Robert M. La Follette, the founder of this magazine, fell short in his independent progressive bid for the presidency in the fall of 1924. It was a tough loss for a campaign that opposed corporate monopolies, promised to strengthen unions, supported civil rights, and dared to challenge the “dictatorship of plutocracy” that the U.S. Senator from Wisconsin saw looming over the United States.
One hundred years later, the American electorate has chosen as its forty-seventh President an authoritarian oligarch who is even more threatening than the forces La Follette took on. Indeed, with the election of billionaire grifter Donald Trump, it may seem as if everything that progressives have worked for over the past century has been rejected by an American electorate that—in the decade after the 1924 election—had embraced a New Deal vision for economic and social democracy that grew from the seeds La Follette planted. The trajectory was so clear that historian Bernard Weisberger would argue that Franklin D. Roosevelt “completed the elder La Follette’s work.”
Now, the White House will be controlled, more completely and more aggressively than ever before, by a President who aims to dismantle the regulatory state that was imagined by La Follette and established by FDR as a bulwark against corporate monopoly and overreach by plutocrats. This is a heartbreaking result for progressives—a circumstance that calls to mind the initial response from La Follette to his 1924 defeat: “The American people have chosen to retain in power the reactionary Republican administration with its record of corruption and subservience to the dictates of organized monopoly.”
Even more troubling today is the fact that Trump and his Republican allies do not borrow their ideas from the American conservatives of the era when men like Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover did the bidding of Wall Street. Rather, they look to European strongmen of the past and present, to remake America along lines that Trump himself suggests will be dictatorial. Our future, says historian Timothy Snyder, will be governed by a wannabe autocrat who “takes the tools of dictators and adapts them for the Internet.”
It is not unreasonable to suggest that the 2024 election has produced the most dystopian result since the 1828 election that took the presidency from an enlightened incumbent, John Quincy Adams, and handed it to Andrew Jackson, an openly racist enslaver who would violently displace the Native peoples of the eastern United States, establish a patronage system that replaced career public servants with partisan cronies, disregard the courts, and threaten to use the military to force Americans to accept his economic and political agenda.
The results of this year’s election have inspired considerable speculation about whether this marks the end of the American experiment, as it has been historically understood, and the opening of a new era in which the instability of this country’s democracy threatens not just free and fair elections but everything from abortion rights to civil rights and union rights. In such a circumstance, despair comes easily and hope is in short supply. Yet, there was a twist to the results from La Follette’s Wisconsin, which over the past quarter century has been America’s most consistent battleground state.
Trump, who narrowly won Wisconsin in 2016 and narrowly lost it in 2020, won it again in 2024—by around 29,000 votes. With his victory in the Great Lakes states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, Trump was able to reclaim the presidency at the end of a night that saw Republicans take control of the U.S. Senate—with the defeat of Montana Democrat Jon Tester, an old-school farm populist from the state that produced La Follette’s 1924 running mate, Senator Burton K. Wheeler, and Ohio Democrat Sherrod Brown, an outspoken advocate for labor rights who was far ahead of his time in opposing the free-trade deals that have devastated manufacturing towns in Ohio and across the country.
And what of Robert M. La Follette’s seat? While “Fighting Bob” was long gone, having died a few months after his independent progressive presidential bid of 1924, the seat he held from 1906 to 1925 was on the Wisconsin ballot in 2024. In the ninety-nine years since his death, La Follette’s seat has been held by a progressive Republican who ultimately aligned with FDR on domestic issues (his son, Robert M. La Follette Jr.); a member of Wisconsin’s independent Progressive Party (La Follette Jr.); a dangerously reactionary Republican whose name became synonymous with the politics of innuendo and guilt by association (Joseph McCarthy); a maverick Democrat who made his name by exposing Pentagon waste (William Proxmire); a centrist Democrat who aligned with Bill Clinton (Herb Kohl); and, for the past twelve years, progressive Democrat Tammy Baldwin.
