Hello and welcome to this day in esoteric political history from Radiotopia.

My name is Jody Avergan.

This day, October 25, 2002, 11 days before the 2002 midterm elections, Minnesota Senator

Paul Wellstone died in a plane crash in Evelith, Minnesota.

The senator's wife, Sheila, their daughter, Marsha, and three staff aides were also

killed along with the pilot and co-pilot of that small plane that crashed.

Wellstone had served two terms as Senator of Minnesota

was running for his third in a close race in a very interesting 2002 midterm

election. We've wanted to talk about Wellstone for a while on this show.

We've received a bunch of emails from folks asking us to talk about Wellstone,

so thank you for those.

To my mind, Wellstone kind of a forgotten figure for many in Democratic politics,

but someone who had a big impact in the

90s and the 2000s and beyond and we'll talk about sort of the legacy of

politicians like Paul Wellstone here to do that as always is Nicole Hammer of Columbia. Hello

Nicky. Hello Jody. So you know I want to start with just a painting a sketch

of Paul Wellstone as a person and Paul Wellstone and his politics and then we'll

talk about his legacy.

You know I will just share that my folks are sort of active in lefty politics and in the

sort of DC think tank world and when Wellstone died in 2002 you know was on the younger side. I don't think I had a sense at the time of who he was.

But I just remember sort of my parents generation this death really hitting them hard in progressive politics.

And I mean, that's honestly kind of one of the reasons I want to do this

...