On a Saturday night in a Duluth gymnasium, a crowd that came ready to make noise got exactly what it bargained for. Peggy Flanagan, the Democratic candidate for Minnesota’s open Senate seat, opened the evening by greeting a rowdy room with a grin and a nod to the state’s top lawyer. “Well, don’t we have the best attorney general in the country?” she asked, drawing the first of many ovations. What followed was less a standard campaign stop than a sustained indictment — of Donald Trump, of his administration, and of the Republican opponent Flanagan says is running to stand behind him rather than stand up to him.
The setting mattered. Duluth is a labor town, a port town, a place where generations of working people have organized for what they have. Flanagan leaned into that identity early, invoking the docks, the ships, the trades, and the hospitals, and she wove in the Native organizers of the region with the same ease. Her Ojibwe name, she told the crowd, means “speaks in a loud and clear voice” — and no one in the room seemed surprised. With ten days until the election and more than 400,000 Minnesotans already having cast ballots, the message was simple: the work is not done, and the final stretch is a sprint.
The Economy of Two and Three Jobs
Before turning her fire on Washington, Flanagan grounded the argument in the lives of people who are doing everything right and still falling behind. She described a hotel clerk in Moorhead who also runs the town’s bakery — one woman, two shifts, a schedule that never quite ends. She described a farmer in Browns Valley who works a full-time job off the farm to keep health coverage for her family, only to learn her insurance premium is rising 18 percent.
Those stories are not anecdotes to Flanagan; they are the policy. She argued that life should not be this hard, and that hardship of this kind is not an accident. Somebody benefits from the arrangement, she said, and it is not the people working two or three jobs to keep their heads above water. That framing set up her central claim: the corruption in Washington is not an abstraction reported on the evening news. It is the reason costs keep climbing in kitchens and farmhouses across greater Minnesota.
She pointed to the Port of Duluth as an economic engine supporting thousands of jobs and generating more than $500 million in annual income — and then to the trade war that helped push cargo volume last year to its lowest total since 1938. Farmers, she added, have lost overseas markets they spent decades building. The crowd did not need the history lesson; the room understood what a slow port means for a town built around one.
An Indictment, Charge by Charge
Flanagan did not soften her language. Donald Trump, she said flatly, is the most corrupt American president the country has ever seen, using his office to enrich himself and his family. She listed the particulars: pardons for fraudsters, money solicited from corporations seeking favors, billion-dollar no-bid contracts handed to campaign donors, and more than ninety white-collar criminals pardoned after stealing billions in taxpayer dollars. She noted that independent watchdogs supposed to hold the president accountable were fired out of the gate.
The contrast she drew was sharp and local. In Minnesota, fraudsters are prosecuted and sent to prison. In Donald Trump’s Washington, she said, they get pardons. “We are not the same,” she declared, and the room roared. The line worked because it tied a national story to a state identity — Minnesota as a place that still believes in accountability, whatever the fashion in the capital.
She did not spare the president’s allies in Congress, either, naming Republicans who let it happen and cheer it on. And she argued that the chaos has a price tag every American pays, with Minnesota paying more than most. She cited the deployment of thousands of ICE agents into neighborhoods, the deaths of two neighbors — Renee Good and Alex Prey — and a community still waiting for justice. Those lines landed heavily in a room that had been laughing minutes before.
The Opponent: ‘Are You MAGA Scared or MAGA Proud?’
Much of Flanagan’s speech was aimed squarely at her Republican opponent, Michelle Tafoya, whom she described as a candidate who did not stumble into Trump’s endorsement but earned it, worked for it, and treated loyalty as the litmus test. Flanagan quoted Tafoya saying that anyone who voted for Trump should have no problem voting for her — and then pressed the question the campaign has been hammering for weeks: why, ten days out, will the candidate not say whether she would stand on stage with the president?
“Are you MAGA scared or are you MAGA proud?” Flanagan asked. “Are you afraid of this president or are you proud to stand with him?” The result, she argued, is the same either way: Republican members do Trump’s bidding. She walked through a series of votes and statements — praise for an unauthorized war with Iran, a suggestion that Minnesotans struggling with gas prices keep a stiff upper lip and take one less trip to Starbucks, celebration of a bill that could cost up to 250,000 Minnesotans their health coverage even as rural hospitals and nursing homes are pushed to the brink.
The January 6 thread drew some of the loudest reactions. Flanagan noted that Tafoya platformed rioters on her podcast and called them “really good people,” and that she has never given a clear answer about who won the 2020 presidential election. She accused her of supporting the SAVE Act, which she said could block millions of Minnesotans from voting, including women who changed their names when they married. “Give me a break,” she said, and the gymnasium agreed.
On abortion, Flanagan was unambiguous. She noted that Tafoya claims to be pro-choice while saying she is completely aligned with Trump on the issue, supports a new abortion ban, and celebrated the overturning of Roe v. Wade. “There is only one pro-choice candidate in this race,” Flanagan said, “and it’s me.” She also turned to biography: the opponent’s remark that she is embarrassed to live in Minnesota, her plans to flee to Florida, her mansion and her yacht club with a $140,000 initiation fee. “I don’t own a yacht,” Flanagan said. “I don’t have a mansion in Florida. And I have never been more proud to call Minnesota my home.”
