File this under "Too Good To Fact Check" if you'd like. As an urban conservative in Minnesota, I'm used to having that same feeling Charlie Brown gets that split second after Lucy pulls the ball away yet again.
But if I didn't believe in miracles, I couldn't be an urban conservative in Minnesota, now, could I?
Anyway — while Republicans nationwide sweat out an early autumn of ominous polling from the Texas senate race among others, there is at least the whiff of a hint of a possibility of an upset brewing in, on its face, the unlikeliest of places.
According to Real Clear Politics average, shows sitting Democrat Farmer Lsbor (DFL) Lieutenant Govenror Peggy Flanagan running ahead of TV sportscaster Michele Tafoya by a sliver of the margin of error. With polls tightening up over the past month.
Now, Flanagan isn't especially well-known even in Minnesota. She was a Minnesota House Representative with the most left-leaning voting record in the House when she was selected as Tim Walz's running mate after Walz lost the DFL endorsement at the convention to a pair of even more radical DFL candidates. Flanagan was a sop to what passed for the "Far Left" of the Minnesota DFL at what seems, today, to be a simpler, more innocent time, before the DSA and metro DFL became straight-up synonyms.
But while Flanagan is no longer the bleeding edge of progressivism in Minnesota, it's not for lack of effort; she allegedly participated in the online network that sent flocks of Minnesota "theater kids" racing to wherever ICE was this past winter:
Peggy Flanagan was allegedly on Signal chats (she later got off that platform) encouraging violent, radical communists to attack cops in Minnesota. She even told people to "put your bodies on the line" against ICE (two of them did, attacking cops and died doing so). We have an… https://t.co/pprBnG0VYC
— The Real GOP 🇺🇸 (@TheRealGOP) June 3, 2026
But, #unexpectedly, that sort of thing just doesn't get much coverage from the Minnesota media:
A huge upshot of this blatant bias is that Peggy Flanagan, a certified leftist lunatic, has all but avoided national scrutiny. I don’t think that’s an accident. https://t.co/PlbeifA1uz pic.twitter.com/xA4o9vZse0
— David Marcus (@BlueBoxDave) September 27, 2026
But Flanagan isn't running for a House seat in south Minneapolis (unofficial nickname: "Portland on the Mississippi") anymore. She's trying to run for US Senate in a state that, riots and Walz and theater kids protesting ICE notwithstanding is nearly mathematically "purple"., with a four Republicans and four DFLs in the House delegation and a legislature that is almost perfectly tied.
So she's focused a little more on being just like the rest of us:
My mom worked hard, but we needed help from programs like SNAP and Medicaid to get by. Now, Donald Trump is gutting the same programs that saved my life.
— Peggy Flanagan (@peggyflanagan) September 21, 2026
I'll never forget where I came from - and I won't stop fighting until we restore the cuts from the Big, Ugly Bill. pic.twitter.com/dygRC4FfM0
And Flanagan has come a long way from those straitened circumstances:
Flanagan has between $990,000 and $2.7 million in assets, according to her financial disclosure, putting her near or in the top 10% of American households.
Which is, it's fair to point out, a fraction of what Tafoya's disclosures show — but then, Tafoya has been a no bones about it network sports celebrity for a couple of decades, and her husband's no slouch at the bottom line either.
Thing is, though, that Peggy Flanagan has been a public employee her entire life:
Flanagan reported making $129,000 from the state of Minnesota last year as lieutenant governor. Flanagan and her husband, Tom Weber {a former Minnesota Public Radio reporter, and yes, they did start dating when she was the sitting Lieutenant Governor and Weber was in the Capitol press pool), bought a home in St. Louis Park for $447,500 in 2023, according to county property records.
House members in Minnesota at that time made in the low $30,000s; before that, Flanagan was on the Minneapolis School Board and worked as a "community organizer".
So — she started humble, is now well into the to 10 percent of incomes. What came in between?
If only Minnesota had an institution, perhaps with printing presses and transmitters, whose job it was to answer those questions.
