Angie Craig abandons Democratic party endorsement in Senate bid, looks straight to primary

Calling the party endorsement process unrepresentative and undemocratic, U.S. Rep. Angie Craig announced on Wednesday she won’t seek the Democratic-Farmer-Labor endorsement at the party convention this weekend in Rochester and will instead take her pitch directly to voters in the August primary.

The announcement is an admission that Craig doesn’t have support from enough party activists to mount a serious challenge in the endorsement process to Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan, whose campaign boasted on Wednesday she was on track to win 75% of the roughly 1,200 party delegates who make the endorsement.

Forgoing the endorsement process saves Craig the embarrassment of defeat  — and robs Flanagan of a victory — in a process many in the party say is flawed and rarely leads to the endorsement of the strongest candidate in a general election.

“It’s not really democracy when 1,200 people get to pick who our candidates are in America. It doesn’t allow every voice to be heard,” Craig said at a news conference in front of the state Capitol in St. Paul, flanked by a few dozen supporters.

Craig said the process favors more ideologically extreme candidates who excite the party activists loyal enough to spend weekends in hotels debating candidates and party platform issues according to Robert’s Rules of Order.

“Most Minnesotans don’t have the luxury of choosing a subcaucus over a Saturday soccer game with their kids. Most Minnesotans can’t choose a convention over a closing shift, and most Minnesotans can’t put a delegate vote over driving their dad to a doctor’s appointment,” Craig said.

Yet being able to excite the party’s base is critical to attracting volunteers and motivating voters to show up to the polls. Flanagan’s campaign said in a statement ahead of Craig’s announcement that if she truly didn’t think the endorsement was important, she wouldn’t have spent the past several months showing up to smaller conventions to try to win it.

“If you can’t show up and face your own party, then you’re not ready to face Republicans,” Flanagan said in a video posted to social media.

Craig faced significant headwinds with the party’s base over her vote for the Laken Riley Act, which empowered the Department of Homeland Security to detain undocumented immigrants without bail for burglary, theft and shoplifting. Following Operation Metro Surge, Craig said she regretted her vote.

St. Paul Mayor Kaohly Her, a Hmong refugee, urged the public at Wednesday’s news conference to look at Craig’s entire record on immigration including her co-sponsoring legislation to provide a pathway to citizenship for Dreamers and legislation to stop Trump’s travel bans.

“It’s easy to point out some of the votes that people take that we can criticize, but we don’t lift up the things that they do that are right for the people,” Her said.

DFL party activists do have a poor record of selecting candidates who go on to win with primary voters. Indeed, Gov. Tim Walz and Flanagan lost the party endorsement in 2018 but went on to win the primary and be re-elected to a second term.

Craig argued she can appeal to the moderate voters who will decide the election against a Republican, like leading candidate Michele Tafoya, a retired sports broadcaster. However, the publicly available polling puts Flanagan far out in front of Craig in the primary.

“I’ve won a district that Donald Trump carried,” Craig said. “The job of our Senate candidate is to hold this U.S. Senate seat and to help DFLers up and down the ticket.”