The crucial upper Midwest.

• Author: Nichols, John
• Position: Essay

For those who still believe the tales told by pundits and

partisans about the conservative landscape of American politics, a drive across Minnesota into northern Iowa, over the Mississippi River to Illinois and then up into western Wisconsin makes no sense. Small towns and cities here are separated by vast stretches of farmland. People raise flags, march in parades, and hold true to those "rocksolid values" shaped across generations. And here's the confusing part for the pundit panels that think it is possible to explain everything about America from inside the D.C. Beltway: A lot of the "rock-solid values" are progressive.

These folks gripe about wars, worry about privacy in an age of surveillance, and can't figure out why Republican governors and politicians in Washington are so intent on shredding the social contract.

These are the people who sent Paul Wellstone and Russ Feingold and Tom Harkin and Paul Simon and Tammy Baldwin to the U.S. Senate. And these are the people who have kept the Democratic Party in the game of Presidential politics. Indeed, when you look at those red-versus-blue maps of the United States after the quadrennial exercise of choosing a chief executive, the vast expanses of Republican red that fill the interior of the United States are broken up by great big islands of Democrat blue in the upper Midwest--dozens of counties along the Mississippi, across the Minnesota Iron Range and the north country of Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan that just keep voting Democratic.

Yet these counties, these states, are rarely respected by the Democratic National Committee. They are not supported--let alone defended--by top Democrats in times of trouble, as was evident when President Obama and most Washington Democrats avoided Wisconsin during the 2011 uprising that saw hundreds of thousands of union members and their supporters protest Governor Scott Walker's assault on public-sector unions. The same lack of interest was evident when the President and top Democrats failed to step up as Michigan Republicans were implementing an anti-labor "right-to-work" law in 2012.

A few years back, it dawned on savvy Republicans that they might be able to take apart the infrastructure of progressive politics in the upper Midwest--with an eye toward changing the politics of the nation. So it is that, with massive infusions of money from deep pocket funders such as the Koch brothers--$85 million for the gubernatorial campaigns of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker since 2010; $65.3 million (nearly $36 a vote) for Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner's 2014 campaign--and a determination to remake politics, Republican politicians and their allies have shaken up the heartland.

The region has been rocked by political, social, and economic turbulence that has frequently made national news in...