Tuesday, November 5, 2002, will be remembered as the day that the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party died.  On Election Day, the Republicans swept most of the state’s constitutional offices and elected Norm Coleman to the U.S. Senate, Tim Pawlenty to the governorship, and John Klein to the U.S. Congress.  The GOP also gained seats in the state legislature.

The Democratic Party will survive this loss, but the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party will not.  The election was a watershed not just because the DFL old guard and such prominent names as Walter Mondale (standing in for the late Paul Wellstone), Roger Moe (state senate majority leader and 30-year veteran of the legislature), and Hubert H. Humphrey (his grandson ran for secretary of state) all lost, but because the kind of populism that Wellstone and the DFL once represented and the base upon which it was built are all but gone.

Yes, the DFL practiced state socialism, but Humphrey purged the party of communists during the vicious battles of the 1940’s.  The DFL was culturally conservative up until the 70’s, and it always stood for the working class, which once was the bulk of Minnesota’s population.  It was a model for the Democratic Party nationwide, and its leaders served in the top ranks of the national government.  The DFL was the dominant party in Minnesota from 1954 to 1990.

Unfortunately, suburbanization, globalization, the decline of family farms and manufacturing jobs, and the left’s lurch toward cultural Marxism affected Minnesota just as they did the rest of the country.  The election results declare that Minnesota has officially become suburbia just like everywhere else—and the Democrats will adjust accordingly.  There are far more soccer moms and office-park dads in the Land of 10,000 Lakes than there are farmers, factory workers, and the Scandinavian socialists who once formed the DFL’s backbone.

The populism of the old DFL will soon become a memory, and its base of small farmers and union laborers of the Iron Range and the Twin Cities will continue to shrivel.  Republicans and Democrats will fight for the “arc”—a line drawn from Duluth, through St. Cloud, to Rochester, east of which lives three quarters of the state’s population.  Those who live outside the arc will be ignored by the politicians and bureaucrats in St. Paul, regardless of who is in charge.

Paul Wellstone’s death did not just deprive the DFL of a Senate seat; it robbed the party of the last shreds of its old identity.  As a political-science professor at Carleton College in Northfield, Wellstone did not spend his time drinking chablis with colleagues or writing checks to the United Farm Workers while driving around town in a BMW.  He organized farmers protesting foreclosures during the 1980’s farm crisis, and he stood on the picket line with meat packers in Austin during the bitter Hormel strike of the mid-80’s, when the food giant was slashing wages, busting the union, and bringing in cheap Third World labor to work the plants.  His activism got him arrested several times, horrifying the parlor liberals at Carleton who wanted to boot him out.  Only a local outcry in favor of the popular professor kept him at his post, the base from which he launched his political career.

Wellstone was running a close race the day he died while flying over the Iron Range to attend the funeral of a friend’s father; most polls showed him to be ahead, even pulling away from Coleman.  His vote against the resolution to authorize war against Iraq had worked in his favor, as Minnesotans of all persuasions appreciated his independence and honesty, even if they disagreed with him.  That the DFL chieftains picked the 74-year-old Mondale to take his place on the ballot—instead of someone younger or more dynamic, such as state Supreme Court Justice Alan Page or State Auditor (and former Republican) Judy Dutcher—showed again how out-of-touch and clueless the DFL had become and reinforced its image as “Grandma and Grandpa’s party” to voters who barely remembered Mondale’s career.  The choice allowed Trotskyite-turned-neoconservative Norm Coleman to proclaim himself the candidate of the future.  It is no wonder that the demoralized Well-stone field army of 15,000 volunteers—larger than that of any other candidate in the country—could not muster any enthusiasm for a ticket of old names and establishment figures.

With Gov. Jesse Ventura’s departure to fill the remainder of his days with celebrity schlock, the Independence Party (formerly the Reform Party) will also die a slow and painful death.  It carried just one election throughout the state and has no identifiable cultural or economic base.  Its members are mostly “new” Democrats (like its failed gubernatorial candidate, Tim Penny) and moderate Republicans.  With the death of the old DFL, these voters will quietly return to the Democratic fold to complete the party’s trans-formation.