Nearly half a century ago, Minnesota Republicans were the beneficiaries of a political campaign by a rogue Democrat. The primary campaign between DFLers Bob Short and Don Fraser in 1978 helped to lift the GOP from the political wastelands of the post-Watergate years and propel them to dominating statewide wins that year.
Here’s the kicker: Rather than using the winning GOP campaigns as a springboard to political dominance in Minnesota, Republicans adopted the formula Bob Short used to defeat U.S. Rep. Don Fraser in the 1978 DFL U.S. Senate primary. The results over five decades most often have been the same for Republicans as they were for Short.
Certainly, Republicans had other advantages in 1978, including a strong slate of candidates, and the Democrats had alienated many Minnesotans with power grabs and other missteps. But the Short primary campaign stood out for its surprising success against a heavily favored opponent and for the unfortunate template it created for politics going forward.
Short focused his campaign on rural Minnesota, especially the Iron Range, and coalesced voters around anti-abortion and gun rights. He also played on the resentment of some Iron Rangers toward urban liberals, attacking the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness Act that passed Congress in 1978 and was signed into law by Democratic President Jimmy Carter. Fraser was instrumental in restricting mining and logging in the BWCA limiting the use of motorized vehicles. Short put the deeply-held differences in economic and lifestyle attitudes between Iron Range and Twin Cities Democrats front and center in campaign against Fraser.
With strong support from northern Minnesota voters, Short won the primary by fewer than 3,500 votes out of more than 500,000 cast. The general election was a different matter. Short’s rural-centric message gained only 35% of the vote to Republican Dave Durenberger’s 61%.
Durenberger and Rudy Boschwitz were elected to the U.S. Senate, Al Quie won the governor’s office, and the state House of Representatives went from a 104-30 DFL advantage when it convened in 1977 to a 67-67 tie to begin the new session in 1979.
The “Minnesota Massacre” was a remarkable turnaround from a party scarred just a few years earlier by Richard Nixon and the Watergate scandal. While Durenberger, Boschwitz and Quie became the faces of the Minnesota Republican Party, the post-Watergate turmoil gave a new breed of conservative the opportunity to take control of the party. Among them was Glen Sherwood, a state legislator who was in his third term as a rural DFL legislator when he gave an interview in 1977 to St. Cloud State University. Sherwood’s priorities were issues with “moral overtones…that we consider to be a threat to the people of Minnesota,” said Sherwood.
Abortion long had been an issue that had advocates and opponents in both parties. That changed with Sherwood and his fellow conservatives. Sherwood switched partisan allegiances, winning re-election as an Independent-Republican in 1978 and 1980. In 1982 he sought the party’s endorsement for governor. When his path to endorsement was blocked, he allegedly worked a backroom deal to support fellow conservative Lt. Gov. Lou Wangberg. According to newspaper reports, the “Sherwood delegates flocked to Wangberg after Sherwood dropped out with the fervent injunction that the convention pick a gubernatorial candidate in his own ‘strong pro-family, pro-life’ image.” Wangberg went on to lose the Republican primary in 1982 and the GOP lost the governor’s office to Rudy Perpich.
Today, Minnesota Republicans seem stuck in 1978, still echoing Short’s agenda of deep reductions in government spending, tax cuts, a constitutional amendment to restrict abortion and economic development of fragile wilderness areas. And, just like Short did to the DFL, the most strident of the Republicans are fracturing the party, demanding absolute purity to an ideology that seems out of touch with most Minnesotans. Action 4 Liberty opposes anyone – Republican or Democrat – who is not fully in line with the group’s strident anti-government agenda. No one is immune from the group’s attacks; even the very conservative 6th District U.S. Rep. Tom Emmer is considered a “corrupt, Globalist, RINO (Republican in Name Only).”
Republicans today can hold their own in state legislative races only because the alignment of districts hasn’t caught up with the movement of the population to metro areas where the DFL prevails. That will change after the 2030 census. Meanwhile, the party that went all-in on Donald Trump now carries the political baggage of presidential policies that disproportionately hurt farmers, Main Street businesses and rural communities.
Republicans need a new agenda of reform that tosses aside the institutions and vested interests that aren’t working. As chief of staff to Gov. Harold LeVander in the late 1960s, Durenberger worked closely with a group of GOP legislators known as the “Young Turks.” Writing about them decades later, Durenberger said the “Young Turk” legislators “saw themselves as a force for modernizing state and local government to adjust to the many changes in Minnesota that the postwar decades were bringing. They wanted to make government work better for people like themselves – families raising and educating young children in fast-growing urban and suburban communities.”
The “Young Turks” drafted a remarkable GOP state convention platform in 1966, Programs for People. The agenda called for investments in education, health services (especially mental health care), environmental protection and legislation to fight discrimination, calling racial equality under the law “the root of the entire existence of the Republican Party.”
The platform supported tax cuts but not reductions in state spending. Instead, it promoted new and broader revenue sharing with the federal government in which a fixed share of federal tax dollars would be returned to states for them to determine how best to spend the resources.
The platform and a new generation of Young Turks would position today’s Republicans once against as the party with new ideas to support people in a changing economy. It would make the Republican Party competitive again instead of policies and candidates that just keep coming up Short.
Abortion was the biggie that year, IMO. Short was an anti-choice Democrat. We were fairly new to Minneapolis and were surrounded by like-minded people. And because Fraser was a popular Representative, we went to bed assuming we’d wake up to a Fraser candidacy. We didn’t. Urban Dems like us were clueless about rural Dems, and many still are.
Dave Durenberger was a pro-choice Republican and I voted for him over Short. Only Republican vote of my life! Now there are few if any pro-choice Republicans and ditto anti-choice Dems.
That may have been one of the first races where choice played such a role. We used to be divided on the dull things like farming and tax policy and now both parties seem hyper focused on gender and sexuality. And because those are such personal issues, they make it much more difficult to find common ground. I