The second case of considerable defection among the Republican Scandinavians occurred after the widespread development of agrarian discontent in the late eighties. The farmers and laborers, American and Scandinavian alike, felt the stress of hard times, turned to political agencies for relief, forsook the old parties, and formed the party called variously the Populist, People's, and Farmers' Alliance Party. Besides those Norwegians and Swedes who had been for years Republicans, whose political color was fixed by the mordant of slavery and the Civil War, there was then a very large number of men who arrived in the vast immigrant invasions between 1880 and 1885, and who were just coming into the full exercise of the rights of citizenship. An increasing proportion of these later arrivals went to the large cities and towns. All of them were moved less by the traditions of "moral ideas" and more by the contagious discontent of the older settlers and by the arguments of industrial and political agitators. In the election of 1890 a serious break occurred in the Republican Party in Minnesota and in the Dakotas. There was a general impression in the rural districts of Minnesota that the Republican candidate for governor, William R. Merriam, a wealthy banker of St. Paul, was renominated for his second term by a political ring composed of lumber-kings, wheat dealers, and millers who combined to cheat and rob the farmer. Accordingly the Farmers' Alliance nominated a third ticket headed by S. M. Owen, the editor of an agricultural paper in Minneapolis, who polled a vote of 58,513, and reduced Merriam's vote of 1888 by about 46,000.[401] Merriam was re-elected by a plurality of less than 2,500, tho he had had more than 24,000 two years before. [401] _Minnesota Legislative Manual_, 1893, 482: 1888 1890 Republican candidate 134,355 88,111 Democratic candidate 110,251 85,844 Prohibition candidate 17,026 8,424 Farmers' Alliance candidate ... 58,513 A careful examination of the votes for 1888 and 1890 in such strong Scandinavian counties as Otter Tail, Douglas, Chisago, Freeborn, Polk, and Norman leaves no doubt that the Swedes and Norwegians in very large numbers either voted for Owen, or refused to vote for Merriam.[402] In some cases the Republican vote fell off one-half and even two-thirds, and third-party Alliance candidates for the legislature were elected. A prominent Norwegian writer estimated that "25,000 Norwegian-born farmers turned their backs upon Mr. Merriam and voted for Mr. Owen for governor," disregarding the injunction of the Scandinavian Republican press to "stick to the grand old party, for the grand old party is particularly favorable to the Scandinavians, and the best political party in America."[403] [402] _Minnesota Legislative Manual_, 1889, 397; 1893, 472. [403] Mr. J. J. Skordalsvold in _The North_, Aug. 10, 1892.