Mark Dayton became the first Minnesota gubernatorial candidate in 20 years to win a majority of the vote. While his fellow Democrats will frame this as affirmation of his first four years in office, the reality is it's largely due to the waning influence of the Independence Party.
After last week's election, where none of the Independence Party's statewide candidates received 5 percent of the vote, the party will regroup and assess its future. It is the Post-Bulletin's hope that the Independence Party reasserts itself in Minnesota politics.
Since its founding by Dean Barkley in 1992 as the Reform Party, the Independence Party has garnered enough votes in four straight gubernatorial elections to ensure the winning candidate was a plurality governor. Its pinnacle was the historic win by Jesse Ventura in 1998. Ventura and the party broke away from the Reform Party in 2000, creating the Independence Party. Its influence in national politics was evident six years ago when Barkley drew 15 percent of the vote in the U.S. Senate election that ended with Al Franken defeating Norm Coleman by just 312 votes.
After Ventura chose not to run for a second term, the Independence Party continued to attract well-known candidates as its standard bearers, starting with former Democratic Congressman Tim Penny in 2002, former state Finance Commissioner Peter Hutchison in 2006 and longtime Republican activist Tom Horner in 2010. However, this year's gubernatorial candidate, Hannah Nicollet, a longtime political activist, was relatively unknown when she secured the party's endorsement and managed just 2.9 percent of the vote.
That's part of the problem. "It was always an organization in formation, associated with a big name," said University of Minnesota political scientist Larry Jacobs. "I think once they were unable to recruit a big name, they had very little to fall back on."
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One of the Independence Party candidates the Post-Bulletin Editorial Board interviewed for endorsement, secretary of state nominee Bob Helland, presciently told us that his party has to field candidates for local and state offices if it expects to expand its influence. We agree, which is why we invited five Independence candidates, including Tom Price, who ran for House District 27A, to our endorsement interviews.
In post-election interviews, Independence Party Chairman Mark Jenkins said it's time for the party's next generation of leaders to take over, and he expects to be replaced as state chairman when his term expires next year. We hope thoughtful people like Helland, a 29-year-old who received 4.9 percent of the vote for secretary of state, will be ready to assume leadership and rebuild the party at the local level.
The Independence Party has deep roots in southeast Minnesota. The first state chairman of the Reform Party was the late Don Dow, of Rochester. Penny, its gubernatorial candidate in 2002, represented the 1st Congressional District from 1983 to 1995 and is still prominent today as president and chief executive officer of the Southern Minnesota Initiative Foundation.
The Republican wave of last Tuesday wasn't necessarily a mandate from Minnesota citizens, just as the Democratic victories of 2012 wasn't a mandate either. We see it as evidence that many Minnesotans don't identify closely with either major party.
There should be a place for people who are too liberal to be a Republican, but too conservative to be Democrat. The Independence Party was once that home, and it could be again.
