​What The Hell Just Happened

By Jim Fuglie

jimfuglie920@gmail.com

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 there were eight statewide offices on the ballot Tuesday, and Republicans won them all. I know, I know the state superintendent race is nonpartisan, but in that race, Kirsten Baesler was the lesser of two evil Republicans. Her opponent, right-winger Jason Heitkamp, tried to play off on the last names of two of his popular cousins, Heidi and Joel. Didn’t work.

It’s not the first time the GOP has swept the statewide races. Democrats didn’t even put up candidates in a couple of them, including, for the second election in a row, letting our giant insurance commissioner Jon Godfread run unopposed. What’s up with that? Are they afraid of the guy because he’s so big? I heard once that, at 6 feet 10 inches, he’s the tallest statewide elected official in America.

But the saddest story in North Dakota was the legislative races. There were 76 legislative seats up for grabs November 5, a little more than half the chamber, because of some redistricting problems and the death of one House member. 76.

The Republicans won 68 of those.

The Democrats won 8.

You read that right, 68-8.

There were eight holdover Democrats in the legislature. So in the upcoming legislative session, there will be 83 Republicans and 11 Democrats in the House, and 42 Republicans and just 5 Democrats in the Senate.

Of course, you can't win if you don't have a horse in the race. Ten Republican Senate candidates and 24 Republican House candidates had no opponents.

You read that right, too. Democrats failed to field a candidate in 34 of the 76 Legislative races. Almost half.

That’s really embarrassing. Especially for a Democrat. Especially for a Democrat like me, who used to work for that party. And still votes for it.

I hate to say this, but for all intents and purposes, there no longer is a Democratic-NPL Party in North Dakota. I don’t know how that happened, but I blame it mostly on a lack of leadership. All the leaders in the party got old and turned it over to a new generation, and the party of Bill Guy and Quentin Burdick and Art Link and George Sinner and Byron Dorgan and Kent Conrad and Myron Just and Byron Knutson and Bruce Hagen and Sarah Vogel and Heidi Heitkamp and Richard Backes and Buckshot Hoffner and Francis Barth and the Pomeroy brothers has ceased to exist.

Not only is that sad for the few members of that party who remain, but it’s sad for North Dakota, because unchecked power in a one-party state does not make for good government. I am afraid for our future. That one-party status doesn’t just apply to the legislature and the statehouse. It is reflected in the vote for President as well.

In piling up two-thirds of the vote in North Dakota, Donald Trump carried 51 of our 53 counties. Only Rolette and Sioux Counties, both reservation counties, gave the race to the Harris/Walz team. And of the other 51, only three — Benson (also home to a reservation), Cass and Grand Forks gave Trump less than 60 percent. And not by much.

In spite of being convicted of 34 felonies just a couple months ago, Trump seems to be getting more and more popular in North Dakota with every election. He got 67 percent this year, compared to 65 per cent in 2020 and 63 percent in 2016.

In comparison, Mitt Romney got 58 percent in 2012, and John McCain just 53 percent in 2008. (To be fair, no Democratic Presidential candidate has carried North Dakota since Lyndon Johnson in 1964.) Well, at least Trump won’t be running again in 2028. Although I think he’s threatened to do away with at least half of the U.S. Constitution. So we’ll see.

Nearly half of North Dakota counties — including every county west of the Missouri River, gave Trump more than 80 percent. If you walk down the street in Logan, McIntosh, Kidder, McHenry, Wells, Sheridan, McKenzie, Emmons, Grant, Oliver, Stark, Renville, Burke, Dunn, Adams, Billings, Bowman, Golden Valley, Hettinger, Williams, Slope, or Mercer Counties, four out of every five people you meet will have voted for Trump. In fact, in Slope, the least populated county in the state, thank goodness, the vote was 351 for Trump and just 33 for Harris. That’s nine out of every ten. 90 percent. Uffda.

By the way, I know who one of those 33 Harris voters was. I’d like to meet the other 32. I think I need a trip to the badlands.

A bright spot: Of the eight Democratic-NPL candidates who actually won legislative seats, four of them were Native Americans. I don’t think that’s ever happened before. So there will be four Native Americans in the 2025 legislature, including the colorful Senator Richard Marcellais, who bounced back after losing his last race. He makes the senate fun.

And one final note: Maybe, just maybe, we’ve seen the last of Rick Becker.

Oh, wait, one more thing. My nomination for the Best Post-Election Quote by a Politician is from North Dakota’s new Governor-elect Kelly Armstrong, an attorney from Dickinson who’s about to be only the second governor in my lifetime (which is quite a long time) from west of the Missouri River. When asked by a reporter about the keys to his victory, Kelly said, “"I've tried really hard not to talk like a lawyer."

It worked.