Who is Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan? A ‘hard-nosed’ negotiator fighting for Minnesota kids

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Peggy Flanagan’s passion for children and families has defined her career in public service. She served on the Minneapolis school board, worked as executive director of the Children’s Defense Fund Minnesota, and advocated for kids as a state legislator and lieutenant governor.

Now, she may bring that passion to the governor’s mansion. On Aug. 6, Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris named Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate. If Walz becomes vice president, Flanagan will step in as governor. She would be Minnesota’s first female governor and first Native American governor — and the first female Native American governor in the country.

The governor’s communications office did not respond to Sahan Journal requests to interview Flanagan this week. As second-in-command, she has sometimes been less visible than Walz. But her friends and political allies say she has consistently played a pivotal role in negotiating policies that benefit children and families, while bringing community groups to the table. They expect she would bring that approach to the governor’s office.

“Peggy’s hallmark is always policy that will directly impact Minnesota families,” said Carin Mrotz, a close friend of Flanagan’s and senior adviser in the Minnesota Attorney General’s Office.

“No one fights harder than Peggy for kids,” said Rep. Jamie Becker-Finn, DFL-Roseville.

Mrotz described Flanagan as an “extremely hard-nosed policy negotiator” and said she had worked closely with Walz on many key initiatives.

“Free school lunches was very much a team effort, and I see Peggy Flanagan’s hands all over that,” Mrotz said. 

She also pointed to Minnesota’s work in recent years to develop a first-in-the-nation state office for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Relatives.

“That’s them as a team, but I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the governor has prioritized those things,” Mrotz said.

She also recounted how when Flanagan was first elected as lieutenant governor, she spearheaded efforts to raise cash payments for the Minnesota Family Investment Program (MFIP). In 2019, when Flanagan took office, the payments had remained stagnant since 1986 — when Flanagan was in first grade. Flanagan led the effort to negotiate a $100 monthly increase to the program.

“Hardworking families who are still living in poverty are experiencing more money in their pockets, and that’s because of Peggy Flanagan,” Mrotz said.

A ‘young whippersnapper’

Flanagan, a member of the White Earth Band of Ojibwe, grew up in St. Louis Park, where she still lives with her family. Her father, Marvin Manypenny, was a longtime activist who spoke out against the loss of White Earth land. When she was a child, her family relied on public assistance; she’s spoken frequently about coming to school with a different-colored lunch ticket. She previously told Sahan Journal that she felt “invisible in my own classroom” because of the limited representation of Indigenous people in St. Louis Park Schools at the time.

In 2004, Flanagan, then 25, was elected to the Minneapolis school board. Javier Morillo, the former president of Service Employees International Union Local 26, remembers being impressed with the polish of the “young whippersnapper” when screening candidates for endorsements. Morillo now considers Flanagan his best friend, and is godfather to her daughter.

They worked closely together during a 2014 campaign to raise the Minnesota minimum wage. At that time, Minnesota Democrats held a trifecta of the House, Senate, and governor’s office. The state minimum wage was $6.15 for large employers, below the federal minimum wage of $7.25. 

Flanagan, then the executive director of Children’s Defense Fund Minnesota, co-chaired the Raise the Wage Coalition. The coalition aimed to raise the minimum wage to $9.50 an hour by 2016. Morillo recalled that Flanagan led a subgroup to make sure that the new minimum wage would be indexed to inflation. Though Democrats held a trifecta, this point was controversial among some Senate Democrats, Morillo recalled.

At one point, Morillo said, the coalition reached a compromise on minimum wage that would have left out the inflationary indexes. But Flanagan refused to accept that concession, Morillo said, at one point physically blocking a chalkboard that laid out the compromise during a coalition meeting. She helped lead a subgroup to make sure indexing was part of the final law.

In the end, the final bill included inflationary increases. Because of those yearly raises, Minnesota’s minimum wage for large employers is now $10.85. 

Flanagan is “accomplished, ready and history-making,” Morillo said.

Keeping incarcerated moms with babies

Flanagan was elected to the Legislature in 2015 during a special election. The incumbent legislator, Rep. Ryan Winkler, DFL-Golden Valley, resigned to follow his family when his wife took a job in Belgium.