In 2024, Baldwin sought a new term as a supporter of Harris, a defender of abortion rights, and a proud member of the LGBTQ+ community who was targeted in Republican attack ads across the state. Her challenger fit the precise model for Republican rivals to Democratic incumbents in the 2024 cycle. The scion of a well-to-do Wisconsin family, Eric Hovde has never held public office. But he had a qualification that appealed to outgoing Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky, and the National Republican Senatorial Committee: immense personal wealth (much of it made as a California banker) and a willingness to spend freely on attack ads that wildly distorted Baldwin’s political record while poking at her personal life. These included one which weaponized her identity and made references to “Tammy and her girlfriend.”
Lavish spending by billionaire-backed conservative political action committees made Hovde a competitor, even after a disastrous debate appearance where he admitted to voters in “America’s Dairyland” that he knew almost nothing about the pending federal Farm Bill. Hovde also benefited from the collapse of local media, the overwhelming influence of big money on what were once grassroots campaigns, and the deepening divide between Democrats and Republicans. All of these manifestations of the nationalization of American politics led to widespread speculation that a Trump triumph in Wisconsin would sweep out Baldwin—just as a 1980 win for Republican President Ronald Reagan in Wisconsin contributed to the defeat of Democratic Senator Gaylord Nelson, the founder of Earth Day, and just as Trump’s 2016 success in Wisconsin helped to upend the comeback bid of former Democratic Senator Russ Feingold, another progressive titan.
Could Baldwin hold on? Like Feingold, she had a record of standing in the La Follette tradition to oppose the Iraq War and the USA Patriot Act, of championing civil liberties and women’s rights, and of aligning with workers and small farmers against corporate interests. And, like Feingold, she was under heavy attack in a year when Trump was surging.
But Baldwin, a deeply rooted Wisconsinite with political skills that have helped to win every county board, state legislative, Congressional, and U.S. Senate election race she’s run since 1986, recognized the political volatility that had overtaken the nation in the post-COVID-19 era. She ran a campaign that embraced many of the themes adopted by the national Democrats—including outspoken support for abortion rights and warnings about Republican threats to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. But she did not stop there.
Baldwin ran a campaign that borrowed heavily from a progressive populist tradition that extended back to La Follette. She ripped into Hovde as an Orange County, California, millionaire who had returned to Wisconsin primarily to advance his long-held political ambitions, and she did so with the humor that had always been a part of progressive politics in Wisconsin: Noting that her opponent had been honored as an outstanding figure in Orange County, Baldwin gleefully informed crowds that, “We have a Brown County, Wisconsin, and a Green County, Wisconsin, but not an Orange County, Wisconsin.”
Humor aside, the key to Baldwin’s victory was an understanding, rooted in Wisconsin history but not well understood by national Democrats, that voters are ready to respond to explicit appeals for working-class solidarity in the face of plutocratic overreach.
While the Harris campaign, and those of several other Democratic Senate candidates, focused a lot of their attention on reaching out to suburban Republicans—to the extent that the Democratic presidential nominee made multiple Wisconsin appearances with former House Republican Conference chair Liz Cheney and other “Never Trump” Republicans—Baldwin spent her time on factory floors with union workers and in the countryside with small farmers. Her ads featured Teamsters explaining how she had helped save their pensions, and shipbuilders talking about how she’d fought to keep their jobs in Northeast Wisconsin. One ad featured dairy farmers referring to Hovde’s disparaging remarks: “A California banker criticizing Wisconsin farmers for not working hard? We know what that is,” says the woman farmer’s voice-over, as a load of manure is swept away.
La Follette would have approved of that ad. So did the voters of the township where he was born and raised. Primrose, which remains largely rural, and has its share of dairy farms, voted 324-205 for the Democrat—as Baldwin overcame the Republican surge, by a margin of more than 29,000 votes in the state, and kept Robert M. La Follette’s Senate seat in progressive hands.