INTRODUCTION
Today on Better Minneapolis, we’re bringing you a conversation with Congresswoman Angie Craig as she launches her run for the U.S. Senate. We talked about the experiences that shaped her—growing up in a mobile home park without reliable healthcare—and how that fuels her push to lower costs, improve community safety, and reform Washington.
We cover healthcare affordability, the $35 insulin cap, housing shortages, childcare costs, and what it will take for families to get ahead in every corner of Minnesota. She also opens up about surviving an attack in D.C. and discusses her work on mental health, addiction, fentanyl, and holding Big Tech accountable. And we dig into immigration and how she balances fighting harmful policies with finding bipartisan solutions.
You can find out more about her campaign by visiting:
If you value clear, grounded conversations about Minneapolis and the future of our state, consider becoming a subscriber. Your support makes this work possible.
ADVERTISMENT
For more information, visit: pbrmedia.io
Summary
Congresswoman Angie Craig opens the conversation by grounding her Senate run in her personal story: growing up in a mobile home park, raised by a single mom and grandmother, sometimes without health insurance or enough food. She frames her campaign around three core themes she’s already used to win a swing district: making life more affordable, keeping communities safe, and fixing a Washington she says isn’t working for ordinary people. That means capping insulin at $35 a month (a bill she wrote), backing a ban on members of Congress trading stock or becoming lobbyists, and supporting policing that is both effective and fair while also pushing for limits on military-style assault weapons.
Throughout the interview, Craig returns to affordability as the throughline of what she’s hearing on her listening tour—from Minneapolis to the Iron Range. In different places, it shows up as rent, childcare, healthcare access, or the difficulty of buying a first home, but the anxiety remains the same. She criticizes Trump-era tax cuts and Medicaid reductions for driving up healthcare costs, argues for a public option and letting people buy into Medicare, and lays out how uncompensated care cascades through the system into higher premiums and deductibles. She backs expanded child tax credits, wants more support for young families struggling with childcare, and calls for unleashing new housing supply through tax credits for first-time buyers and builders, modular housing, and confronting NIMBYism—while insisting a four-year degree can’t be the only path to opportunity.
Rep. Craig also talks candidly about being assaulted in her D.C. apartment by a man who was homeless, schizophrenic, and addicted, and how that experience deepened her commitment to the intersection of mental health, addiction, homelessness, and public safety. She highlights the Reconnections Act—recently signed into law—which invests more resources in community mental health and addiction services, and describes her push to hold Big Tech accountable when fentanyl-laced pills are sold on their platforms.
On immigration, she calls Trump’s attempt to end Temporary Protected Status for Somali Minnesotans “disgusting” and “inhumane,” pledging to stand with Somali communities in Minneapolis and across the state. She closes by describing her governing posture as “one fist closed, one hand extended”—ready to fight policies that harm Minnesotans while still working across the aisle to solve real problems as she seeks to serve as Minnesota’s next U.S. Senator.
