by Dan Burns

Nov 4, 2026, 6:30 AM

Sen-elect Flanagan was kicking butt all along

Minnesota Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan won the US Senate race in Minnesota by about nine and a half percent. This was after much of Minnesota’s corporate media claimed the race was tight, though they did back off on that somewhat during the last week or two. Yeah, we were really supposed to believe, for a while there, that a massive upset could be brewing. And to believe that on behalf of a slick, smug, privileged phony like Michele Tafoya.

The election in Minnesota was never primarily about wildly overblown, racist dog-whistle rants about fraud, however much Republicans and their media allies, especially the StarTribune and MPR, tried to make it that. It was mostly about entirely, absolutely, unequivocally deserved loathing of and contempt for both the policies and the person of Donald J. Trump, and of the MAGA GOP, among a solid majority of Minnesota voters as in much of the rest of the country.

And there’s no reason to believe that that wasn’t the case all along. We were subjected to the same kind of crap before the primary election, which Flanagan ended up winning quite handily over Rep. Angie Craig.

And, maybe, hopefully, we’re finally seeing the long-awaited shift in the electorate really start to manifest, as the most important part of the GOP base goes to their eternal rewards in increasing numbers. Note how the 2022 midterm was supposed to be a huge Republican blowout according to much of corporate media, and instead was in some ways the best midterm for a sitting president’s party since 1934. A lot of people realize they made a big mistake in 2024, and I for one am pretty confident that many won’t make such a mistake again. They’re finding out, all too often in hard, personal ways, that voting against wingnuts in every election does matter. And that far too much of our traditional media really is just absolutely full of shit these days.

This rant is not about the actual boots on the ground in corporate media in this state. When I was a civil engineer, and before that learning to be one out in the field, I regularly played a role in wetlands destruction and urban sprawl. So I have no business criticizing others for doing their jobs that they need. The problems with corporate media go a lot deeper than that. They always have.