Twenty-five years ago Friday, the former professional wrestler Jesse “The Body” Ventura shocked America by winning the Minnesota governor’s race as a third-party candidate. In the lead-up to the 2016 presidential race, Ventura was “ecstatic” as Donald Trump — another brash outsider celebrity candidate — mounted a run.
And now? Ventura compares Trump to Charles Manson and looks back “shamefully” on how his upset victory in 1998 served as a catalyst for Trump’s win.
“Oh, he watched my playbook, don't kid yourself,” Ventura said in a telephone interview.
Ventura toppled the political establishment as the Reform Party gubernatorial candidate by throwing out everything in the conventional politician’s playbook. As The Washington Post’s Marc Fisher wrote in a 1998 story on Ventura’s victory, “With support heavily concentrated among young men, Ventura roamed the state demonstrating his straight talk and regular-guy habits. He ate big burgers, talked of big tax breaks and quoted the big, deceased thinkers — Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead and the Doors' Jim Morrison.”
Looking back a quarter-century later, “The Body” said election night was like an “out-of-body experience.”
A Minneapolis Star-Tribune poll found that he had energized new voters — 10 percent said that they wouldn't have voted if Ventura hadn’t been one of the candidates. Ventura, who won nearly 50 percent of voters under 30 in a three-candidate race, said his campaign aides had tried to talk him out of his plan to visit every college campus in the state.
“My people said to me, ‘Oh, you're wasting your time. They don't vote,’” he recalled. “I went, ‘Baloney. They've never had a chance to vote for Jesse the Body. They'll vote.’ And I went to every college campus, and they were hanging from the rooftops.”
Compared to his major-party rivals, Ventura ran his campaign on a shoestring budget. Republican candidate Norm Coleman outspent him 5-1, and Democrat Skip Humphrey outspent him 3-1, according to the New York Times, which called his victory “an earth-rattling political upset that shellshocked politicians and prognosticators everywhere.” The paper described him as “a colorful mixture of affable, often amusing, bravado and plain-spoken drive.”