12/25/2023 0 Comments Time capsule lost judgment![]() Many Republican leaders in the state believed that Gov. Tragically, the country lawyer from Mauston suffered a series of severe heart attacks a month later - a fifth and fatal one occurring two-and-half days after the first one - setting off a series of legal fireworks for his replacement. The dark circles and deep lines on his face revealed more than a hint of strain. Friends and supporters noticed how exhausted he looked after the election. The campaign, however, had taken a devastating physical toll on Loomis. The voters of Wisconsin overwhelmingly agreed. “Our present state government,” declared Loomis in a radio interview in early October, “has lacked competency based upon knowledge of and experience in governmental affairs, has shown brutal disrespect for the will of the people, astonishing lack of diplomacy, judgment, dignity and integrity - in its all-out determination to replace government of, by and for the people with the will of one man!” Heil, he said, was an embarrassment to “Fighting Bob” La Follette’s progressive tradition, a legacy that had made Wisconsin a “laboratory for democracy.” Heil, a wealthy steel manufacturer from Milwaukee, had defeated La Follette’s son, Philip, in the state’s 1938 gubernatorial race. Running rings around his opponents while visiting virtually every town, city and rural community in the state, Loomis ran up huge pluralities in heavily-populated Milwaukee and Dane counties while carrying 51 of the state’s 71 counties.įocusing on fiscal frugality and economic issues, Loomis hammered Heil throughout the campaign, accusing the Republican governor of establishing the most “incompetent one-man rule to be found anywhere in the nation.” Asserting that Heil had been an absentee chief executive, the Progressive candidate also lambasted his Republican opponent for bringing “ridicule upon the state” as a result of some of his public utterances. “Spike” Loomis - a nickname given to him as a young boy - waged a near picture-perfect campaign in the fall of 1942, out-hustling his major-party opposition at every opportunity. Zeidler, who eventually served three terms as the Socialist mayor of Milwaukee and later headed his party’s ticket in the 1976 presidential campaign, garnered 11,295 votes while finishing ahead of two other minor-party candidates in the race.Ī former president of the Wisconsin Senate and an FDR-appointed, one-time director of the state’s Rural Electrification Administration, Loomis had lost a heartbreaker to Heil two years earlier, losing to the Republican governor by 12,000 votes out of nearly 1.4 million cast. Loomis swamped his Republican and Democratic rivals, garnering 397,664 votes to Heil’s 291,945 and 98,153 for Sullivan. Loomis unexpectedly trounced Republican incumbent Julius P. While Minnesota’s neighboring Farmer-Labor Party went out with barely a whimper and most of the country’s other minor parties fared poorly at the ballot box that autumn, the most spectacular - and ultimately tragic - achievement by a third-party candidate in the 1942 mid-term elections occurred in Wisconsin’s three-way gubernatorial campaign where 49-year-old former attorney general Orland S. Just 36 days after winning the governorship, this week in 1942 death cruelly intervened and denied the Wisconsin Progressive Party one of its greatest electoral achievements in the party’s twelve-year history. Tulsi Gabbard Announces Departure from Democratic Party
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