MINNEAPOLIS — The crowd at First Avenue in downtown Minneapolis was still swelling past midnight when Peggy Flanagan stepped onto the same stage where Bob Dylan played his first concert and said the thing they had come to hear. “For months now, I have been telling you that this campaign was about the many versus the money,” she told them. “Well guess what? The many just won.”
With 58.8 percent of the vote, the 46-year-old lieutenant governor defeated centrist Representative Angie Craig in Minnesota’s Democratic Senate primary on Tuesday, NPR reported, ending the most expensive primary in state history. If she wins the Senate seat in November, Flanagan will become the first Native American woman elected to the United States Senate.
Flanagan is a member of the White Earth Band of Ojibwe. Her campaign drew directly on that identity and on a biography shaped by government assistance programs, food aid, Medicaid, and childcare subsidies in her childhood, as testimony against the direction the Trump administration has taken American domestic policy. In August, the administration finalized a rule barring Medicaid funding for transgender youth, a policy medical organizations called a denial of evidence-based care and one that reinforced Flanagan’s argument about who the federal government under Trump is and is not protecting.
The arithmetic of the primary was unambiguous. Craig, a congresswoman with long-standing institutional backing and the endorsements of Pete Buttigieg and Senator Tammy Baldwin, ran with roughly $20 million through her campaign and allied super PACs. Flanagan and her allies spent $4.7 million. The spending gap was four to one. It did not matter.
What animated the race in its final weeks was not any single policy difference but a question about where Democratic money comes from and what it requires in return. AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, did not formally endorse Craig in the Senate race, but Craig had accepted more than $550,000 from the organization in her previous congressional campaigns, and AIPAC-aligned fundraisers and donor networks worked quietly on her behalf throughout the primary. Flanagan attacked those ties relentlessly, arguing that Craig’s willingness to take pro-Israel PAC money compromised her ability to press for a ceasefire in Gaza, where Israeli strikes continue to target civilian infrastructure across Lebanon and where what international courts and dozens of rights organizations have classified as a genocide is ongoing.
The Gaza dimension was not abstract in Minnesota, which has a large Somali-American community in the Twin Cities that has pushed elected officials to break with AIPAC-aligned incumbents with unusual directness. Craig’s vote for the Laken Riley Act, an immigration enforcement bill passed in the early weeks of Trump’s second term, added a separate grievance. Flanagan’s call for dismantling Immigration and Customs Enforcement entirely made the contrast as sharp as a primary rivalry could get.
There was one wrinkle Craig’s campaign tried to weaponize. Reporting in the final stretch revealed that Flanagan had submitted an Israel position paper to AIPAC consultants, a document they said suggested she was seeking to work with the organization’s donor network rather than against it. Flanagan disputed that characterization. The consultants maintained they had been encouraged to believe she was reachable. The episode did not appear to move votes, but it left behind a question the general election is unlikely to resolve: what Flanagan’s actual posture toward AIPAC will be when she is a senator rather than a candidate.
Senators Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts campaigned for Flanagan, and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez endorsed her in the race’s final weeks. The same progressive networks that have backed challengers to AIPAC-linked incumbents in Michigan, Illinois, and New York deployed here, contributing to what Craig’s allies described as a coordinated national infrastructure operating against a locally anchored moderate. HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had separately frozen over $1 billion in Medicaid reimbursements to California and Minnesota earlier this year, a move that became a live issue in a state where Flanagan had spent a decade building a political identity around the promise of government health and social programs.
On the Republican side, Michele Tafoya, a former NBC Sports sideline reporter who has embraced Trump-aligned conservatism, won the GOP primary with 51.9 percent, NBC News reported. She raised $2.6 million on a platform of government accountability, border security, and inflation. The November matchup will set a candidate who built her coalition against corporate Democratic money against one who built hers on the cultural grievances that have made Trump-era Republicans competitive in states they historically lost. Minnesota has not elected a Republican to the Senate since 1978.
What Flanagan’s primary victory does not resolve is whether her positioning holds against a general electorate considerably larger and less ideologically uniform than Tuesday’s Democratic primary field. Medicare for All and ICE abolition poll well inside progressive circles and less well outside them. Tafoya, who has a media profile that extends beyond Minnesota and the backing of Trump’s political infrastructure, will test that gap starting Wednesday morning. Flanagan won by telling her supporters the many had beaten the money. Whether that holds through November is the question her campaign has not yet had to answer.
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