The Long Tradition of Midwestern Democratic Populism That Gave the World Tim Walz

Having gone viral during the veepstakes for calling MAGA Republicans “weird,” Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, the newly-minted Democratic Vice Presidential candidate, offers the potential for the Democratic Party to make inroads in rural America and challenge perceptions that the party consists only of the coastal elites. Everyone from Lutheran pastors to high school wrestling coaches sings the praises of Walz and what he has done with the Democratic-Farmer-Labor (DFL) Party, now in control of the Minnesota legislature.

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Midwestern liberalism is having its moment in the Democratic Party. But what is it all about? 

Rural, midwestern liberals like Walz have been shaped by the rise of “progressive populism”: intensely personal campaigning rooted in economic policy that prioritizes a broad, multiracial, working-class coalition across urban and rural America. It is embodied by a generation of senators like Tom Harkin of Iowa and local officials like North Dakota Agriculture Commissioner Sarah Vogel, and Walz learned progressive populism from the former staff of the late Minnesota Senator Paul Wellstone.

This political tradition illuminates that the heartland is not a reactionary hinterland, but a place in which economically populist policy and grassroots campaigns can thrive. While Democrats once shunned this political approach Kamala Harris embraced it with her selection of Walz, revealing a renewed interest by leading Democrats in this Midwestern liberal tradition.

During the 1980s, the Midwest faced twin economic crises of deindustrialization across the Rust Belt and the Farm Crisis on the Plains: factories shuttered or locked out unionized labor, while commodity prices tumbled by 50% and family farms failed—14% of all farms in Minnesota and at least 250,000 across the country.

Activist groups fought back, staging tractorcades and trying to build farm-labor solidarity across rural and urban lines. Dubbing Nov. 1, 1983, “Solidarity Day”, farmers provided free breakfast to a capacity crowd at the Ruth-Hawkins YWCA Center in North Minneapolis, where civil rights advocate Spike Moss and United Auto Workers leader Bob Killeen addressed the audience. From there, farmers and urban activists drove two hours north to Minnesota’s Iron Range, where miners faced 65% unemployment. At the Central Labor Temple in Duluth, speakers from farm advocates to labor leaders to Ava Bates, a Black farmer from Kansas, whipped up those assembled with calls for working-class solidarity.

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Populist Democrats joined their fight. Elected officials like Texas Agriculture Commissioner Jim Hightower, Harkin, 1988 Democratic primary candidate Jesse Jackson, and Wellstone—a Carleton College professor-turned-senator—relied on those coalitions for support and fought for their interests. Their idea? That Ronald Reagan and Republicans prioritized, to paraphrase Hightower, the Rockefeller, not the little feller. Wellstone described it as being from “the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party.” And Harkin called it “progressive populism,” rooted in the traditions of Robert “Fightin’ Bob” La Follette, Wisconsin’s progressive Republican governor who ran for President under the Progressive Party banner in 1924.

There was truth to that. Rural Democrats in the 1980s prioritized reforming farm and trade policy, arguing unfettered free-market policies disproportionately hurt family farmers and rural communities. Harkin and Missouri Congressman Richard Gephardt sponsored a 1987 bill to reduce farm subsidies and introduce supply management, which would limit the amount of commodities farmers could produce, thus reducing surpluses and raising prices to approach what it cost farmers to grow. The bill failed, as conservative Southern Democrats and the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), wary of supply management and restrictions on the free market, provided cover for congressional Republicans.

The tensions between the neoliberal and rural progressive wings of the Democratic Party erupted again as Congress debated the 1990 Farm Bill and the 1992 North American Free Trade Agreement. During the former legislative battle, senators like Tom Daschle of South Dakota fought for two-tier subsidy systems to prioritize family farmers over corporate agribusiness.

But a compromise version that traded conservation policies for frozen price supports passed with the support of coastal and southern Democrats. Plains senators like Daschle and Harkin voted “nay.”

