Minnesota Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan ran around the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party convention all day Saturday in a dark emerald-green suit, with matching Native-beaded earrings, trying to talk to everyone. Later that day, she won the DFL nomination by acclamation in her race to become the state’s next US senator, and the crowd roared.

But Flanagan is still facing an opponent in her August Democratic primary. Rep. Angie Craig campaigned for the DFL nod for months, but two days before the party convened in Rochester, she declared that she would no longer seek the endorsement, and wouldn’t attend the convention.

“It’s not really democracy when 1,200 people get to pick who our candidates are in America. It doesn’t allow every voice to be heard,” Craig said at a news conference Thursday, in front of a few dozen supporters.

“If you can’t show up and face your own party, then you’re not ready to face Republicans,” Flanagan countered in a video posted to social media.

This race isn’t over. Craig, a lesbian mother of four, has support from the state’s big LGBTQ groups, endorsements from many establishment Democrats and four times the funding of Flanagan right now (though the DFL endorsement will open party money and major campaign infrastructure resources for Flanagan). In 2018, Craig won a purple district on the outskirts of Minneapolis and she touts her centrist record as better preparation for a statewide race.

“Minnesotans have always proved that organized people can beat organized money,” Flanagan countered at the convention. “Senator Paul Wellstone was famously outraised 7-1,” she reminded me Monday on the phone.

Heading into the weekend, local media reported that Flanagan could count on support from at least 75 percent of the convention delegates. In April her campaign told The Nation that she had won more DFL delegates than Craig in over 90 percent of the 117 local-unit conventions, essentially giving her a lock on the DFL’s endorsement. It turns out that was closer to 95 percent.

And while Craig claims that only “1,200 people” made the DFL decision, in fact 40,000 people participated in precinct caucuses, and 57 percent of delegates were first-timers. Until recently, Craig herself was actively seeking the DFL nod, sending “Team Craig” representatives to 113 of the 117 unit conventions. But Flanagan was clearly winning all along, even in Craig’s own congressional district, where the lieutenant governor picked up 70 percent support. All of that seems to have led the congresswoman to pull out of the process two days before the convention began.

Craig was beginning to change her tune about the DFL when I interviewed her in March. “I wanna respect the people who participate in this process, but it’s less than 2 percent of primary voters,” she told me. She went on to depict Flanagan as the insider, while she, the candidate with the big campaign fund, is the upstart. “I’m still the outsider in Minnesota politics,” she told me. “Peggy has been in the political class in Minnesota for her entire life.”

That’s one way to depict Flanagan’s background. She was raised by her struggling single mother, Pat Flanagan, a DFL activist who relied on government programs to raise her daughter while she went back to college. Flanagan still describes herself as “the girl with the different-colored school-lunch ticket,” which tipped off classmates that she got free school lunches. She worked organizing for Paul Wellstone, the late DFL hero, while still in college, and then went on to a range of social justice organizing jobs. A member of the White Earth Ojibwe tribe, she would be the first female Native senator in American history.