Angie Craig or Peggy Flanagan and Minnesota knows both? Who's best, i.e., more promising of representing all of us, with the more progressive agenda of the two?
Both are presently seeking to place into a position of not alienating any, or few, Minnesota voters.
Either would suffice, i.e., neither has strikes against her to be repugnant, if winning. Start there.
Angie Craig endorsees - Nancy Pelosi, Hakeem Jeffries, others. https://angiecraig.com/endorsements/
Peggy Flanagan endorsees: Liz Warren, Ed Markey, Keith Ellison, Deb Haaland, Al Franken, i.e., quality people as visibly more progressive than stiff. Others: https://peggyflanagan.com/endorsements/
No contest! To send donations by mail, as I will do:
Peggy Flanagan for Minnesota
PO Box 26023
St. Louis Park, MN 55426
BOTTOM LINE - That's where my check today is going. Angie is not a bad person. She seems fine enough - as a person. A good person. But I go with who I would expect to best represent my outlook, fiscal beliefs, Gestalt, and economic class, as well as personally being a good individual too. If Craig does win the primary, I'd support her on those grounds since she'd them be running against some actual Republican retrogressive.
But Peggy offers me the better perspective as I see it, and she's where I feel best when primary voting between the two.
..............................................................
It is hard to get progress without progressives. Neither is avidly so but the divide is clear.
___________________UPDATE ___________________
Republicans struggle to find candidate for open Minnesota U.S. Senate race
National Republican groups are trying to recruit more candidates to make it competitive, but so far their efforts have fallen flat.
--- This means the Republicans have no "winner" and are looking for a chance. Traditional Republicans such as Tim Pawlenty note that MAGA is in power -- so that the closest thing to a viable traditional Republican candidate is Angie Craig, who has support of Jeffries and Pelosi, each of whom looks like a traditional Republican, in comparison to those with anything resembling a populist-progressive orientation, an orientation most closely embodied by Flanagan's campiagn.
She's not there as I'd like, but the gulf between her and Craig is great and in her favor.
I mailed that check, and while again Craig is competent, competence being something the Republicans lack, she has Pelosi and Jeffries to show how far she is from the mark. Her career is being staked on this run, and as MinnReformer reports she's gathered more big donor love than Flanagan, but really, Peggy's the one. That report began:
Rep. Angie Craig raised $2.2 million in the third quarter for her Senate primary campaign against Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan, who brought in around $914,000 over the same period.
Ten months out from the primary, campaign finance reports released Wednesday show Craig has nearly $3 million in cash on hand to Flanagan’s $836,000.
To date, Craig has been her own biggest donor, transferring more than $650,000 from her House campaign to her Senate campaign. She’s also received more than $100,000 from Majority Fund, a political action committee affiliated with Majority Democrats, a group of centrists aiming to remake the party’s image in the wake of Donald Trump’s election.
No other individual donor or PAC has contributed more than $14,000 to Craig’s Senate primary; 92% of donations were less than $100, according to the campaign.
Flanagan, who has said she will not accept donations from corporate PACs, is relying heavily on small-dollar donors. The average contribution to her campaign was $29, and 98% of donations were under $100, according to her campaign.
Craig aligning with that "Majority Democrats" unprepossessing group seems a deal killer. For Christsakes, look at the names at https://majoritydemocrats.com/
Not one fucking progressive!! Representative of the Republican-lite nature of the thing - Elissa Slotkin,
They highlight themselves as the party for pablam - "The New Center:" Their breaking news there -
Defining a new center requires drawing from the disparate ideologies of American life. The old mapping of those ideologies onto parties no longer holds. Younger voters, in particular, are keen to hear about new combinations. For example:
- from conservatives, the respect for faith, family & the flag and the centering of personal responsibility
- from liberals, the commitment to individual freedom, rule of law, and equal opportunity
- from progressives, the conviction that equal opportunity requires a level playing field for everyone, not just one set of rules for everyone
- from libertarians, the uplifting of free minds & free enterprise and the healthy skepticism of centralized & personalized power
- from populists, the prosecution of corruption and the status quo
In other words, same old Bill and Hillary shit, where taxing the rich fairly and Medicare for All are beyond comprehension of the bunch in their bullet list.
