MINOT, N.D. — Over the Thanksgiving holiday in November of 2015, I met soon-to-be governor Doug Burgum for the first time.
He’d asked for a meeting at his downtown Fargo office to ask me if I thought he could win if he ran for governor.
I didn’t tell him he couldn’t, though that thought was in my mind. I told him it would be a tall mountain to climb, and that it would cost him a lot of money, and that he probably wouldn’t win against Wayne Stenehjem, the long-time attorney general who had been winning landslide statewide elections for a generation.
So of course, Burgum mopped the floor with Stenehjem, picking up nearly 60% of the vote in the NDGOP’s primary on his way to turning North Dakota politics on his head.
What did I learn from that turn of events?
Don’t bet against Doug Burgum.
It’s wisdom I’m holding to now as Burgum’s nascent presidential campaign, not yet officially announced, gets brushed off by the lazy knee-jerk pundits and shallow social media hot-takers.
I can understand why they feel that way. Burgum is hardly a household name in national politics. Most Americans couldn’t tell you who the governor of North Dakota is. And North Dakota itself isn’t exactly fertile political ground. This isn’t a swing state. We have just three Electoral College votes to offer candidates.
Our state has offered just three presidential candidates, and one of them probably shouldn’t count.
Theodore Roosevelt held the presidency from 1901 to 1908, and while he loved North Dakota, and famously credited his time here as important to his political career, his political career was in New York, where he was born and lived most of his life.
The other two candidates represented third parties.
William Lemke, a member of the Nonpartisan League who served as attorney general and for nine terms in the U.S. House of Representatives, ran for president in 1936. He was a candidate for the now-defunct
Union Party,
founded by a coalition that included notoriously anti-Semitic radio broadcaster
Father Charles Coughlin.
More recently, Gary Johnson ran for president on the Libertarian Party ticket in 2012 and 2016. He was born in Minot, but left the state when he was 3 years old.
So, when it comes to producing presidential candidates, North Dakota is
no Ohio.
This relative obscurity will be a tough thing for Burgum to overcome. It will be a struggle for him to get attention in a chaotic GOP field alongside better-known political heavyweights such as Gov. Ron DeSantis, former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley and, of course, disgraced former President Donald Trump.
But maybe that’s an asset for Burgum. He doesn’t have the name recognition, but he also doesn’t have the baggage, and the chaos of a Republican party that is desperately trying to figure out what it stands for may work in his favor.
Burgum’s bid is a longshot.
But, as I learned in 2016, it’s foolish to bet against him.
