Midwest’s Progressive Populist Tradition
Both Minnesota and Wisconsin have political legacies characterized by insurgent, left-wing third parties: the Farmer-Labor Party in Minnesota, featuring a coterie of Socialist-influenced populists, and the Progressive Party in Wisconsin, led by the sons of Robert “Fightin’ Bob” La Follette. Both parties won election by embracing government-sponsored forms of unemployment relief during the Great Depression, brash oratory demonizing corporate wealth and influence, and working-class economic populism that bridged farm-labor and rural-urban divides.
A generation of insurgent progressives turned to those legacies after Republicans swept Democrats out of the governorships of Minnesota, Wisconsin, North Dakota, and South Dakota, and seven U.S. Senate seats in those four states plus Iowa, in 1978 and 1980. Many moderate Democrats—especially the “New Democrats” and the Democratic Leadership Council at the national level—concluded that the party should moderate its stances to win back power.
But when, in the 1980s, the Upper Midwest faced a double whammy of economic downturn—the inseparable crises of deindustrialization and the collapse of family farming—the candidates from whom Martin and Wikler learned rejected those calls to moderate and, instead, pitched a plan of multiracial, working-class, economic populism that rebuilt Democratic parties from the grassroots up.
In Wisconsin in 1986, Ed Garvey, former executive director of the NFL Players Association, beat a Democratic party-backed moderate in the U.S. Senate primary and earned the praise of In These Times for running “a rainbow coalition campaign” that “link[ed] labor and environmental groups, urban workers and farmers, women’s rights campaigners and the LGBTQ community.” While Garvey lost in the general election, Garvey-allied grassroots groups helped Wisconsin Democrats gain seats in the state Assembly.
More prominently, Paul Wellstone called upon nearly two decades of grassroots activism in Minnesota and built a working-class, economically-populist coalition that sent him to the U.S. Senate in 1990. Traveling the state in his signature green bus, Wellstone held off moderate DFLers in the endorsement race and primary election, then beat a two-term Republican incumbent behind quirky campaign ads that attacked corporate wealth and breathlessly listed his support for the environment, organized labor, public education, universal health care, and more.
Sometimes successful, as in Wellstone’s 1990 and 1996 campaigns, and sometimes not—in 1998 Garvey ran for governor against three-term incumbent Tommy Thompson, losing by 21 points—Wellstone and Garvey’s David-versus-Goliath stories provided formative lessons for Martin and Wikler about politics and party-building. Martin interned on Wellstone’s 1990 campaign for the U.S. Senate, and in 1998, at just 17 years old, Wikler worked for Garvey, who refused to accept campaign donations over $100 to call attention to the issues of money in politics.