Peggy Flanagan, Minnesota's Lieutenant Governor, just won the Democratic Senate nomination with the enthusiastic backing of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Her platform includes abolishing ICE, supporting Medicare for All, and — this is a direct quote from the woman — calling Mount Rushmore a "symbol of white supremacy."

So naturally, the Democratic Party thinks she's their best bet to win a purple-state Senate seat.

Flanagan has served as Tim Walz's lieutenant governor, which means she's had a front-row seat to — and direct involvement in — some of Minnesota's most spectacular governance failures. That includes presiding over a state government that oversaw $9 billion in welfare fraud. Nine billion. Not million. Billion, with a B. She also had a ringside view of the $500 million in damage Minneapolis sustained during the 2020 George Floyd riots, which she met not with calls for order but with language about reimagining public safety.

Her exact words on that topic: "We must re-imagine how we approach the issue of public safety overall...if Minnesota is safer for the black community, it is safer for all of us." Minneapolis residents picking through the charred remains of their businesses probably had some thoughts about that reimagining.

On immigration, Flanagan wants to abolish ICE entirely. On healthcare, she's a full-throated supporter of Bernie Sanders' Medicare for All scheme. On children's gender medicine, she's told audiences: "I should be allowed to make those decisions that protect the health of my child along with her physician." She's even used the case of Nex Benedict, a trans youth who died in Oklahoma, as a rallying cry — and bragged about families relocating to Minnesota to access these services. "I think once you have a conversation with a family who has relocated to Minnesota from Texas or Florida...then you can have real connections," she said.

Then there's the Land Back movement. Flanagan, who is a member of the White Earth Band of Ojibwe, has openly championed the idea that federal land should be returned to tribal nations. "Land Back isn't just a hashtag," she said. "It is intentional, detailed, hard work that we do together." That's a sitting lieutenant governor endorsing the redistribution of U.S. territory as a policy goal, not a bumper sticker.

The endorsements tell the whole story. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren didn't back Flanagan because she's a moderate who can win swing voters. They backed her because she's one of them. This is the same cycle where Abdul El-Sayed is running as a progressive darling in Michigan. The pattern isn't subtle.

Some will argue Flanagan's background as the first Native American woman to serve as a state's lieutenant governor makes her a historic candidate. Nobody's disputing the biography. The question is whether Minnesota voters want a senator who thinks four presidents carved into a mountain are a symbol of racial oppression, who presided over the worst welfare fraud in state history, and whose answer to law enforcement is "reimagine" it.

The Democratic Party isn't even pretending to run toward the center anymore. They're sprinting left and daring the electorate to keep up.

Minnesota used to be the land of Hubert Humphrey and Walter Mondale — liberals, sure, but liberals who at least believed in the basic mechanics of American governance. Now it's producing Senate nominees who want to abolish federal agencies, hand back federal land, and treat $9 billion in fraud as someone else's problem.