Cory Haala’s new book, When Democrats Won the Heartland: Progressive Populism in the Age of Reagan, 1978-1992 (University of Illinois Press, 2026) tells the story of the Midwestern farmer-labor coalitions of the 1970s, 80s, 90s, and their many efforts to steer a new direction for the Democratic Party. These Progressive Populists, as Haala calls them, called for moratoriums on farm foreclosures, stricter plant closing laws, lower taxes on ordinary people, and higher taxes on banks, agribusiness, utilities, and mines. Their grassroots coalitions, which elected dozens of Democrats to public office in the 1980s, included white and Black trade unionists, feminists, Native Americans, religious leaders, and of course, ordinary farmers. The book challenges readers to reckon with how we ought to tell the story of the Midwest during the “Culture Wars” of the late twentieth century. That is, while it is easy to point to the rise of the Religious Right as an inevitability in rural America, Haala reminds us that there were still many heartland coalitions maintaining and reinventing progressive traditions around visions of economic justice and democratic pluralism. Haala’s well-researched and well-written book holds up a real alternate possibility for both the national Democratic Party platform, both in the late twentieth century and today.
I got a chance to chat with Cory Haala about this midwestern “Progressive Populism” as well as the question of how to frame this movement.
Your book begins with midwestern Democrats’ rediscovery of the early twentieth century Non-Partisan League. Can you remind us what the Non-Partisan League was and why its history and memory became important to midwestern Democrats in the 1970s?
The Nonpartisan League, to borrow from Michael Lansing’s excellent 2015 history of the movement, was a farmers’ movement that began in western North Dakota in 1915, spreading across the Midwest and Great Plains—including the Canadian prairie provinces—that challenged the mal-concentration of wealth in the capitalism of the late Gilded Age. As a progressive wing of the state’s Republican Party frustrated with the control of outstate capital like the Pillsbury mill in Minneapolis, they and their allied farmers took control of the state’s Republican Party and set up a state-run Bank of North Dakota and State Grain Mill and Elevator. (The State Bank and State Mill are both still operating today!)
This message really resonated with farmers in the Midwest in the late 1970s as the farm economy began to collapse. As historian Pamela Riney-Kehrberg documented in Iowa, the “Go-Go Seventies” were characterized by Richard Nixon’s Secretary of Agriculture, Earl Butz, famously—and ominously—telling farmers to “get big or get out.” Farmers upgraded machinery, bought and planted more land, and took on debt to do so. But the bubble burst: farmland’s value hiccupped, and Jimmy Carter’s grain embargo in response to the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan accelerated a depression in the rural Midwest. Farmers, dealing with low prices for their products, the deregulation of railroads, and increasingly concentrated industries like meatpacking, had seen this movie before.
(No, literally: the 1978 film Northern Lights, a Cannes award-winning movie about the establishment of the Nonpartisan League, had spread like wildlife not only in North Dakota—where many locals were extras in the movie—but was screened in places like Adair County, Iowa, by some of the farm activists I document in the book.)
The Nonpartisan League was one of many regionally-unique examples—like the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party or the Wisconsin Progressive Party, a continuation of Robert La Follette Sr.’s political platform led by his sons in Depression-era Wisconsin—that activists turned to across rural and urban settings as the Midwestern economy collapsed in the 1980s.
As your book shows, late twentieth century midwestern Democrats developed a tradition you call “Progressive Populism” which won many elections, including several governorships, in a time period we usually associate with the rising tide of the Republican Party (1978-1992). What did this coalition represent and why do you think they had the success they did?
As much as they pushed back against the free-market economics of Ronald Reagan and the Republicans—their continuation of tight money and deregulation only compounded the Midwest’s twin challenges of the Farm Crisis and deindustrialization—these “progressive populists” represented a break with the national Democratic Party as well. In a decade that historians of liberalism have associated with the rise of the neoliberals, the Democratic Leadership Council, and the “New Democrats” (read: Bill Clinton! finally, a winner!), I argue that Democrats at the state and local level had already figured out a winning formula—economic populism and citizen-led democracy.
This coalition began at the grassroots through activist organizations like the Iowa-based North American Farm Alliance (NAFA) and Minnesota Citizens Organized Acting Together (COACT). They saw working-class solidarity—think about the “Farmer-Labor Party” not just in name, but in coalition—as necessary to overcoming those things that had torn apart the old “labor-liberal” coalition in the 1970s: the race-baiting, gender-politicking, and militarization-pushing single-issue campaigns of the 1978 and 1980 campaigns. To put a working-class coalition back together, groups like NAFA and COACT led “Farm-Labor Solidarity Day” events in 1983, for example: farmers brought surplus food to unionists and community centers in Waterloo, Minneapolis, and Duluth, engaging in conversations with Black community members and union workers about their shared struggles.
This movement percolated upwards into economically-populist campaigns for everything from Public Utility Commissioner and Commissioner of Agriculture to governor of Minnesota and U.S. Senator from Iowa. Activists not only did the organizing legwork, though—they often found themselves with a seat at the table when it came time to do the policymaking: Minnesota Gov. Rudy Perpich appointed a farm activist, Anne Kanten, to be Deputy Commissioner of Agriculture; members of Brookings-based Dakota Rural Action worked with Rep. Tim Johnson of South Dakota on the 1990 Farm Bill.
It was authentic solidarity built at the grassroots around an important shared sense of place and struggle. These were Midwesterners, working to save their communities from outside forces—from capital and conservatives to the Democratic Party, the latter of which in the 1980s angered them in all sorts of ways: adopting superdelegates in the presidential nominating process, withholding Minnesota’s and Wisconsin’s seats at the Democratic National Convention until they agreed to drop their open primaries in favor of caucuses, and ignoring Midwestern proposals to structurally reform family farming and slow the national push toward free trade agreements.
Let’s talk about the struggles which Progressive Populists faced. Tell us first about their struggles with Democrats in other regions of the country, especially as the national party made decisions in 1984 and 1988 about how to focus their platform. Why do you think the national party downplayed progressive populist demands in favor of a neoliberal agenda?
Getting the national party to care about agricultural issues was tough in and of itself! Beyond that and in addition to producing different commodities here (especially milk, but corn as well), states and voters in the Midwest had intentionally—primarily in the 1930s and again in the 1970s—passed “anti-corporate farming laws” that limited who could own and farm the land. In addition, the Reagan Revolution of 1980 had brought in a number more neoliberal and conservative Democrats into regions like the South and West; when laws like the 1981 tax bill came up, those regions’ Democrats voted with Reagan. So too on farm policy reform and free trade were there inherent challenges in reaching “New Democrats” in the Northeast: voters and politicians there valued cheaper farm products, and so they were okay taking trade-offs like environmental provisions in the Farm Bill (“swampbuster” and “sodbuster” clauses) for lower price supports for farm commodities that disproportionately hurt family farmers relative to larger corporate farms.
This extended though, too, into the “people power” approach of these Midwestern populists: they challenged the role and influence of “big money” in politics. Politicians like Paul Wellstone and Tom Harkin emphasized their work with these grassroots groups like COACT and the Iowa Citizen Action Network, respectively, and in the case of Harkin and Texas Agriculture Commissioner Jim Hightower, established venues like the New Populist Forum to talk about issues and how they could empower people over corporations. That was at odds with a changing national Democratic Party, which under chair Chuck Manatt and alongside fundraising outfits like the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (featuring a young Rahm Emanuel) sought to bring that sweet, sweet corporate PAC money into the Democratic fold. Is a party reliant on corporate money and prioritizing the voices of “superdelegates”—the party “elite”—going to mesh with these grassroots politics?
