Politics

Tina Smith endorses Peggy Flanagan over Angie Craig in Minnesota Senate race

Published

5 months ago

February 2, 2026

Sen. Tina Smith is endorsing Minnesota Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan as her successor over Rep. Angie Craig, taking sides in a hotly contested primary to fill Smith’s Senate seat that’s been roiled in recent weeks by the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration enforcement efforts.

“Today, 3,000 federal agents are terrorizing our communities,” Smith said in a video announcing her pick that was shared first with Blue Light News. “I know that right now there is no one that I trust more to stand with Minnesota than Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan.”

Flanagan, in the video, called it an “honor” to have the retiring senator’s endorsement and pledged to “continue in her footsteps.”

“We’re going to push back against the status quo and send a progressive fighter to continue representing us in Washington, D.C.,” Flanagan said.

Smith’s endorsement comes a day before the state’s Democratic and Republican precinct caucuses, the first step in each party’s formal endorsement process.

In selecting Flanagan, Smith is elevating a fellow lieutenant governor and progressive over Craig, a moderate, for the seat she has held since 2018. Smith is the eighth sitting senator to endorse Flanagan, who also has the backing of Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and other members of the so-called Fight Club of progressive senators of which they are all a part. Former Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.), who held the seat before Smith, also endorsed Flanagan.

Craig has some high-profile endorsements of her own, with five senators including Sens. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.), Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) in her corner, as well as former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.

And it comes against the backdrop of deadly incidents involving federal agents enforcing President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown in the state that have opened new fissures in the Senate primary. While both candidates have called for Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s impeachment, Flanagan has attacked Craig for taking “pro-Trump” immigration votes last year, while Craig has countered that her rival is being “disingenuous” about the content and context of the measures.

Nonpartisan public polling in the race has been scant. Polling conducted in the past month for Flanagan’s team, as well as a separate survey commissioned by a pro-Flanagan group, shows the lieutenant governor with a double-digit lead over Craig. A poll commissioned by Craig’s campaign showed the race within the margin of error.

Craig has built a fundraising advantage in the race, raising $2 million in the fourth quarter of 2025 and starting the election year with $3.7 million in cash on hand. Flanagan, meanwhile, raised roughly $1 million in that timeframe and ended the year with $810,646 in the bank.

Politics

A drag queen, a rainbow festival and a game FIFA can’t control

Published

53 minutes ago

June 26, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

SEATTLE — FIFA has not endorsed the Seattle host-city committee’s “Pride Match” designation, which will not be part of the official branding when Iran and Egypt meet tonight at Lumen Field.

“I think they’ve always been aware of what we’re doing,” said Louise Chernin, who as chair of the organizing committee’s Pride Match Impact Council began planning for the day nearly a year and a half ago.

Chernin began her match day at Rough & Tumble, a women’s sports bar in Ballard, a historically Scandinavian neighborhood where a crowd had gathered to cheer on Norway against France. The bar was notably free of FIFA’s commercial imprint: The World Cup posters on the walls and the merchandise for sale were all drawn by local artists without any official logos.

It all reflected the extent to which the “Pride Match” has become a gentle challenge not only to FIFA’s record of clamping down on some expressions of LGBTQ+ rights but also the corporate monoculture it creates in host cities through its restrictive sponsorship rules.

“If there’s going to be revenue spent, let us bring it to LGBTQ-owned businesses,” said Chernin, a longtime head of the Greater Seattle Business Association, an LGBTQ+ chamber of commerce.

Just down the street, fans had gathered at a “regnbue” street festival — the word is Danish and Norwegian for “rainbow” — organized by a local Ballard business association. The Norway-France match was being shown on an oversized screen, but when halftime hit attendees did not listen to any of the ads on the Fox broadcast.

Instead DJ SummerSoft took the stage as Sativa the Queen, a local drag performer, vamped through the break.

Politics

The world’s not big on the US. The World Cup might help.

Published

1 hour ago

June 26, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

America’s stint hosting the World Cup is drawing mostly positive reviews to date — and it couldn’t come at a better time.

According to a new report from the Pew Research Center, views of America across the world are worsening and confidence in President Donald Trump’s leadership is dropping.

Pew surveyed 42,000 people across 36 countries between February and May, and found that America has a largely negative impression on the global theater. Only 23 percent of surveyed adults expressed confidence in Trump’s leadership — eliciting less confidence than Chinese leader Xi Jinping (34 percent) and Russian President Vladimir Putin (31 percent).

Foreign policy is the biggest pain point for Trump’s international critics, who take issue with his handling of tariffs, Gaza, Iran, Greenland and the Russia-Ukraine war, according to Pew’s findings.

Meanwhile, fewer countries — and longtime allies — believe the U.S. is a reliable partner. In Canada, where 83 percent of respondents described the U.S. as reliable in 2022, that number is now down to 35 percent.

In 2023, 60 percent of Germans said the U.S. considers international interests in its foreign policy decisions. That share has now dwindled to 23 percent — Germany’s public opinion of the U.S. is “now similar to or more negative than what was measured during George W. Bush’s presidency, when many people in Europe and elsewhere strongly opposed the war in Iraq and other major elements of U.S. foreign policy,” writes Pew.

There are only seven nations where a majority rate the U.S. well — Israel leads the pack, with 81 percent of respondents viewing America favorably. Some of the country’s lowest ratings come from predominantly Muslim publics, “such as Malaysians, Pakistanis, Turks, and Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.”

Over the past decade, Pew’s polling has found growing concerns about the health of American democracy. A 2013 Pew survey, just as Barack Obama entered his second term, an all-time high of 75 percent of respondents in Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Japan, Poland, the Philippines, South Korea and the U.K. said the U.S. respects its citizens’ personal freedoms.

Since then, declining shares of world respondents believe the U.S. respects its citizens’ personal liberties — and this year, 56 percent of respondents said the U.S. does not.

Politics

Envoy’s pharaoh well party

Published

1 hour ago

June 26, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Egyptian Ambassador Motaz Zahran and wife are hosting an informal farewell party tonight for close friends and family at his Washington, D.C. residence tonight, according to an attendee, hours before Egypt faces off against Iran in a closely watched game in Seattle. Ambassador Mohamed Hamdy Mohamed Mokhtar El-Molla will replace Zahran as the new Egyptian envoy to the U.S.