Two years later, Minnesota congressman Collin Peterson, who represented the state’s rural northwest, founded the congressional Anti-NAFTA Caucus, highlighting the detrimental effects the proposed treaty could have on farm commodity prices and labor unions. NAFTA passed anyway, too, with newly-elected Senate Democrats like Wellstone and Russ Feingold of Wisconsin voting no.

And so, the Democratic Party veered toward the neoliberalism of Bill Clinton, with dire consequences for rural America: free trade decimated American labor, and the 1996 Freedom to Farm Act stripped price supports from American agriculture, a supposedly free-market reform. The result was a collapse in farm markets in 1998, followed by increased concentration in agriculture and adjacent industries like meatpacking. As the conservative DLC ascended, the progressive populists faded into the background.

To combat that turn, Midwestern liberals like Wellstone turned to “people power”: progressive, small-d democratic campaigns that relied on grassroots enthusiasm to reach the rural working-class and overcome fundraising deficits. In 1990, Wellstone had barnstormed Minnesota in a beat-up green school bus and upset a two-term incumbent Republican senator. Despite being a curly-haired, Jewish professor out of place on the blue-collar Iron Range or in farm communities, he was fondly recalled as “one of us” because he made their fight his fight. 

To capitalize on that momentum, in 1992 Wellstone and his allies had created the Wellstone Alliance, an organization to train leaders and candidates at the grassroots in Minnesota and to convince the state party to embrace progressive populism.

It made an immediate splash. That fall, Wellstone volunteers flooded southwestern Minnesota to campaign for a little known DFL school board member, David Minge, running for a congressional seat that had not been held by a Democrat in 50 years. Minge won by 575 votes. Further down-ballot, the Wellstone Alliance helped candidates for state House overcome anti-abortion attacks.

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After Wellstone’s untimely death in a 2002 plane crash, his campaign manager, Jeff Blodgett, and Wellstone’s two sons established Wellstone Action, a nonprofit organization to carry on Wellstone’s progressive legacy. The organization put on Camp Wellstone, a two-and-a-half-day campaign training boot camp that combined “community organizing, large-scale grassroots campaigns and progressive leadership with intensive training in the nuts and bolts of effective political work.” 

In 2006, Walz attended Camp Wellstone. His now-lieutenant governor, Peggy Flanagan—who stands to become the nation’s first Native American governor if Harris and Walz win—was one of Walz’s trainers. The economic populism and retail politics he learned at Camp Wellstone connect Walz into the longer Midwestern liberal tradition. Along with Peterson, Walz voted against the $700 billion bailout of Wall Street in 2008. His buffalo plaid has become a ubiquitous campaign trail look—reminiscent of 1970s DFL governor Wendell Anderson’s iconic TIME cover.

But those moves came as Democrats ceded the rural heartland. Minge lost reelection by 155 votes in 2000 and Daschle lost to John Thune in 2004, beginning a slow reddening of the rural Midwest that accelerated in the 2010s when, attacking the Affordable Care Act and hot-button cultural issues, Republicans flipped seats in Iowa, South Dakota, Wisconsin, Nebraska, and North Dakota (twice). 

Increasingly, rural America also factored less into Democrats’ electoral calculus: in 2016, Chuck Schumer vowed that “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.” Only now have governors like Walz in Minnesota, Tony Evers in Wisconsin, and Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan begun to reverse that decline.

What this means for the Harris-Walz ticket remains to be seen. As skeptics have noted, Walz’s margins in rural Minnesota declined from 2018 to 2022. But when the conversation switches from culture wars to free school lunches, banning non-compete clauses, or supporting organized labor—he was a member of the National Educators Association, after all—you see the glimmer of progressive economic populism that won over a rural congressional district. When Walz tells people he “gives a damn” about workers or tells Republicans to “mind your damn business” in stump speeches, the retail politicking of Wellstone Action shines through.

Unlike when it was Paul Wellstone, though, the Democratic Party might finally be willing to listen to the heartland.

Cory Haala serves as assistant professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point and is a political historian of the Midwest and American liberalism.

Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.