> US Left doesn't know "tactical voting"?
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> Ulhas
Michael Pugliese recently alluded to the Non Partisan League, which managed to subvert the Republican party, in a region where the Democrats have never been very strong:
"North Dakota is ... a place where people on the outside of the elite economic and political structures of the state once used the two-party duopoly to build an independent political force that swept the Upper Midwest from 1915 to 1925. It was not a new party, like the Progressives of Wisconsin or the Farmer-Labor Party of Minnesota, but an organization that used the Republican and Democratic nominations to advance its own agenda: the Non-Partisan League (NPL)."
http://www.freestateproject.org/npl.htm
"By the election of 1918, the League had captured the control of the Republican Party in North Dakota, elected the Legislature, and elected their candidate as governor in North Dakota. In a single session of the State Legislature, they enacted all five planks of the platform of "State Socialism," including the foundation of the state-owned Bank of North Dakota, which continues to this day. The New York Times, the organ of the ruling class, seriously alarmed, wrote in genuine trepidation (the plutes were already cutting a deal with Lenin) of "Bolshevism on the Prairie."
http://www.sonic.net/~doretk/ArchiveARCHIVE/MARK%20EVANS/PopulistSocialism.html