Figuratively, Wellstone was in one of the toughest Senate races in the nation. Literally he also liked where he was, the Iron Range, almost 200 miles north of the populous Twin Cities, a region whose identity — political, financial and cultural — was forged in the iron mines by European immigrants.
Just a few days after visiting Brown, Wellstone was returning to the area for the funeral for a legendary Iron Range labor leader when the plane he was in crashed and he was killed. He was 58.
The death rocked Democratic politics less than two weeks before midterm elections that flipped the Senate to Republicans and crushed liberals across the nation. They viewed Wellstone as an icon who connected their coalition from the liberal academics and students he used to teach at Carleton College, to the grunts hauling iron ore from the Range who counted their United Steelworkers membership cards as a lease on life.
For years after his death, Democrats running for high office would appropriate Wellstone’s line about representing the “Democratic wing of the Democratic Party,” often without attribution.
To mark Tuesday’s 20-year anniversary, his family arranged a virtual tour of the memorial at the place where Wellstone, his wife, daughter and three aides were killed.
For local activists, the anniversary serves as a bittersweet memory, losing a natural leader but also serving to remind them of a political era that is disappearing fast. The Iron Range has shifted to the right in a Trumpian era of grievance that left many members of Minnesota’s Democrat-Farmer-Labor Party wary of what used to be considered its base. Frankly, there just aren’t many Democratic politicians left who can fuse real support anymore from the F and L portions of the party acronym, and certainly not in the way Wellstone could while remaining beloved by urbanite liberals focused on cultural issues.
Some, like Brown, 42 now, have their doubts that even Wellstone could still thread that needle if he were alive and still running statewide campaigns.
“Were Wellstone still here, he’d struggle with it. Everybody wants to know what side are you on,” Brown said in a recent telephone interview.
The Iron Range runs about 125 miles across seven counties in northeastern Minnesota, where immigrants in the late 19th century and early 20th century flocked for grueling, but well-paying, jobs inside the iron mines, working for the likes of U.S. Steel and the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company.
Robert Zimmerman grew up in there, in Hibbing, before leaving to become Bob Dylan and recording albums about Highway 61, which ran through the heart of the Range. Labor battles with the corporations were legendary, resulting in a very well-organized workforce that had deep unity, inside the mines and inside the voting booth.
In the 14 elections from 1960 through 2012, the seven Range counties gave the Democratic presidential nominee a margin of victory of at least 25 percentage points 10 times, with the 14-point margin in 1972 the smallest Democratic victory there.
The voters around the mines tilted even more toward the DFL-backed candidates.
But Republicans remained competitive in governors races, and in the 1970s and 1980s they won both Senate seats, largely through big margins in the suburbs around the Twin Cities.
Enter Wellstone, who in 1990 left his political science post to launch a long-shot bid against then-Sen. Rudy Boschwitz (R). With one failed race under his belt, Wellstone drew little interest from Washington. The leaders of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee declined to meet with him, leaving him to meet with their communications director, Anita Dunn, who is now a senior aide in the Biden White House.
But Wellstone campaigned everywhere, riding around in a green bus, and his gregarious approach united the DFL coalition to win in an upset.
Those miners never doubted Wellstone, despite a background that began with his childhood in Northern Virginia and then a wrestling scholarship to the University of North Carolina, before settling outside the Twin Cities as a college professor.
“He knew and could speak their language,” said Brown, who is now an author and local college professor.
The Range remained friendly to DFL candidates and national Democrats — until 2016 and the arrival of Donald Trump in politics.
Hillary Clinton received 48 percent support in the seven counties, a 13-point drop from Barack Obama’s performance in 2012. President Biden won those counties by six percentage points in 2020, a slightly bigger margin, but, like Clinton four years earlier, that’s only because of the still strong Democratic lean of Duluth, a port city of almost 90,000 that sits outside the Iron Range.
Trump won those old union mining towns that had been so loyal to the Democrats, Brown said. “That’s when the DFL collapsed on the Iron Range.”
Two years later Rep. Pete Stauber (R-Minn.) won this congressional district that had been in Democratic hands for 70 of the past 72 years. He won reelection by more than 19 percentage points in 2020 and is cruising to a third term this fall.
Stauber frequently uses “our way of life” as his motto when discussing gun rights, environmental regulations and even local community funding requests.
What does “our way of life” mean?
“A lot of memories, a lot of nostalgia, a lot of resentment,” Brown suggested.
The mines used to provide more than 40,000 jobs in the 1950s, which shrank to about to 16,000 in 1980, largely due to automation and, over the past few decades, offshoring of jobs.
Today’s Range provides technical, high-end jobs, helping produce about as much iron ore as the steelworkers did decades ago. Just three weeks ago U.S. Steel announced a $150 million upgrade to an Iron Range mine, what some considered the biggest investment in 40 years — yet it comes as other mines this year have had shutdowns and layoffs.
There are now fewer than 4,000 people holding mine jobs, according to Brown, leaving towns and schools that feel basically half full.
While other rural areas made earlier shifts to the right politically, the Iron Range really changed over the last decade as its residents relied increasingly on national cable news and social media sites for their news.
“Older white people here started behaving like older white people elsewhere,” he said.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) is the rare DFL’er who retains her popularity there. Part of that is her own good politics, some due to her Slovenian heritage. Her father was raised on the Iron Range and went on to become a popular sports columnist.
Among Senate Democrats, Sherrod Brown (Ohio) is the closest thing to Wellstone today, running as a proud union man in a swing state. Others adopting this style are in deep blue states.
In 2002, the old rules still applied: Wellstone hit the trail all across the Iron Range, needing to run up his tally there to deflect against the expected margins former St. Paul Mayor Norm Coleman would get in the suburbs.
Coleman ended up winning by two percentage points, as former vice president Walter Mondale took Wellstone’s place on the ballot.
Brown, the editor at the Hibbing Daily Tribune 20 years ago, gave Wellstone a ride to the small local airport after their meeting, watching as the senator knocked on the door trying to get inside and get back on the trail.
Had he not died, and went on to win his reelection campaigns, Wellstone would have been on the ballot in 2020, with Trump. Could he have still won the Iron Range, after all that economic and cultural change, or would Wellstone have instead focused on the cities and suburbs to win?
“I kind of doubt Trump-Wellstone voters would be easy to find,” Brown said.
