U.S. ELECTIONS | Guide to the 2008 Election
17 January 2008
Minnesota's Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party
Local Democratic Party affiliate began as a third party
Washington -- Because of the federal structure of the U.S. government, specific election processes are determined at the local level, and this decentralization of government is reflected in the national political parties, which depend on their state and local branches to rally voters on Election Day. Each state branch of the Democratic and Republican parties has its own character and brings different constituencies to the national party.
The local idiosyncrasies of U.S. political parties are evident in Minnesota, where the state’s branch of the Democratic Party proudly clings to its local identity: the Democratic-Farmer-Labor (DFL) Party. The origins of the DFL date to 1920, when a labor leader in Chicago invited farmers and workers from across the country to meet in his city. In the 1920s and 1930s, the party ran a number of candidates for state and local office in Minnesota who benefited from the ill fortune of the then-dominant Republican Party.
The issue was the worldwide economic downturn of the late 1920s and early 1930s. Since the Republicans were in power nationally and in the state when the Depression began, Minnesotans voted them out.
The first Farmer-Labor governor in Minnesota was Floyd Olson, elected in 1931, who initiated a progressive state income tax, created a social security program for the elderly, expanded the state's environmental conservation programs, guaranteed the right to collective bargaining and instituted a minimum wage. Meanwhile, the Farmer-Labor Party came to control both of the state's U.S. Senate seats.
By World War II, the Farmer-Labor party had weakened. In 1944, it merged with the state's Democratic Party to form the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party. The merger helped boost the prospects of both groups. Soon, the new DFL was a powerful force in the state's politics.
Among DFL members who won national acclaim were senators Hubert Humphrey, one of the DFL's founders, Eugene McCarthy and Walter Mondale. Humphrey and Mondale went on to become vice president -- Humphrey under President Lyndon Johnson and Mondale under President Jimmy Carter. McCarthy is remembered for mounting a challenge to the renomination of Lyndon Johnson for president in 1968 before Johnson announced he would not run.
The DFL is still active in Minnesota as the state affiliate of the national Democratic Party.