And who needs Republican - lite? Who wants it?
They dodge the economic nitty-gritty of the ongoing class war the wealthy have always for over a centurt fought against regular people. They imply acceptance of it as the norm. So, yes, if Angie Craig somehow wins the Minnesota Dem Primary, no question, she gets every Dem general election vote, or should get them.
But the primary is the thing. There is a choice. Peggy Flanagan is not an AOC or Bernie, unfortunately, but Peggy is miles ahead of Craig in understanding the mood of the American people wanting economic justice first and foremost, and freedom from the healthcare Angst imposed by present practice.
Decency is what Flanagan stands for, and it's good to see.
Craig - not going to rock any boat, (especially the yachts, while admittedly not at all near to MAGA in gratuitous cruelty and ignorance).
_____________FURTHER UPDATE____________
HotAir, with its Republican slant, does a number on the "Majority Democrats" supersized wafle:
NYT: Younger Dems Want to 'Remake' the Party -- But How?
Gee ... I thought they already had transformed the Democrat Party? And that's precisely the problem that the 'Majority Democrats" want to avoid.
This New York Times analysis of yet another small faction emerging after the disastrous (for Dems) 2024 election skips over that to some extent. It also manages to remain ambiguous about what the Majority Democrats represent, other than a lot of butt-hurt over losing.
Are these moderates seeking to seize back the reins from the Left? Progressives trying to seize full control from the moderates? Or just people who think that maybe, just maybe, politicians should consider popular consensus rather than attempt to beat ideological agendas onto electorates?
The latter is certainly part of the new initiative, but everything else seems up for debate
[... lengthy NYT quote omitted]
And what's so extraordinary about the NYT coverage is that they never actually do lay out a case for what Democrats should stand, other than winning some elections. After all, the progressives in their coalition have spent the last two-plus decades challenging the Clinton-era moderation approach, where abortions were supposed to be "safe, legal, and rare," and when able-bodied Americans were expected to work while receiving welfare benefits. The progressives led by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez see themselves still as outsiders tilting against the Democrat establishment, as does their new poster boy Zohran Mamdani.
In fact, Mamdani is a pretty good test case for this incoherence on principles. Mamdani won an election, or at least the Democrat mayoral primary. If he does win the mayoral general election -- and right now he's the favorite, with Eric Adams and Andrew Cuomo haggling for the independents -- doesn't that match up with the only clear goal of Majority Democrats in this NYT piece? To win elections?
[...]
So will Majority Democrats emulate the DLC and pull back to the center? Apparently not:
[... NYT quote again] organizers insist there is no ideological litmus test to join (nor, despite the new-generation focus, is there an age limit; Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado, 60, is on board).
What does it mean to have "no ideological litmus test to join" when the point of the initiative is to "remake" the party based on "lay[ing] out the case for what we’re for as a party"? Reading just a bit further, the intent seems clear -- to appease the progressives and keep them from conducting purity purges:
Expanding the Democratic coalition, Mr. Talarico said, takes “some patience and some tolerance.” He added: “[...] We’ve got to be open-minded. We’ve got to be willing to join with people in a coalition that we may not share 100 percent of our policy views.”
Well, it certainly helps to avoid committing to any principles. However, what this means in practice is that Democrats don't want to "remake" the party at all from its current radical-progressive course. They just want to beg the ascendant radical-progressives for room to pretend that they can still offer some nuances, when those nuances will mean absolutely nothing when Democrats become the governing party again.
That says a lot, even while adding fantasy and mention of Marx since they are GOP propagandizing.
What the Hot Air item explicitly does is expose one giant stupendous sized waffle, tarted up as substance, and while GOP in mood, the characterization seems correct. Angie Craig went that way, and Minnesotans in the primary can decide, waffle or not.