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This article is part of The 74’s EDlection 2026 coverage, which takes a look at candidates’ education policies and how they might impact the American education system after the 2026 election.
A citizen of the White Earth Nation, Peggy Flanagan has made electoral history several times. In 2005, at the age of 25 she became the youngest-ever member of the Minneapolis School Board. In 2018, her ascension as Minnesota’s lieutenant governor made her the first person of color elected to statewide office and, at the time, the highest-ranking elected Native American woman in the United States.
Now, pending the outcome of a very tight race against former sportscaster Michele Tafoya, Flanagan, 47, may become the first Indigenous woman elected to the U.S. Senate.
Rep. Mary Peltola, the first Alaska Native elected to Congress, is also running for an open Senate seat. Even if both win, Indigenous women will still be severely underrepresented in elected office.
Few people run for office two years out of college, but Flanagan quite literally grew up attending political meetings. Her father was an Anishinaabe land-rights activist and her mother an Irish Catholic insider in the Hubert H. Humphrey wing of Minnesota’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party.
She cut her own political teeth on the late Paul Wellstone’s campaign for a third term in the U.S. Senate. When he was killed in a plane crash days before the election, she was one of a number of young progressives who worked for a grassroots candidate incubator started by Wellstone’s inner circle. There, she trained an unknown congressional hopeful named Tim Walz, who is now serving his final weeks as Minnesota’s two-term governor.
The former executive director of the Children’s Defense Fund-Minnesota, Flanagan campaigned to raise the minimum wage, was a driving force behind universal free school lunch, extending paid family and medical leave and increasing the state child tax credit, among other policies.
The candidates’ education platforms have little in common. Tafoya promises to “get men out of women’s sports,” strengthen parental rights and push for academic accountability. Flanagan wants to expand Head Start, expand publicly financed pre-K and increase federal funding for special education services.
Here are four things to know about Flanagan.
‘I Am Those People’
Flanagan ran for school board assuming she wouldn’t win, but would get to raise the school system’s brutal, century-old legacy of failing the American Indian community.
“At least we’re going to talk about the issues that are really important in the community, right?” she recalled in 2015 in a public talk about education. “We’re going to talk about poverty, we’re going to talk about the opportunity gap and how young people don’t see themselves reflected in their curriculum….
“I remember a high ranking elected official at the time said to me, ‘You know, Peggy, you really should stop talking about poor children because you make people uncomfortable and it’s hard for folks to connect with you.”
Those weren’t the potential voters who interested Flanagan the most, she explained: “We ran a really grassroots campaign and registered voters and went to all the folks. You know the places where people would be like, ‘Don’t bother, these people don’t vote.’ And I’m like, I am those people so I should go there.”
As someone who grew up in poverty — supported by a Section 8 housing voucher, Medicaid and other public benefits — Flanagan stood out on a school board then replete with strong personalities as laser-focused on elevating students’ voices, recalls Tom Madden, board chair during part of Flanagan’s tenure.
In 2010, the district announced plans to close North High School, a beloved but persistently underperforming institution that had withered from nearly 1,200 to fewer than 300 students over the course of six years. Flanagan encouraged North’s predominantly Black students to show up for a district listening session, says Madden.
They did. Things got heated. Madden was escorted out by the police — something he admits cheerfully now, conceding that the board needed to be reminded who its key constituents were.
Focusing on students “May seem obvious, but when you’re on the board you have to deal with policy and money and things like school closures,” he says. “It’s easy to get lost.”
North remains open, and chronically underenrolled.
‘Suddenly I Was a Sponge’
Flanagan liked school, which she attended in St. Louis Park, the small, middle-class suburb on Minneapolis’ western boundary where her own daughter is now a middle schooler. Flanagan graduated with a GPA of 1.75, having had just one teacher who wasn’t white in her entire academic career.
At the University of Minnesota that changed. “The first class that I walked into was intro to American Indian Studies with Dr. Brenda Child at the front of the room,” she recalled. “I was in a classroom surrounded by other American Indian students being taught by an American Indian educator and my whole life changed. Suddenly I was a sponge and I wanted to know everything.”
