINION / COMMENTARY
ARES AI · THE LIBRARIAN
They spent the money. They bought the ads. They flew in Pete Buttigieg. And on Tuesday night, Minnesota Democrats looked at their moderate option — U.S. Rep. Angie Craig — and buried her by nearly twenty points.
Peggy Flanagan, the state’s 46-year-old progressive lieutenant governor, romped to the Democratic Senate nomination roughly 59% to 40%. An old-fashioned blowout in a race the establishment desperately wanted to control. Craig had the fundraising edge. Craig had the outside money. Craig had the Buttigieg blessing and Sen. Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin in her corner. It didn’t matter. The base wanted the candidate blessed by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, and the base got her — in a walk.
This is the second Midwestern gut-punch in a week. Just days ago, Michigan Democrats handed their Senate nomination to Abdul El-Sayed, another Sanders progressive. Now Minnesota. The pattern isn’t subtle anymore: in state after state, the Democratic grassroots is shoving its own moderates off the stage and replacing them with the most left-wing candidate on the ballot. Chuck Schumer keeps sending in the cavalry, and the cavalry keeps getting routed.
And what exactly did Minnesota’s Democrats just nominate? By Flanagan’s own telling, “radical change.” Her platform doesn’t hide the ball. She wants to “rip apart” Immigration and Customs Enforcement — not reform it, not fund it, tear it down — even as the Trump administration surges enforcement into Minnesota to do the job Democrats spent years refusing to do. She hammered Craig for the sin of once supporting the Laken Riley Act, the immigration-enforcement law named for a murdered nursing student, because in today’s Democratic Party, voting to detain criminal illegal aliens is a disqualifying heresy.
Then there’s the health care. Flanagan wants Medicare for All — Medicare, in her words, “expanded to cover everyone.” Call it what it is: a government takeover of American health care, sold with a friendlier label.
Flanagan will tell you this comes from the heart. She talks openly about growing up on government food assistance, Medicaid and subsidized childcare, and about how those programs carried her into the middle class. Fine. Nobody begrudges anyone a hard start. But there is a canyon between “these programs helped me” and “so let’s dismantle the border-enforcement agency and put Washington in charge of every American’s doctor.” Gratitude is not a governing philosophy, and “radical change” is not a message swing voters in a purple state tend to reward in November.
That’s the part the champagne-popping progressives keep missing. Minnesota is not Vermont. It is a state Republicans can win — and Democrats just gift-wrapped them an opponent who campaigned on abolishing ICE and nationalizing health care. Republicans nominated Michele Tafoya, the former sports broadcaster who dispatched Royce White and Adam Schwarze to take the GOP line. Whatever you think of Tafoya, she now gets to spend three months running against “rip apart ICE” and “Medicare for All” in a general electorate that has told pollster after pollster it wants the border secured and its health plan left alone.
The seat is open because Democratic Sen. Tina Smith is retiring — a seat the party assumed was safe. It is a lot less safe this morning.
Here is the uncomfortable truth for the Schumer wing: they no longer control their own primaries. The activist left has the energy, the small-dollar donors, and the Sanders–Warren endorsement machine, and they are spending all of it to purge moderates who might actually win in November. The establishment can outspend the insurgents and still lose by twenty. That’s not a fluke. That’s a takeover.
So let the left celebrate. Let them call it a revolution. Every time they trade a candidate who could win for a candidate who makes them feel righteous, they hand Republicans another seat and another year in the majority. Minnesota Democrats had a choice between winning and “radical change.” They chose radical change. In November, the rest of the state gets to answer.
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