You know who matters in the 2018 midterms? Donald Trump! But not just Donald Trump. Control of the Senate rests in part on what voters think of the president of the United States, but it will also be determined by local disputes and regional quirks—demographics and issues, but also myth-making and self-conception. In this series of articles—this is the seventh—Politico Magazine asked an expert on a state with a crucial statewide race to explain what matters there that doesn’t matter anywhere else.

North Dakota handed President Donald Trump his fourth-largest margin of victory in the 2016 presidential election, making it the second-reddest state on the Senate map this cycle. But Democrats are surprisingly resilient when it comes to winning Senate races in the state. For a Republican state, North Dakotans sure love to send Democrats to Washington.


For more than two decades, two Democrats—Sens. Byron Dorgan and Kent Conrad—won statewide races by double-digit margins. From 1980 until 2010, Democrats also held the state’s only House seat every cycle. Then in 2010, Republicans took a Senate seat and the House seat for the first time in 30 years. It seemed like the beginning of a significant shift. Yet just two years later, in 2012, Democratic Sen. Heidi Heitkamp defied polls and eked out a narrow 1-point victory over Republican Rep. Rick Berg. Even as North Dakota has moved further to the right, Heitkamp hopes to repeat her feat in the race against Republican Rep. Kevin Cramer this year.

“I've always thought because North Dakota leans Republican, that if you're a Democrat, you've got to be able to demonstrate that you can get results for your state,” Conrad says. “That is the critical component of winning elections, showing that you can deliver. A Republican, they can sometimes get by just because an R is next to their name. But even that doesn't last very long.”

North Dakota is the only state that doesn’t require voter registration. That independent streak makes the state notoriously difficult to poll, and it amplifies how much the state’s politicians rely on individual voter connections. North Dakotans point to Heitkamp’s first win six years ago to make the point: She trailed in every public poll in October, including by 10 points in one survey, but won by a point.

“We're a small town with really long streets,” Republican Lt. Gov. Brent Sanford says of the state (he credited Gov. Doug Burgum for the phrase). With so few voters, most residents know the politicians by first name, he said, and expect them to be readily available.

Despite its geographic breadth, North Dakota’s population is just over 755,000, about the size of most congressional districts. Fewer than 350,000 votes were cast in 2016. In 2010, the last time the state had a Senate race during a midterm year, just 238,812 votes were cast.

The majority of votes in North Dakota sit in a cluster of several counties with large cities: Fargo, in Cass County; Bismarck, in Burleigh County; Grand Forks, in Grand Forks County; and Minot, in Ward County. But according to Conrad, who won five Senate races in North Dakota, the state doesn’t quite follow the national pattern of a clear divide among urban, suburban and rural voters.

“East and West Coast urban areas have a different experience, a different life experience, than people in rural areas,” Conrad said. “That is less true in North Dakota.” He went on, “I never targeted specific parts of the state. I never thought that was a winning strategy.”

The homogeneity among the state’s rural areas and its urban centers helps to explain Democrats’ success in the state, says Tyler Axness, a former Democratic state senator who now hosts a radio show based in Fargo. But he said as the national Democratic Party shifted left, it has become harder for local Democrats to disassociate themselves from the brand, especially outside the cities. Axness said it wasn’t uncommon to encounter voters who agreed with him on 80 percent of issues but wouldn’t back him because of his party affiliation.

Still, when it comes to voting patterns, the urban-rural divide is pronounced. Most of the populous counties that lean Democratic are on the eastern border of the state, while the western half is dominated by Republican voters. Democrats have only nine of the 47 state Senate seats this year, and only 13 of 94 state House seats, most of which are clustered near Fargo or Grand Forks. There are no Democratic state lawmakers west of the suburbs of Bismarck, near the state’s geographical center.

Cass County is particularly critical for statewide elections. Home to Fargo, it’s both the most populous county in the state and also the most fertile ground for Democrats. Heitkamp won the county by a 14-percentage-point margin in 2012, collecting 41,480 votes, almost exactly one-quarter of her total in the state.