Today, when Flanagan meets students she often recommends Child’s book “Boarding School Seasons,” a compilation of hundreds of letters written between 1900 and 1940 by children, parents and teachers. The correspondence vividly depicts the squalid conditions at residential schools in Kansas and South Dakota where children were kept away from their families, and by extension their languages and cultural practices.
Until very recently, few Minnesota K-12 schools taught the legacy Flanagan learned about in Child’s university classroom. As a result, for example, students were taught that President Abraham Lincoln freed slaves, but not that he ordered the largest mass execution in U.S. history, the 1862 hanging of 38 Dakota men.
Like all states, Minnesota periodically updates its curricular standards — age-appropriate topics students should be exposed to. In 2023, the state’s ethnic studies standards got a major overhaul, attended by no shortage of controversy over how indigenous people are depicted.
“Peggy has been a strong supporter of teaching a fuller, more accurate version of the history of the place we call home,” says Lars Esdal, executive director of Education Evolving, a policy incubator that helped shepherd the new standards.
Partly as a result, St. Louis Park students can now study Ojibwe.
‘The Governor Has Been Very Clear That The Buck Stops With Him’
The contest to replace outgoing Minnesota Senator Tina Smith is Flanagan vs. Tafoya, but its subtext is Trump vs. Walz.
In 2024, Flanagan served as interim governor while Walz was Democratic presidential hopeful Kamala Harris’s running mate. In the wake of Walz’s failed vice presidential run, he and Flanagan appeared to suffer a falling out that has not been addressed on the record.
Since late 2025, Walz has faced intense scrutiny for his slow response to Medicaid and social service fraud. He ruled out running for a third term because of the criticism, eventually conceding he should have done more sooner.
Fraud had indeed plagued Minnesota’s social services sector in recent years, but not to the extent it has in other states, including Texas, Florida and Arizona. Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison has prosecuted more than 350 fraud cases to date.
Trump justified sending thousands of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to the Twin Cities last winter, saying the Department of Homeland Security would root out the criminals behind the fraud.
In the June primary, Flanagan faced a much better-financed suburban moderate, Rep. Angie Craig, who was hard-pressed to defend her vote in favor of the Laken Riley Act, which dramatically broadened ICE’s powers. After the violence of ICE’s Minnesota siege — including the killings of U.S. citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti — drew worldwide attention, Craig said she regretted her vote.
The GOP has pounded Flanagan, saying that as Walz’s deputy she should have done more to combat fraud. In the lone senatorial debate, Tafoya also said Flanagan bears some of the blame for the volatility of the ICE surge, calling the governor’s office’s leadership a “massive failure.”
“The governor has been very clear that he, the buck stops with him,” Flanagan clapped back. “He was the one who had oversight here.”
In an October interview, Walz backed her. “Look, this stuff happened,” he told the New York Times. “We were on it early, did what we could do to stop it. It doesn’t excuse it. And that’s why I said I took full responsibility for it. I think most people know that’s not the lieutenant governor’s job.”
‘Earring Enthusiast’
In an era where commentators still focus on the clothes women in politics wear on public stages, Flanagan has become well known for showcasing Indigenous jewelers and fashion designers. She often appears in colorful ribbon skirts and two years ago modeled in Native Nations Fashion Night, organized by an Ojibwe designer who dressed Flanagan for her 2023 inauguration.
When her fashion choices drew national attention during the 2024 Democratic National Convention, Flanagan told reporters she often swaps outfits with other Native women, including former U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, who is currently running for governor in New Mexico.
Last summer Flanagan, who describes herself on social media as an “earring enthusiast,” took to Instagram to find out if it was true that a home-based designer who goes by the moniker Potty Mouth Makery had made oversized earrings featuring Flanagan.
One of the most popular attractions at the Minnesota State Fair — a must-show event for candidates and electeds at every level — is the butter sculptures. Every year, a new Princess Kay of the Milky Way is crowned. She and her court take turns sitting in a refrigerated booth while their likenesses are carved into 90-pound blocks of butter.
The Peggy Butter Earrings — or Flanabutters, as some quickly subbed them — cast Flanagan from the shoulders up.
“I have some folks who would like to order Peggy butter heads,” the candidate asked on Instagram, complete with a heart-eyes emoji. “Can they do that? Is there a link?”
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