What Comes After the Corruption
Flanagan was careful not to leave the crowd with only anger. When we root out the corruption, she asked, imagine what we can build. The list came quickly: ending prior authorization so that a bureaucrat or an algorithm cannot decide what lifesaving care a doctor may provide; Medicare for all; a federal minimum wage indexed to inflation so that one job is enough; universal child care; housing working families can afford, and a ban on Wall Street buying up entire neighborhoods; and dismantling ICE in favor of an immigration system with secure borders, safety, dignity, and a pathway to citizenship that does not detain children. On the last point she returned to a familiar theme: we do not lack these things because we cannot afford them, but because too many leaders in Washington put the money over the many.
That is why, she said, she is the only candidate in the race taking not a dime of corporate PAC money. “I only work for you,” she told the crowd, and promised she had their back. The money-out-of-politics argument led her, naturally, to Paul Wellstone. Tomorrow, she noted, marks twenty-four years since the plane crash that killed Wellstone and his wife Sheila, and she had visited their memorial the day before. She recalled walking into the Wellstone for Senate office as a college student just to check it out, never imagining she would one day run for that seat. Wellstone, she said, taught her to fight for people, to be accountable to people rather than big money, and never to forget who you work for.
She quoted his final ad, written in his own hand: he did not represent the big oil companies, the big pharmaceutical companies, or the Enrons of the world, because they already had great representation in Washington. It was the rest of the people who needed it. Twenty-four years later, Flanagan said, the powerful still have too much representation — a president who sells pardons and hands out no-bid contracts, billionaires writing his tax cuts, and an opponent ready to rubber-stamp all of it. So she said it the way Paul did: you will always know where she stands and who she stands up for. Not the billionaires, not the big drug or insurance companies, and “sure as hell” not Donald Trump.
Bernie’s Civics Lesson
When Bernie Sanders took the microphone, he began with a joke about standing in a junior high school gymnasium and asked the crowd’s forgiveness for a brief civics lesson. There is a popular image, he said, of the Senate as a place where two people from every state sit down, trade ideas, and vote on the merits after a respectful debate. That, he told the room, is not how the Senate works — under either party. The majority party calls the tunes, and a president’s agenda passes or fails on the strength of party loyalty.
That is why he argued the stakes go well beyond the differences between Flanagan and her opponent, real as those differences are. If you believe, as he does, that Donald Trump is the most dangerous president in American history, then the priority is to remove the rubber stamp of Republican leadership in the House and Senate and elect a Congress that stands with working families rather than the oligarchs. The argument was procedural on its face — a lesson about how majorities actually function — but its purpose was to convert outrage into a down-ballot strategy. A Senate seat, in his telling, is not a solo act.
Sanders then turned to the president’s conduct and character. He described Trump as an authoritarian who does not believe in democracy, more comfortable with the oligarchic dictators of Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Russia than with the leaders of democratic countries. He called him a pathological liar, then made a direct appeal to conservative friends in Minnesota and around the country watching the livestream. We may disagree on any number of issues, Sanders said, but conservative parents want to raise their children to be honest, not bullies, not people who lie and cheat all the time, not narcissists who think the world revolves around them. If that is what we want for our kids, he said, then we have to hold this president accountable.
He acknowledged that some in the audience might disagree with Flanagan on this issue or that one. Fine, he said — but in this moment, the question is whether Trump is held accountable and whether Congress answers to working families rather than to the wealthy few. It was the same argument he has made for years, but placed in the frame of the moment: a president who, in his words, is a self-proclaimed genius and a pathological liar, and a Senate that will either check him or enable him.
The Final Stretch
Flanagan returned to the microphone with a closing argument built on endurance and affection. Ten days is nothing, she said — we can do anything for ten days. She urged the crowd to make a plan to vote, to vote early, to text every friend, to reach out to young people voting for the first time, to knock doors and make calls. Minnesota, she said, has a responsibility to tell this president and the world that we do not stand for chaos and cruelty. Trump has lost Minnesota three times, she noted, and he will lose it again in ten days.
Then she brought it back to the room itself. She hoped people were leaving filled up, she said, reminded that they are not alone and that the many will beat the money once again. She thanked the crowd for being on her team and on Attorney General Keith Ellison’s team, and introduced the coach of that team. She called Sanders a friend and praised him for leading the fight for working people, a friendship she called one of the highlights of her campaign.
The rhythm of the night was telling: a warning, a prescription, a memory, and a pitch. Flanagan’s speech operated on the theory that voters are less moved by outrage alone than by outrage attached to a plan and a memory of what politics can be. She invoked Wellstone not as nostalgia but as instruction — representation for the rest of us, accountability to people rather than money. Sanders supplied the structural argument that made the Senate race bigger than one seat. And the crowd, applauding all the way, supplied the energy the final ten days will require.
That is the case the campaign intends to carry to Election Day: that corruption is not a Washington story but a grocery bill, an insurance premium, a shuttered port, a hospital on the brink. Whether the argument lands with the broader electorate will be settled soon enough. In a packed gymnasium in Duluth, with ten days on the clock, it landed like a thunderclap.
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