WASHINGTON – Millions in spending by outside groups to influence the hotly contested U.S. Senate primary race between Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan and Rep. Angie Craig is filling the airwaves with attack ads and demonstrating the power of money in politics.
Television ads and other appeals will reach a crescendo as next Tuesday’s primary election draws near because the political action groups funding them have ramped up their last-minute spending.
The campaigns of Flanagan and Craig, Democrats vying to win retiring Sen. Tina Smith’s seat, are forbidden by law from coordinating with these outside groups spending big money on their behalf.
But there doesn’t have to be direct contact to know what a candidate wants and needs. Campaigns helpfully post their positions on their campaign websites to inform outside groups. And there are often relationships between the candidate and outside groups.
Related: Craig’s legacy in ‘purple’ district hangs over the DFLers hoping to replace her
For instance, Flanagan has benefitted from nearly $2.5 million in spending by the Democratic Lieutenant Governor’s Association (DLGA) political action committee, according to an analysis by Sunlight Research.
Flanagan served a one-year term as head of the DLGA. Now its PAC has spent nearly $500,000 in ads that support Flanagan and about $2 million in ads that attack Craig.
Top donors to the PAC include the Forward Movement Foundation, which donated $1 million and does not disclose its donors. The foundation has also given $4 million to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).
Other top donors to the DLGA PAC include health care giants Vertex Pharmaceuticals and AstraZeneca, the Lockheed Martin employees PAC and AIPAC secretary and treasurer Mark Rubin, who gave $111,500.
The DLGA also has a separate, non-profit PAC whose top donors included CVS, Wells Fargo, Comcast and United Health Care.
Flanagan has made it a tenet of her campaign to not accept any corporate PAC money and has excoriated Craig for accepting money from corporate donors, which she says makes Craig beholden to them.
Craig’s retort is that the lieutenant governor is hypocritical because her campaign benefits from corporate donors that give to the DLGA PACs.
DLGA executive director Kevin Holst said the organization’s PACs were formed to help Democratic lieutenant governors get elected. Unlike Minnesota, where the lieutenant governor candidate runs with his or her party’s candidate for governor on one slate, 17 states, including Texas, North Carolina and California, hold separate races for governor and lieutenant governor.
But Holst said the PAC’s policy was changed in 2024 to also help lieutenant governors in primaries for other political offices.
This year, the PAC backed New Jersey Lt. Gov. Tahesha Way, who lost a primary for a U.S. House seat, and Illinois Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton, who won a primary to run as the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in her state.
After Stratton won that primary, the DLGA pivoted to Flanagan’s race.
Holst said the PAC is helping Flanagan “level the playing field” against Craig, who has raised more campaign cash than the lieutenant governor and has much more outside money helping her campaign. He said the DLGA PACs are “sister committees of the Democratic Party.”
He also said the DLGA’s help is not crucial to Flanagan’s campaign.
“This is going to be a safe ‘blue’ seat and we think Lt. Gov. Flanagan is going to win it handily, even without our help,” Holst said.
Outside groups spend millions to help Craig
Craig was a prodigious fundraiser in her battles to keep the “swingy” 2nd Congressional District in Democratic hands and has for years benefitted from spending by outside groups.
The main group, called North Star Dawn PAC (Dawn, by the way, is Craig’s middle name) has spent about $7 million on TV ads promoting Craig and attacking Flanagan and millions more on digital ads and direct mail.
The group was launched in May, about the same time the DLGA PAC began spending on behalf of Flanagan.
Like the DLGA PAC, the North Star Dawn PAC is a super PAC, a type of political action committee that can raise and spend unlimited amounts of money from individuals, corporations, and unions to advocate for or against political candidates.
But the North Star Dawn PAC receives most of its funding from a group called Civic Progress, which is not required to publicly identify the individuals or organizations that fund it, classifying it as “dark money.”
The North Star Dawn PAC is run by several Democratic consultants who have worked on other Democratic campaigns, including Jerid Kurtz, who was briefly a campaign manager for Sen. Raphael Warnock, D-Ga.
The PAC did not respond to requests for information about its support of Craig. Craig’s campaign said it did not know anything about this deep-pocketed supporter.
Craig has other outside help, too.
Like Civic Progress, there are other groups that do not disclose their donors called Unite to Win, Minnesotans for Progress and Center Forward that also spent money – a total of almost $6 million – to boost Craig’s candidacy.
“Dark money is worse than any other source in a campaign because you don’t know where it’s coming from,” said Public Citizen lobbyist Craig Holman. “It could come from a single, very wealthy, individual who is trying to buy an election.”
An ‘onslaught of money’
Craig told MinnPost she “deplores the onslaught of money” in political races.
But she also said she is not about to disarm unilaterally and ban corporate donors or discourage the help of outside groups, especially since the U.S. Supreme Court recently struck down federal limits on how much money political parties can spend in coordination with candidates, a decision that is said to favor the GOP.
“I don’t think, as Democrats, we can tie one hand behind our backs,” Craig said.
She also said she’d welcome tighter restrictions on campaign funding, just as long as they applied to all candidates for political office.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., who has stumped in Minnesota for Flanagan and is a major proponent of campaign finance reform, said she was impressed when the lieutenant governor called her and said her campaign would not take any corporate PAC money.
“Most people would like that money but Peggy said ‘no,’” Warren said. “She wanted to give people of Minnesota a real choice.”
Related: Angie Craig hopes risky new strategy will stop Flanagan’s momentum
Warren said progressives like her and Flanagan will never “get big structural change” unless they “change the structure of money.”
“He who pays the piper plays the tune,” Warren said.
But even with the best of intentions, money floods into American politics. That’s how the DLGA was able to greatly increase its fundraising – and help Flanagan — in this campaign cycle.
Holman said federal campaign laws “themselves are good.” But the not so good are the interpretation and reversal by the Supreme Court of those laws, beginning with the landmark 2010 Citizens United decision.
That ruling reversed century-old campaign finance restrictions and enabled corporations and other outside groups to spend unlimited money on elections.
“We really have no reasonable regulations on money in politics today,” Holman said.
Michael Nolan and Seraphina Harris-Feron from MuckRock’s Sunlight Research Desk provided research and data analysis for this story.
The post Outside groups fuel bitter Senate race between Peggy Flanagan and Angie Craig appeared first on MinnPost.
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