The Governor of North Dakota doug burgum is set to announce his 2024 Republican campaign for president on Wednesday, adding his name to a long list of contenders hoping to dent Donald Trump’s early lead in the race.
Burgum, 66, is ready to launch his campaign in the city of Fargo, where he lives and which is close to the small farming town of Arthur, where he grew up.
Known to few outside of North Dakota, Burgum faces an immense challenge in a field dominated by former President Trump and the best-known governor in the race, Ron DeSantis of Florida.
As evidence of his long odds, Burgum isn’t even the most prominent candidate to announce a presidential campaign on Wednesday. Four hundred miles to the south, former Vice President Mike Pence will launch his bid for the White House in Iowa, facing off against the president he served loyally for four years.
Burgum, a former computer software entrepreneur, plans to visit early voting states immediately. He will campaign Thursday and Friday in Iowa, site of the country’s first Republican caucuses, and on Saturday and Sunday in New Hampshire, home of the first Republican primary.
In a video preview of his ad, Burgum portrayed himself as a common-sense rural state conservative, clearly seasoned in energy policy and far removed from the bitter war of words between Trump and DeSantis as the 2024 Republican campaign heats up.
“Anger, yelling, infighting, that won’t be enough anymore,” Burgum said in the video, which features stunning views of all of North Dakota. “We are going to do things. In North Dakota, we listen respectfully and talk things out. This is how we can get America back on track.”
As governor of the state’s fourth least populous state, he signed measures this year. promote conservative policies on culture war issues. They include banning schools and the government from requiring teachers and employees to refer to transgender people by their preferred pronouns, banning transgender girls and women from competing in women’s sports, and banning abortion with few exceptions up to six weeks gestation. , before most women know you are pregnant
His preview video also subtly touched on his opposition to “wake up” ideology, a catch-all term used derogatorily by conservatives to refer to policies or ideas that acknowledge the existence of social injustice and racial inequality.
“I grew up in a small town in North Dakota,” Burgum said. “Waking up was what you did at 5 am to start the day.”
Burgum enters the race with a more advanced background in energy policy than most in the Republican field in light of the decade-long boom of North Dakota’s oil industry and his administration’s effort to capture carbon dioxide from across the country. .
“Instead of shutting down American oil and gas, we should unleash energy production,” he said in the video, “and start selling energy to our allies, rather than buying it from our enemies.”
In addition to Trump, DeSantis and Pence, Burgum will face off against former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, US Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, former Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson, anti-wake activist Vivek Ramaswamy, conservative radio host Larry Elder and businessman Perry Johnson.
Burgum was first elected governor in 2016, reelected in 2020, and is eligible to run for a third time in 2024. In 1983, he founded Great Plains Software, which was acquired by Microsoft in 2011, and Burgum remained as Microsoft’s vice president. until 2007.
The Republican nominee is expected to face the Democratic President Joe Biden in November 2024.
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Beaumont reported from Des Moines, Iowa.