The year after Flanagan was seated in the Legislature, Becker-Finn, a Leech Lake Ojibwe descendant, joined her. The two bonded right away as the only Ojibwe women in the Legislature, Becker-Finn recalled. 

“We were immediately really good friends going through that together,” Becker-Finn said.

During the 2017-2018 legislative session, Republicans held the majority in the Minnesota House. Becker-Finn said she and Flanagan, who had different areas of expertise, often found themselves combing through newly introduced bills to identify negative impacts for tribal communities and trying to explain them to bill authors.

In October 2017, Walz, then a member of Congress running for governor, announced that Flanagan would be his running mate. The gubernatorial election was still more than a year away. Walz announced Flanagan as his running mate at an unusually early moment, in an effort to show that together they would represent all of Minnesota — rural white voters like Walz, and voters of color from urban and suburban areas like Flanagan.

Becker-Finn introduced Flanagan at her first event as a candidate for lieutenant governor, at the American Indian Center in Minneapolis. After Walz and Flanagan won the election, Becker-Finn saw how Flanagan used her influence to shape policy.

In 2019, Flanagan and Becker-Finn visited the Minnesota Correctional Facility in Shakopee, the state’s only women’s prison. While there, they met with incarcerated women, guards, social workers and doulas. Becker-Finn said they learned from those women “that we were still as a state doing the practice of taking newborn babies away from their moms.”

For Flanagan and Becker-Finn, both mothers, the insight hit hard: “Putting yourself in the shoes of those women and imagining what that would have been like to have your baby taken out of your arms at 36 hours old,” Becker-Finn said.

Flanagan directed staff at the Department of Corrections to author a bill to change this practice, while Becker-Finn led the effort at the Legislature. At that time, Minnesota had a politically divided Legislature; the push attracted bipartisan support. 

In 2021, Walz signed the Healthy Start Act, which allows women who are pregnant or recently postpartum at the time of their sentencing to serve their time in a halfway house or community alternative for up to a year. Minnesota was believed to be the first state to implement such a program.

“If I tried to do that on my own without Peggy and without her leveraging the resources that she had as lieutenant governor, I don’t think that would have been a thing we were able to get done as quickly as we did,” Becker-Finn said.

She also pointed to Flanagan’s work in pushing the state to codify Minnesota’s relationship with tribal governments into statute.

“Things like that are trickier than they might seem to get across the finish line,” she said. “Both the governor and Peggy have visited tribal nations. They’ve actually put in the work.”

Indigenous education

Another focus for Flanagan has been making sure all Minnesota kids have access to education about Indigenous history and contemporary knowledge. In 2021, she spoke with Sahan Journal about the state’s efforts to provide better curricular resources to teachers. Since that time, Minnesota has adopted new social studies standards that also require more education about Indigenous communities.

Flanagan told Sahan Journal that this initiative came directly from tribal leaders, who made it a top priority. She said that when she was growing up attending St. Louis Park Schools, the curriculum did not reflect her lived experience.

“When you don’t see yourself reflected in your teachers or curriculum, there is an impact,” she said. “To be really candid, it made me feel like I was invisible in my own classroom.”

For Indigenous people in particular, many of whom are just a generation or two away from family members being forcibly removed to boarding schools, this erasure can fuel distrust in the education system, she said.

But she noted that for her daughter, in the same school system, representation was starting to improve.

“I think making sure that our Black, Indigenous, and students of color see themselves reflected in their curriculum, and that it is taught in a way that also makes them feel valued, is a game changer,” she said.

Gov. Flanagan?

So what would a Flanagan governorship look like?

It’s early to say. But her friends and political allies look forward to seeing how her approach to leadership could change state government.

Mrotz said that she expected Flanagan to find more ways to bring more voices to the table in decision-making.

“She is somebody who is like, ‘Well, then let’s build a bigger table, and then we can have more people sitting here,’” Mrotz said.

Becker-Finn reflected on the contradictions of being a Native American elected official in a system that was “designed to destroy your people.” She said Flanagan might question processes and structures that weren’t designed to include everyone.

“I think Peggy won’t be afraid to be open to doing things in better ways that are more reflective of our values and of the reality of what a Minnesotan looks like,” she said. “I just think she’s going to be really intentional about that.”

Editor’s note: This story was written by Becky Z. Dernbach, the education reporter for Sahan Journal.