Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz applauds as President Joe Biden speaks at Dutch Creek Farms in Northfield, Minnesota. AP/Andrew Harnik
It was damn cold in St. Paul—even cold for Minnesotans—on a weekend in late January 2005, when one or two dozen wannabe politicians trudged into the hall of the Carpenters Local Union 322. They had come to learn how to campaign for office. Most were new to electoral politics. That included a 40-year-old high school social studies teacher and football coach named Tim Walz.
The three-day training session was called Camp Wellstone. It was the signature program of Wellstone Action, a nonprofit created by aides and supporters of Sen. Paul Wellstone (D-Minn.), after the the fiery prairie progressive died in a plane crash in October 2002. The group emphasized Wellstone’s devotion to grassroots politics; Wellstone had first been elected to the Senate in 1990 by mobilizing an army of volunteers that included college students and local activists who mostly had not been involved in campaigns previously.
Walz showed up at the union hall wearing a t-shirt, blue jeans, and sneakers. He was new to politics. The previous August, he had taken a few of his students to a George W. Bush rally at a local quarry in their home town of Mankato, a small city in the southern part of the state. When they entered the event, security spotted a John Kerry sticker on the wallet of one of the students and wouldn’t let the group in. This so angered Walz that he signed up to volunteer for the Kerry campaign. A command sergeant major in the National Guard, in which he had served since 1981, he eventually became a district coordinator for Veterans for Kerry. After the 2004 election—in which Bush defeated Kerry—Walz decided to stick with politics and that led him to Camp Wellstone.
A middled-aged white guy from a conservative part of the state who had coached his school’s football team to a state championship—his fellow campers at first wondered if Walz might be a Republican. (Camp Wellstone was a nonpartisan project and obligated to assist candidates of different political stripes.) But they soon figured out that Walz, who was set on running for the US House of Representatives against a six-term Republican incumbent, was no right-winger. “Tim Walz came in saying he was disgruntled by politics and mad at being denied entrance to the Bush rally,” recalls Pam Costain, a founder and director of training for Wellstone Action
One of Walz’s classmates was Mark Ritchie, who had recently worked on a national voter registration campaign. During that effort, he had witnessed what he calls “manipulation” and “denying people the right to vote” in states across the country and in Minnesota. That had propelled him to consider running for office and to attend the session, where he bonded with Walz. “We were both mad about where democracy was heading,” he says
The attendees were schooled in what was called the “Wellstone triangle”—the necessity of connecting three different activities: electoral organizing; grass-roots, issues-oriented organizing; and the formulation of public policy. “Paul had argued that there was an unfortunate disconnect between electoral politics and people who did community organizing,” Costain says. “People in electoral politics had disdain for grassroots organizing and people who did community organizing had cynicism for electoral politics. Paul’s view was that we can’t win without the three parts of the triangle.”
The camp also highlighted what Costain calls Wellstone’s “guiding values”: “integrity, authenticity, talking to people in plain-speak about their problems, and the joy of politics.” Wellstone, she notes, viewed politics as “not about grievance and anger, but getting to know people to solve problems.”
Overall, the training session was short on ideology and long on pragmatic concerns. The potential candidates—who were interested in seeking a variety of city, state, and federal offices—received courses on the basics: how to conduct door-to-door canvassing, how to fundraise, how to build a campaign team, how to hold a press conference, how to write and deliver a stump speech. The instructors were mostly young politicos with campaign experience. This included Melvin Carter, the current mayor of St. Paul, and Peggy Flanagan, a 25-year-old veteran of the Wellstone campaign and a Native American organizer who had the previous year won a Minneapolis school board seat. (Today she is Minnesota’s lieutenant governor.) A fundraiser for ret. Gen. Wesley Clark, who had run unsuccessfully in the 2004 Democratic presidential primary, handled the course on attracting funders. “It was frightening what you had to do to get money,” Ritchie remembers.
Throughout the weekend, there was role-playing in which the attendees held mock press conferences and gave stump speeches. They were also taught how to handle campaign crises. One scenario Camp Wellstone used was a situation in which a campaign manager is revealed to be having an affair with a staffer. What do you as a candidate do about that?
“This was all about brass tacks,” says Ralph Remington, an actor and arts advocate who was at Camp Wellstone in preparation for a run for an open seat on the Minneapolis city council. “How can you differentiate between persuadable and non-persuadable voters. The dos and don’ts of direct mail. What do you say at the door? What do you say in an interview? You’re a candidate. You’re a product. How do you get your product to market? How do you get the product to succeed?”
During the session on stump speeches, Ritchie noticed that the several participants who had served in the military, including Walz, delivered strong and coherent addresses, much more so than the others. Remington recalls that Walz in his speech talked about being a coach and a family man and his time in the military and how all this would inform how he would act as a public servant. “He emphasized how he had been raised and the values of his community,” Remington says. “I could see he was hitting on the right mojo. Tim came across as very folksy, very next-door, the guy at the hardware store. I knew Minnesotans, and I knew that would resonate. I knew that he would win some office eventually.”
The attendees forged friendships that would continue in the coming years. In 2006, as Mark Ritchie ran for secretary of state and Walz for Congress, they occasionally campaigned together. “I did parades different from Tim,” Ritchie says. “While I walked down the middle, he would run from side to side, and I realized that’s how you do parades.” Remington recalls that that camp attendees held reunions with cook-outs and happy hours. “We would be sounding boards for each other’s decisions—say, what donations to take or not to take—and provide each other a sense of accountability,” Ritchie notes.
Many of them won. Ritchie was victorious in his campaign for secretary of state. Remington was elected to the Minneapolis city council. Others in their class won state legislative or local seats. Andrew Lugar, another participant, went on to serve twice as US attorney for Minnesota. (He’s currently in the job.) And Walz won his first race for office in 2006 and was re-elected to Congress five times—in a district Trump won in 2016—before successfully running for governor in 2018 with Flanagan, then a state representative, as his running mate.
“That class success rate was extraordinary,” says Costain. “Now, watching Tim on the national stage, I see he’s so reminiscent of Paul. He has this relatable ability. He can talk progressive politics for real people. I see a lot of Paul in Tim.”
Wellstone, who considered running for president in 2000 and opted not to, had his political career tragically cut short. But he inspired his colleagues to set up a shop that gave a boost to the political career of Walz and many others. Though Wellstone has been gone for over two decades, there now is a Wellstone Democrat on the national ticket.
