Minnesota Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan defeated Rep. Angie Craig in Tuesday’s contentious Senate primary, handing the socialists another major victory in this year’s battle for the future of the Democrat Party
But Flanagan’s win is not a one-off result. From Minnesota to Maine to Michigan, this year’s Democrat Senate ticket is stacking up to be as radical as it’s ever been. Flanagan now joins Abdul El-Sayed and Troy Jackson in a class of candidates defined by Medicare for All, hostility toward ICE, substantial expansions of government spending, and some of the left’s most aggressive positions on cultural issues.
With Flanagan, voters don’t have to guess how she would govern or rely on her campaign slogans. She’s already shown them, and it isn’t pretty.
As Tim Walz’s right-hand woman, Flanagan oversaw a total of $9 billion in fraud, including the Feeding Our Future Scandal — a $250 million fraud scheme which federal prosecutors called “the largest pandemic relief fraud scheme charged to date.”
Meanwhile, the Walz-Flanagan administration made Minnesota a testing ground for some of the left’s most aggressive transgender issues.
Minnesota lawmakers declared the state a “trans refuge,” protecting children and families who travel to Minnesota for sex-change procedures from legal action in their home states, while a subsequent policy ensured taxpayer dollars paid for those procedures.
The administration also supported policies allowing gender-confused children to use bathrooms and locker rooms matching their preferred gender identity and fought Trump Administration efforts to keep biological males out of women’s sports, even as 80 percent of Americans support protecting women’s sports.
Also under Flanagan’s watch, rioters caused nearly $500 million in damage in the Twin Cities during the summer riots of 2020, yet Flanagan described the rioters as “people safely demonstrating.” She now wants to take the same approach to immigration enforcement, calling for ICE to be dismantled and reimagined.
Flanagan campaigns on “building a fair economy that gives people the opportunity to afford the lives they want to live.” But her tenure as lieutenant governor has been the costliest in Minnesota history. Rather than run from the chaotic policies ruling Minnesota, Democrats want to expand their reign.
Troy Jackson, a Bernie Sanders-backed socialist, wants to bring that radical chaos to Maine.
After losing the Democrat gubernatorial primary in June, Jackson was hand-picked as the Maine Senate Democrats’ nominee, following Graham Platner’s forced withdrawal in July.
Jackson has continued much of Platner’s radical platform, including embracing Medicare for All — a system that could cost up to $32 trillion over a decade and would double or triple income taxes for working Americans.
But government-run healthcare is only part of Jackson’s radical agenda.
As part of his socialist platform, Jackson is pushing plans that include enacting a Universal Basic Income, and providing universal child care and free college — plans that would cost taxpayers nearly $150 trillion.
And his record in Augusta shows he would not be shy about making taxpayers foot the bill. As president of the Maine state Senate, Jackson supported legislation that caused a $600 annual healthcare price hike and voted for energy legislation that added $234 million to ratepayers’ bills in 2025.
Back in the Midwest, Michigan Democrats nominated perhaps the most radical candidate of this year’s cycle in Abdul El-Sayed, the antisemetic Medicare for All enthusiast who has called to replace the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms with a right to healthcare.
El-Sayed’s signature campaign promise is Medicare for All and banning private insurance. He also has called to abolish ICE and has a history of supporting calls to defund the police.
El-Sayed is so radical he “hates” the very state he is campaigning to represent and works closely with Hasan Piker, who notoriously said “America deserved 9/11.”
His own comments have hardly been more reassuring. “Fireworks suck,” he said of Fourth of July celebrations in a since-deleted 2024 YouTube video. The former captain of his high school football team, El-Sayed has expressed his loathing of American football, saying it is associated with a “toxically masculine culture.”
El-Sayed’s foreign connections and radical rhetoric have generated controversy in their own right. His father-in-law is a leading member of several Muslim Brotherhood groups, including Council on American-Islamic Relations, and El-Sayed has taken campaign funding from at least 41 individuals with CAIR connections.
When Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed in February, El-Sayed refused to condemn his actions, which killed thousands of people, saying “there’s a lot of people in Dearborn who are sad today, so I just don’t want to comment on Khamenei at all.”
It is not just these three that should alarm common sense Americans. Josh Turek in Iowa and Chris Pappas in New Hampshire want to raise taxes on their voters by more than $300 per month. Roy Cooper in North Carolina has a record of letting violent criminals walk free, and Sherrod Brown in Ohio has spent decades advocating for bigger government and higher taxes.
Democrats are testing just how radically left a candidate can be and still hope to win a general election. Flanagan has a pre-existing radical governing record in Minnesota. Jackson wants to implement Sanders-style economics. El-Sayed has a record of rhetoric that should scare Americans.
November will show whether voters are willing to follow the most radical group of Democrat candidates ever.
Tayte Christensen is a published writer and investigative journalist. Her work has been featured in national publications, including Breitbart, The Washington Examiner, The Washington Reporter, Townhall, and the Daily Caller.