March of the Governors: Jesse Ventura

To call our thirty-eighth governor, Jesse Ventura, unique is to engage in understatement. He was Minnesota’s first third-party governor since Elmer Benson in 1936. Though he ran on the Reform Party ticket, that party elected no one else, so he had no allies in the legislature. His plurality, 37% of the vote, was the lowest of any Minnesota governor. No other governor had been a national celebrity before election, and none before him used the governorship to enrich himself while in office. Despite everything, his term (1999-2003) was a reasonably successful one, marked by substantial tax rebates, a reform of property taxes and school funding, and the foundations of the Twin Cities light rail system. Ventura declined to run for a second term.