After the 2023 Duluth election cycle, I feel compelled to write an homage to the big tent. It is a nod to the power of candidates who avoid closing themselves off, the ones who have dialogue with people with whom they don’t agree. This year’s election was not an easy one: there was some blatant misogyny and an influx of outside money, from shadowy PACs to the crude but large arsenal of one state party, and an unsettled electorate made some moves. Those who cast their eyes widest were the ones who positioned themselves the best.

The power of the big tent is increasingly obvious in an era when so many people self-segregate into like-minded social circles and media bubbles. Duluth’s right is now so moribund that it can’t get candidates through primaries; its media echo chambers, while influential in other places, are useless in a city like Duluth. The hard left, after several election cycles of ascendancy, finally took near full control of the local DFL machinery and then saw its vote totals regress to their lowest levels in years, the power of those three letters unable to overcome rhetoric that only appeals to the already converted, especially in a year when it had no standard-bearer at the top of the ticket. Big tents are not exclusively the territory of moderates—figures left and right have figured out how to command them—but the edges of the spectrum are barely having the conversation these days.

The mayoral race illustrated both the allure of the big tent and its pitfalls. After eight years in office, Emily Larson suffered a crushing 20-point defeat. It seemed a shocking fate for someone who occupied the center of Duluth’s political spectrum, a firm liberal voice in a firmly liberal city. In theory she still commanded the big tent, and she had plenty of positive indicators on her side, and she spoke in sweeping terms about Duluth and its collective future. Even four years ago, though, as I knocked doors across the city, it became clear that having Larson as an ally was not a net positive for some similarly aligned candidates; something had gone awry in her relationship with many voters. It was never entirely clear who her sweeping ‘we’ included. Certainly not the right, which did not share all her values; only reluctantly members of the further left, which loved neither candidate but tended to prefer Larson’s messaging and frowned at Reinert’s conservative support. Not necessarily anyone who was struggling to make ends meet, since a two-term incumbent is in a poor place to highlight the things in a city that need fixing. After eight years of ups and downs through budget decisions, her labor allies were likewise lukewarm. She gave it her all after an ugly result in the primary, but two months cannot make up for eight years of people drifting out of the tents in ones and twos.  

Larson’s great strength is as an authentic communicator, and her ability to pull forth powerful rhetoric in the right situations was part of what made her seem like a rising star in the Minnesota DFL. This can seem like a contradiction for someone who was clearly not communicating as well as she could with a large swath of the electorate, but the flip side of authenticity can be a poor poker face. It was never hard for someone in a room with Larson to know when she was paying rapt attention or when she was disinterested, when she felt one’s pain herself and when her claim that she ‘heard’ or ‘saw’ her interlocutors felt pat. I experienced both myself over the years, and if I did as someone who had a modest but real working relationship with her, I can only imagine how that could feel for a rank-and-file city employee or a constituent who does not often speak to people in power. Her debate performance heading into election, in which she seemed to ooze disdain for the upstart on the stage next her, encapsulated her paradox: filled with pride in her record, hurt by the attacks lobbed her way, her time too short to engage in a true inquisition over what went wrong, powering ahead as best she could. It was a Greek tragedy in full, though I am curious to see her next act.

Into this drama stepped Roger Reinert, an empty vessel into which a lot of voters poured a desire for change. He attracted a right that despised Larson’s rhetoric and certain areas of focus, Democrats who’d felt slighted by Larson for one reason or another, people who saw in him a hearkening back to the less contentious Don Ness era when he built his political reputation, and some who just wanted something new after eight years. He stayed vague enough to bring them all in and he threw around some promises to claim more. This election felt intensely personal in part because there was not a lot of ideological space between the two candidates, though contra some narratives, I do think there were some differences between Larson and Reinert that genuinely matter, including their thoughts on what could be done about downtown Duluth, their stances on the Lester Park Golf Course, and the future of the library. Having opened up the tent to so many people and ideas, Reinert has set some lofty expectations; he now needs to stake the tent down into some core grounding so it can stand in harder headwinds off the lake. We’ll see if this peripatetic striver can muster it.

One group of candidates did seem to find that grounding this past election cycle. The clearest winners in 2023 Duluth were in the labor-backed council camp, which saw Arik Forsman, Lynn Nephew, and Janet Kennedy marched to victory by overwhelming margins, and Roz Randorf, who has her idiosyncrasies but is usually a fellow traveler, won unopposed. They, too, cast wide nets, but their campaigns still felt clearly grounded in certain visions. Reinert will need them to move anything forward as mayor, and they are here both to put the brakes on any riskier promises and to move the city in the direction of some sort of Duluth-centered consensus.

Late on election night, as I sat with a group of people from this camp at the Reef, I realized that we had, unwittingly, assembled the diverse sort of coalition many further to the left aspire to, a heterodox group of people sharing stories about how they became who they were: some raised in privilege and others in trailers, some grateful for the support of public institutions in their lives and others motivated to change it by the opposite experiences. Some have organized labor in their veins; others seem far from it, but are children of a lost majority in northeast Minnesota and know the sorts of voters their coalition needs to reclaim it. Everyone there knew that they could not move their own platform forward alone. They would need to negotiate and find some common ground.

The organized labor movement has had its failings over time, and it cannot put back together its 1960s coalition, or for that matter its Duluth area 2008 coalition. But its basic mode of doing politics, of inviting a lot of people into a sometimes rowdy room and collectively sorting out differences, has a lot to offer in an era when others try to live off high-flung rhetoric from a magnetic personality or a narrow plurality and sheer brute force. Somewhere in here lies the politics that can win the large majorities necessary to steer the ship of state. The election, of course, is the easy part: now it is time to do the work.