Candidate Known For Pro-Trans Knife Shirt Defeats Dem Establishment Pick In Senate Race

Minnesota Democrats had a choice between a sitting congresswoman who at least performs moderation for swing voters and a Lieutenant Governor who once wore a shirt with a knife on it defending "trans rights or else." They picked the knife shirt by twenty points. That is not a close call. That is a party base telling its leadership exactly what it wants, and what it wants is not Angie Craig's careful triangulation.

This is worth sitting with because the DC Democratic establishment keeps insisting the party's problem is messaging, not substance. Run the ads better, soften the language, find a nicer way to say the same things. Flanagan's blowout says otherwise. The actual primary voters in a real state didn't want a nicer version of the platform. They wanted the platform, knife shirt included, and they rewarded it with a landslide instead of a nail-biter.

Craig wasn't some conservative Democrat either. She just wasn't loud enough about it. And that's the tell. When being merely left-of-center gets you demolished by 20 points in your own primary, the median Democratic primary voter has moved somewhere the party's consultants haven't caught up to yet.

Republicans should take this as useful information, not a punchline. A statewide candidate who thinks that shirt was a good idea is going to be an easy target in November, but the deeper story is that Minnesota Democrats had a real alternative and rejected it decisively. That's not a fringe winning by accident. That's the base..