Flanagan launches U.S. Senate campaign focusing on hope, not hype

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When it comes to starting a political campaign, it doesn’t get much more cliche than listening sessions.

And yet I found myself intrigued enough by Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan’s “Kitchen Table Conversations” last Saturday morning that I went to the St. Louis Park co-working space The Coven to see her first event as a U.S. Senate candidate.

The session was neither a pep rally nor a thinly veiled fundraiser. Flanagan drew several dozen voters for what felt like a wellspring of hope and connection.

“We could feel alone. We could feel isolated, but we don’t,” Flanagan said.

Several elected officials were there, including Hopkins Mayor Patrick Hanlon, St. Louis Park Mayor Nadia Mohamed and state Rep. Larry Kraft, DFL-St. Louis Park.

White boards had been propped up. Flanagan wielded markers and Post-it notes and asked attendees to break into small groups and talk about what gives them hope. She roamed the space, crouching and listening in.

I’ve seen Flanagan most recently in her work as the lieutenant governor and running mate to Gov. Tim Walz, a job that requires she play the dutiful No. 2. The event Saturday was the first I’d seen Flanagan as a candidate at an event of her own design.

She wanted to do something a little different. “I’m really leaning on something I know how to do, which is facilitate conversations,” she said in an interview Tuesday. “I don’t think it’s very interesting to have me come into a room, give a speech and take off. I think the power of gathering is really key to all of this.”

She’s had more events since then, including a packed gathering in Apple Valley on Monday. On Tuesday, she scheduled stops in Hibbing and Duluth. She said she will keep it up as long as Minnesotans keep showing up.

“Frankly, I think it’s something that’s been missing from our politics. It always feels like the circus comes to town in the last few weeks or months of a campaign and then they leave,” she said.

Since then, former Minnesota Senate Minority Leader Melisa López Franzen of Edina joined the race. With about 20 months before the election, more contenders are likely.

As of Tuesday, Flanagan said she is seeking the DFL endorsement, but wasn’t ready to commit to dropping out if she doesn’t get it. For now, she’s focused on the broader state, seeking to sow connection, engagement and involvement.

“It just feels like the antidote to divisiveness and fear,” she said in the interview.

Flanagan didn’t mention this, but she would be the first Native American woman elected to the U.S. Senate. Instead, she spoke of her hope for something more, perhaps even bigger in the face of the current deluge of fear and extreme polarization from Washington, D.C.

“We’re not just going to fight against bad stuff; We’re going to build something,” Flanagan said.

I regularly saw strangers approach the late Sen. Paul Wellstone to shake his hand and say they didn’t agree with his positions, but they liked that they knew where he stood.

The feisty, diminutive senator won two statewide campaigns not by tacking to the middle, but with an adherence to his progressive beliefs.

To this day, I have not seen a Minnesota candidate energize or connect with a crowd the way Wellstone did — his finger stabbing the air, drawing energy as he spoke.

I mention Wellstone, in part, because Flanagan did. She tracks the beginning of her political career to an impromptu stop into Wellstone’s University Avenue campaign headquarters in 2002.

A stranger and a novice, she said she was enthusiastically welcomed and put to work stuffing envelopes. She returned every week.

A St. Louis Park native and former legislator, Flanagan intends to make agriculture a cornerstone of her pitch. A suburban kid, she acknowledged on Saturday that she initially didn’t know a “seed from a feed bag.”

Then she realized the role agriculture played in her youth as a recipient of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). “What I know now is those farmers who fought for SNAP saved my life,” Flanagan said.

At her event, the participants filled the white boards with personalized snippets of hope that ranged from “my children” and “fresh perspectives” to “those like us gathering to fight.”

Flanagan also asked everyone to think about what they’re good at and how they could help others. “It is literally about all of us versus these extremist billionaires who only care about getting more money,” she said.

One person asked Flanagan if she planned to do a similar event in Republican U.S. Rep. Tom Emmer’s Sixth District, which is more conservative than her hometown. Yes, she’s heading to Blaine, the largest city in his district.