Farmer-Labor Lars
| 🌾 | |
| Era | The Seventies |
|---|---|
| Age | 62-68 |
| Home | Otter Tail County, MN |
| Demographic | rural, Scandinavian stock, prairie populist |
| Lean | Lean Democrat |
| Race | white |
A farmer in his sixties in west-central Minnesota, shaped politically by the farm co-operative movement and the Nonpartisan League before he aligned with any national party. He is the cast's rural left-wing voter, a Democrat who has never set foot on a campus.
Who they stand for
Lars stands for prairie populism. This tradition includes the Nonpartisan League of North Dakota, the Farmer-Labor Party that merged with Minnesota's Democrats in 1944 to form the DFL, and the co-operative grain elevators and rural electric associations that gave the movement its institutions. Its leading politicians included Humphrey, Mondale, McCarthy and McGovern of South Dakota. Its opponents were the grain exchanges, the railroads and the banks.
The decade brought sharp swings in the farm economy. The 1972 grain sale to the Soviet Union raised crop prices, and Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz told farmers to expand or leave farming. Land values and farm debt both rose as a result. Prices then fell. In 1979, the American Agriculture Movement drove tractors to Washington in protest at falling farm income. Carter's 1980 grain embargo against the Soviet Union felt to farmers like Lars like a betrayal by a president of his own party.
Hubert Humphrey held these counties in the 1968 election. Nixon carried Minnesota in 1972. Carter won Minnesota in 1976, with Mondale as his running mate, but lost North and South Dakota. Unlike Sheboygan Walt, Lars wants government to be actively involved in the economy rather than staying out of it.
Playing to them
Lars responds well to price supports, co-operative credit, antitrust action against the grain trade and the railroads, and rural programmes that take the form of durable institutions rather than one-off payments. He does not forgive an export embargo, a farm policy written to benefit large corporate operators, a bailout for banks, or being grouped together with the campus left by a president who fails to see the difference between the two.
Winning his support costs the support of Muncie Merle and Sun City Dot, who regard agricultural price-parity programmes as a form of socialism. Sheboygan Walt wants the same support for milk prices that Lars wants, but nothing else that Lars wants, so a president can win the support of both only through price-support policy. Berkeley Bruce belongs to the same party as Lars and objects to nothing that Lars wants. A president who wins Lars's support by mocking university students loses Bruce's support. A president who wins Bruce's support by mocking rural voters loses Lars's support.
Where they live
The five states where Farmer-Labor Lars makes up the largest share of the electorate in the seventies:
- North Dakota
- Minnesota
- South Dakota
- Montana
- Iowa