Walz is following in the footsteps of Democrats like Tom Harkin and Paul Wellstone, who fought for workers and farmers in the Midwest.
Democratic Vice Presidential candidate Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz speaks during a campaign rally with Democratic Presidential Candidate Kamala Harris at the Liacouras Center at Temple University on Aug. 6, 2024 in Philadelphia,” 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.
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.
And so, the Democratic Party veered toward the neoliberalism of Bill Clinton, with dire consequences for rural America: free trade, 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.
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.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.
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