When Democrats Won the Heartland

We’re hosting Cory Haala tomorrow evening on UND’s campus for the annual Wilkins Lecture. Haala will be presenting on his very recent book, When Democrats Won the Heartland: Progressive Populism in the Age of Reagan, 1978-1992 (2026). The book is a dense political history of the rise of populist Democrats during the 1980s Farm Crisis in Minnesota, the Dakotas, Wisconsin, and Iowa. The book argues that economic populism, in particular, formed the basis for a coalition of labor, farmers, traditional liberal, progressive democrats, Native Americans, Hispanics, Hmong, and other groups. This coalition, often to the chagrin of establishment “Walter Mondale” type Democrats managed to find remarkable success across states that had voted for Republicans (including Ronald Reagan) over the past two decades. For me, Haala’s book offers an origin story for many of the Democrats who were in office here in North Dakota when I first arrived: Byron Dorgan, Kent Conrad, and later Heidi Heitkamp. It…