If you think Democrats are ridiculous, Peggy Flanagan is the woke final boss. But she’s not any Democrat looking for an office. She has been lieutenant governor since Tim Walz took office in 2019, the second name on a ticket that held the Minnesota governor’s office and one of the top officials who turned a blind eye to rampant Somali fraud. Now, she is looking to join the U.S. Senate.
On October 1, she posted an eyebrow-raising Senate ad against Michele Tafoya and promised to “fight to restore the cuts to Medicaid and SNAP,” the programs she said “saved my life as a kid.”
It wasn’t just her message that was the problem; it was her look. Oversized tan windowpane blazer and striped shirt. A red patterned scarf knotted like a cravat, baggy jeans and black sneakers. Some called it a Paula Poundstone tribute. Others said she came straight from Jeff Dunham’s ventriloquist suitcase, or that she was a character in a Wes Anderson movie. Everyone was expecting her and acknowledged the absurd wardrobe, but she didn’t. That is the tell. The candidate doesn’t know how ridiculous she looks to anyone watching the ad at home.
The outfit may be the joke. Flanagan’s record is the cautionary tale for other states staring down a Democratic trifecta.
Minnesota’s Feeding Our Future began as a COVID child-nutrition program and became a federal case. Prosecutors alleged a $250 million scheme. The Justice Department has since put the theft from that program and its vendors at at least $300 million, and a House investigation estimated $9 billion in fraud losses in Minnesota’s high-risk Medicaid programs since 2018. Most defendants in the food case came from the state’s Somali immigrant community. Walz and Flanagan were warned for years. Walz later suspended his reelection campaign with the scandal still open. Flanagan was in the room when officials were discussing the fraud. Her answer in the ad is to put the money back in the fraudsters’ hands.
The immigrant community produced a gang problem where the violence has bled into the affluent Minneapolis suburbs. Sheriff Bob Fletcher told the Star Tribune his office has identified 12 Somali gangs, about 300 young people, tied to 14 murders and more than 100 shootings over a couple of years, plus a list of more than 100 cases since 2023. Minnesota House Republicans asked the U.S. attorney to step in. The governing party spent the trifecta years treating the community as just having an image problem and called them the fabric of the state.
Flanagan beat Rep. Angie Craig, the moderate, by nearly 20 points on August 11. She told the room the many had beaten the money. The primary voters did not flinch at her record or her wardrobe. While polling suggests the race is far closer than expected, Minnesota has not elected a Republican to statewide office since 2006.
Wisconsin is facing down the possibility of electing its own Peggy Flanagan. Secretary of State Sarah Godlewski, appointed by Tony Evers after Doug La Follette quit, as a reward for dropping out of the Democrats’ 2022 U.S. Senate primary, is the Democrat nominee for lieutenant governor. She is the second name on a ticket that wants the governor’s office back and a legislature to rubber-stamp her progressive agenda. We already know she’ll screech about a thunderstorm if it fits her far-left agenda. Godlewski will make Flanagan look normal only if voters grade on wardrobe. You cannot hide the governing theory. Overspend, overtax, subsidize, scold anyone who investigates the fraud, then ask for more.
A Democratic trifecta in Minnesota set the standard: fraud on a federal scale, unfettered gang crime showing up in the suburbs, and a statewide office holder who thinks the only solution is more spending and higher taxes. Wisconsin is a few votes away from the same arrangement in the governor’s office and legislature. This election is too important to sit out. Minnesota has already shown Wisconsin the preview.
