What The Hell Just Happened
November 21st, 2024
By Jim Fuglie
Okay, so last month I promised you a woman President of the United States. So much for my predictability quotient.
Lesson 1: Never promise something you can’t control. And nobody, not even Melania, can control Donald Trump.
The rest of my predictions were not too bad. I just missed a big one. By a mile. I predicted Republicans were pretty much going to sweep North Dakota, though. I got that right.
But I was pretty confident all along that Donald Trump was not going to be elected President of the United States. Dang. How did that happen?
Well, if North Dakota is any barometer, I can figure it out. Donald Trump got 67 percent of the vote here, a slightly larger percentage than he got in his 2020 race against Joe Biden. That happened in a lot of states this year.
Across the Red River in Minnesota, where traditionally Democrats do pretty well, the Kamala Harris-Tim Walz team snuck across the finish line with just 51 percent of the vote, with almost half of Minnesota voters forsaking having one of their own as Vice President of the United States, joining Hubert Humphrey and Walter Mondale.
Over there, the upcoming legislative session is going to be something to behold. Democrats hold a slim 34-33 majority in the state Senate, while the House is going to be tied at 67-67, pending the outcome of recounts in two House races. The DFL candidate leads by a slim margin in each of those races, so if one of the recounts goes the other way, the Republicans would control the House, 68-66. That would leave one chamber controlled by each party by one vote. Wow! (I’m writing this just a few days after the elections — the recounts could be done by the time you read this.)
The good news is, Tim Walz will still be down the hall in the Minnesota governor’s office with pen in hand, instead of presiding over the United States Senate in Washington, D.C. But, on my side of the Red River, we’re probably going to be rid of our Governor, Doug Burgum, who’s likely to be a member of Donald Trump’s cabinet. That’s why he’s logged a few hundred thousand air miles campaigning for Trump.
I probably should have expected a Trump win Tuesday. I should have listened to my own words, which I wrote four years ago; “Nobody ever got rich betting against Doug Burgum.”
I said, only half-jokingly, to a friend this week, after hearing the election results and surmising that it was going to catapult Burgum to our nation’s capital, “That’s going to improve the quality of both North Dakota and Washington.” I think sending smart North Dakotans to Washington to help run the country is probably a pretty good idea.
But back to the state capitals. While the Democrats are going to have something to say about what happens in Minnesota, that’s not the case in North Dakota. Democrats here just suffered through the worst election since the merger of the Democratic Party and the Nonpartisan League back in the 1950s.
Consider…
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