Meet the Candidates: Minnesota's Angie Craig

The Victory Fund is working to elect dozens of LGBT candidates to higher office and we're featuring the stories of several of these men and women as the election nears. Read a profile of Orlando's Beth Tuura here.

Democrat Angie Craig represents the direction Minnesota's Second Congressional District, which includes Minneapolis and St. Paul, is heading: educated, relatively young, part of a minority community, Her opponent, Republican Jason Lewis, represents the opposite: provincial and antagonistic to change.

A onetime journalist and health care executive, Craig has deep knowledge and experience that belies her 44 years. Her experience and thoughtfulness are helping her pull ahead of Lewis, a Donald Trump-supporting shock jock who's said Minnesota should cap the number of Syrian refugees coming into the state and openly supports voter ID laws, which often affect trans people and people of color. Craig, meanwhile, doesn't target immigrants in her campaign and instead has proposed a coordinated effort to discourage homegrown terrorism.

Craig is married (to a woman) and the mom of four teenage boys. Republicans have tried to turn this against her, with a state GOP chair trying to shame her family in a lamentable Facebook post.

"Hate and bigotry seem to follow Jason Lewis wherever he goes, so it is unsurprising Angie Craig's family photo was used to attack her and LGBT families," Victory Fund president Aisha Moodie-Mills told the Daily Dot. "He has disparaged young women as 'nonthinking' because they support choice and marriage equality, suggested immigrants destroy white culture, and even implied that slavery should be legal."

Lewis's xenophobia was part of the reason the state's most influential newspaper, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune,endorsed Craig. But the paper's editorial board members didn't just castigate Lewis, they commended Craig for her plans to make Obamacare less expensive and make higher education more affordable.

"Craig describes herself as a fiscal moderate and social progressive who would tackle issues with an eye toward pragmatism and bipartisanship," the Star-Tribune editors wrote. "She's a good fit for a Second District that is changing both demographically and in its political leanings."