Peggy Flanagan is the lieutenant governor of Minnesota. She just won her party's nomination for the United States Senate, beating Rep. Angie Craig in the primary. She is a citizen of the White Earth Nation, the first woman of color elected to statewide office in Minnesota, and when she took office in 2018 she was the highest-ranking Native American woman in elected executive office in the country.

On Wednesday, August 12, 2026, Fox Business anchor Cheryl Casone asked Tom Emmer — the House Majority Whip, the third-ranking Republican in Congress — for his read on her.

Here is what he led with, after a warm-up about downtown Minneapolis:

"Cheryl, look. First looking at Peggy Flanagan, she's just a more masculine version of Tim Walz, but it's the same person."

"First looking at." Not her record as lieutenant governor. Not a vote. How she looks.

This is a habit, not a slip

Emmer is not a backbencher who wandered onto television. He is the man who counts votes for the Republican conference, and he has now made a specific kind of remark on this network twice in two months.

On June 25, at a Faith and Freedom Coalition town hall, he said Somali Minnesotans who don't assimilate should "go the hell back to where they came from" — and added that he was "done being careful, even the least bit careful." Minnesota is home to roughly 107,000 Somali residents, the largest such community in the country.

He was telling the truth about that last part. Six weeks later he is on Fox Business describing a Native American woman's appearance as her defining political trait.

The number he stated as fact

The rest of the answer is worth reading closely, because Emmer moved from the insult straight into a figure he presented as established:

"She is literally in the fraud issue up to her eyes. $9 billion in fraud under her watch, Tim Walz' watch, Keith Ellison, Ilhan Omar... Not one government official has been charged or held accountable for almost $9 billion dollars in taxpayer money that was built out of our state government in the hands of Somali fraudsters."

Minnesota does have a serious fraud problem, and nobody sensible disputes that. But the $9 billion number is not a finding. It is a projection an assistant U.S. attorney offered in December for what prosecutors expect they may eventually find across 14 "high-risk" state programs.

The actual charged case — Feeding Our Future, the largest pandemic relief fraud scheme ever prosecuted in the United States — involves roughly $250 million. That is a real scandal and a real number. It is also about 3% of what Emmer said on television.

Gov. Tim Walz has called the $9 billion figure sensationalized. Whether you believe him or the prosecutor's projection, the honest way to say it is "prosecutors believe it could reach." Emmer said it had happened, and attached the words "Somali fraudsters" to it.

That is the same move he made in December 2025, when he told the same network that 80% of crimes committed in the Twin Cities are committed by Somalis — a figure Minnesota's own crime data contradicts, and one he then inflated to 90% two weeks later.

What he's actually running on

Strip out the appearance comment and the inflated figure, and Emmer's pitch is straightforward. He said it himself at the end:

"Vote for Democrats you will get more of the same, vote for Republicans you're going to get a change."

Nothing in the segment was about what Republicans would do. Not the price of groceries, not health premiums, not the hospitals in his own 6th District. The whole answer was about who Peggy Flanagan is — a woman he described first by her looks and then by association with a community he has already told to leave.

Emmer is the third-ranking member of the House majority. When he is asked what Republicans offer Minnesota, this is the answer he gives.

The thing about "she's just a more masculine version"

There is no policy content in that sentence and no way to fact-check it, which is the point of saying it.

It's the oldest available attack on a woman running for office: not that she's wrong, but that she is somehow not properly a woman. Emmer aimed it at the first woman of color Minnesota ever elected statewide, on national television, in the first ten seconds of being asked about her.

Flanagan will face Republican nominee Michelle Tafoya, a former sportscaster, in November. Minnesotans will spend the next three months hearing about this race. Emmer just showed them what shape the Republican half of it is going to take.

Source

Tom Emmer Says Peggy Flanagan Is 'a More Masculine Tim Walz' — Kathianne Boniello, Mediaite, August 13, 2026. Photo: Fox Business via Mediaite.