On the most rural Presidential candidate yet

Doug Burgum, governor of North Dakota, declared his candidacy for the Republican nomination for U.S. President last week, leading to a relative avalanche of coverage of a previously obscure political figure. 

Jonathan Weisman's New York Times story of June 8, 2023, dateline Fargo (population 127,000, which is 16% of the state's population), is headlined "The Presidential Candidate Who Has His Own Supporters Scratching Their Heads."  Here's an excerpt that explains Burgum's extraordinary wealth: 

[A]s a base for a presidential run, Fargo is still the smallest of towns, closer to Winnipeg, in Canada, than to Minneapolis, the nearest American metropolis. The hamlet of Arthur, where Mr. Burgum grew up and where his family’s prosperous, century-old grain elevator dominates the flat landscape, is still more removed from the nation’s political currents. Even North Dakotans who express admiration for their governor’s wealth, business acumen and energy are baffled by his suddenly lofty political ambitions.

“He’s a long shot, for sure,” said Brad Moen, 69, of Jamestown, N.D., who has known Mr. Burgum for 60 years and traveled 100 miles for his presidential introduction on Wednesday. “California, New York, Ohio, Florida — they’re the big dogs, not North Dakota.”

* * *

Mr. Burgum’s path to the White House seems particularly forbidding. His story is out of central casting: the son of a tiny town who as a teenager lost his father, and then channeled a natural entrepreneurial spirit into enterprises that included chimney sweeping, a business software empire and venture capital — all within the state lines of North Dakota.

Mr. Burgum’s status as a billionaire traces back to Microsoft, which bought his company, Great Plains Software, in 2001 in a $1.1 billion stock deal that made him one of the richest men in the Dakotas.

Maggie Astor's story for the Times, "5 Things to Know about Doug Burgum," ran the day before.  Here's an excerpt focused on the fact that Burgum's election as governor in 2016 was a "major upset."  

When Mr. Burgum began running for governor in January 2016, few people in North Dakota knew who he was either.

A poll conducted the next month found him running 49 percentage points behind the state attorney general Wayne Stenehjem, who was the chosen candidate of the North Dakota Republican Party, the departing governor Jack Dalrymple and Senator John Hoeven.

He ended up beating Mr. Stenehjem in the Republican primary by more than 20 points.

“Stand up if you saw this coming,” Mike McFeely, a columnist for The Forum, a newspaper in Fargo, wrote after the primary. “OK, now sit down. Because no you didn’t.”

Mr. Burgum, who had never held elected office, benefited from an anti-establishment campaign message — this was, after all, the year that Donald J. Trump showed Republican voters’ appetite for perceived outsiders — and from Democrats who crossed over to vote in the Republican primary, as state law allows.

Also, Burgum supports fossil fuels as well as carbon capture.  He's signed into law one of the nation's strictest abortion bans, along with eight anti-transgender laws in 2023 alone.  

Maeve Reston writes for the Washington Post about Burgum here, and I love the small-townish, farm-values anecdote she leads with: 

When Microsoft was on the verge of acquiring the software company that tech entrepreneur and soon-to-be GOP White House contender Doug Burgum had helped build from a small firm to one with more than 2,000 employees, he had specific ideas about where he wanted to iron out the details of the $1.1 billion deal.

He convened a meeting at a ranch deep in the rolling hills of central North Dakota. Between working sessions, he said in a recent interview, he dispatched soon-to-be co-workers to mend fence posts, then had them saddle up and move cattle. Burgum, who grew up shoveling grain and hauling fertilizer at his family’s grain elevator business, wanted the big-city Microsoft team to understand the work ethic of the employees they were acquiring, who were “mostly kids from small towns who grew up on farms or ranches,” he said last week during a driving tour that wound its way from the shabby converted warehouse where he helped build his company to the gleaming Microsoft campus at the outskirts of town.

I first became aware of Burgum during the relatively early days of the coronavirus pandemic when he became almost tearful in asking people to be considerate of one another in relation to pandemic restrictions--or the lack thereof--in North Dakota.  Unlike Kristi Noem, the governor of neighboring South Dakota, there was no show-boating, no polarizing language.  Instead, there was just a plea for people to be empathic toward each other, noting that some folks might be fighting cancer or other illnesses and thus be particularly vulnerable health-wise.  I suppose the "nice" or "kind" response he was trying to elicit could be seen as a quintessential rural thing.  Back when I watched the clip of a tearful Burgum at that May, 2020 press conference, I would never have guessed he was a wildly successful entrepreneur.  Instead, he struck me as more like an unassuming, local protestant minister.