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The Politics of the Great Plains
Jim Kuhnhenn
Washington Bureau Chief, the Kansas City Star
Great Plains politics meander around conventional partisanship much like the Missouri River does through these prairie states. Chalk it up to a native individualism, a stubborn unwillingness to be pigeonholed, or a farm-based world-view that lets a progressive populism coexist with an innate conservatism.
Take Nebraska, a state that routinely votes for Republican presidents, but elects Democrats as Senators and governors. Iowa flips the equation - it supported Dukakis and Clinton over Bush, but elected Republicans to Congress. And Minnesota presents such a schizophrenic profile that one of its senators arguably fits the bill as the most conservative member of the Senate while the other is the embodiment of 1960s style liberalism.
Such political unconvention is not the only tie that binds these seven states. This is farmland, and the hardworking men and women in these rural economies can be as fretful about a drought as they can be about an unfavorable trade policy. And while they'll frown on certain types of government assistance, they have come to count on the government to subsidize their crops and bail them out of disasters.
They tend to share a common ancestry. Yankee immigrants settled in Iowa, Nebraska and Kansas, while Scandinavians and Germans headed for Minnesota and the Dakotas.
Missouri tends to be the region's outcast, included more for geographic convenience than any sense of political kinship. Modern Missouri is more of a hybrid as much northern as it is southern, as much eastern as it is western. But its lineage is decidedly southern. It was populated by migrants from Kentucky and Tennessee and, at the time of the Civil War, was the northernmost slave state. Today, its politics tend to be split along urban-rural lines. It has a Democratic governor and two Republican senators.
Politically, the Great Plains states have a wealthy history.
William Jennings Bryant and the populist movement were born out of Nebraska's boom and bust cycle of the late 19th century. There's still a residue of that populist-reformist tradition in the state, which might explain its vote-splitting ways.
By the 1920s, the populist movement had given birth to strong, Socialist-influenced third parties in Minnesota and North Dakota. In time, the anti-Communist faction of Minnesota's Farmer-Labor Party merged with Democrats to form the Democratic-Farmer-Labor party and produced such Democratic party icons as Hubert Humphrey, Eugene McCarthy and Walter Mondale. North Dakota's Non-Partisan League, once a major broker in state politics, eventually was folded into the Democratic party. Though the state's entire congressional delegation is Democratic, its governor is Republican.
Kansas, perhaps the most partisan Great Plains state, also had its share of farm rebellions but today it is Republican through and through. The 1994 election ushered in two Republican first term House members in Congress, a Republican governor and a Republican legislature. The state's pre-eminent Republican, of course, is Bob Dole. In June, Dole ended a 35-year congressional career to run full-time for president and now stands on the verge of being nominated at the Republican National Convention.
But Dole's departure has roiled the state, pitting the party's rebellious right wing against the party establishment that he represents. The fissures could provide an opening for Kansas Democrats who haven't held a U.S. Senate seat in 64 years.
It's the kind of behavior one would expect from a Great Plains state.
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