Fargo’s population leans younger and more educated than the rest of the state. The Fargo economy is high tech, focused on advanced agricultural manufacturing, and it’s also the state’s transportation hub, according to Sanford, the lieutenant governor. Axness said Fargo is also increasingly populated with young professionals who lean Democratic.

In 2008, when President Barack Obama lost the state by 9 percentage points, he won Cass County by 7 points. In 2012, when Obama lost North Dakota by 20 percentage points, he lost the county by 3 percentage points. His 10-point drop-off in Cass County nearly perfectly mirrored his drop-off statewide.

Second to Cass stands Burleigh County, the home to state capital Bismarck, a Republican-rich area. (Because Republicans have near total control of the state government, the capital city is populated with GOP officials.) Berg won Burleigh by 10 percentage points over Heitkamp in 2012, but the Republican margin matters significantly. In 2012, Berg won in Burleigh by only 4,254 votes, significantly less than his 8,761-vote margin two years earlier, when he carried the state on his way to the House of Representatives—and significantly less than the almost 12,000-vote margin in 2012 for Cramer, when he won his House race easily.

Fargo isn’t Democrats’ only stronghold. Another vital area is Grand Forks County, on the eastern edge of the state. Heitkamp won here over Berg by 11 percentage points in 2012 even as the other statewide Republicans carried the county by narrow margins. In 2010, when Berg won his House race statewide, he lost Grand Forks by only 6 points.

Last among the major population centers is Ward County—home to Minot, also a Republican-rich area. Berg won there by 2,658 votes, or 10 percentage points. But again, he underperformed compared with his 18-percentage-point win in the county two years earlier. Cramer won it by more than 5,000 votes and Mitt Romney, when he was the Republican presidential candidate in 2012, won it by nearly 8,000.

High Republican turnout and a strong margin of victory in Burleigh and Ward Counties can counterbalance a Democratic surge in Grand Forks and Cass Counties. Home to the University of North Dakota and North Dakota State University, the state’s two largest colleges, Grand Forks and Cass are younger, more educated and generally more liberal. In Heitkamp’s 2012 win, those four counties represented 55 percent of her total votes in the state. Heitkamp’s best hope is a massive swell of turnout, coupled with a double-digit margin, over Cramer in Fargo and Grand Forks.

For Republicans, it’s critical to limit the margin of loss in Barnes, Richland, Trail and Walsh counties—four small collar counties that neighbor Fargo and Grand Forks and contain suburban voters. “Those aren't huge in population but have enough to make a difference,” a Republican operative with experience in multiple statewide races in North Dakota told POLITICO.

The counties in the eastern portion of the state—particularly along the Minnesota border, and in the southeast corner—handed Trump and Romney their lowest margins of victory, and Heitkamp won nearly every county in the eastern third of the state in her first election. She won only three western counties, and her largest margin of victory there was 2 percentage points. There simply aren’t enough Democratic votes in the western half of the state to make up for any underperformance in the population-dense areas in the east. “Republicans need to really run up margins in the western half of the state,” the GOP operative said.

North Dakota’s population has boomed this decade, growing by 12 percent (almost 83,000 people) from 2010 to 2017. Of that growth, about two-thirds was in the four populous counties. In a state where one-on-one voter contact is expected, outreach to new voters becomes even more critical.

Although those new residents live in Heitkamp’s geographical base, they are likely to be Republican voters, said Sanford, the lieutenant governor. Much of the population growth stemmed from the massive boom in oil production in the past decade, which drew people from other oil-producing—and Republican—states like Texas, Oklahoma and Louisiana. Many of the oil workers, however, weren’t permanent residents initially, and so it isn’t clear whether the population growth led to a growth in North Dakota voters. (There’s no voter registration, remember!)

The state’s economy is massively dependent on energy and agriculture—two industries that can divide the state. Though both issues are important across the state, agricultural interests are more prevalent in the east, while the energy sector is clustered in the western half of the state. North Dakota is the second-largest crude-oil producer in the nation, and has significant renewable energy resources. The state also ranks among the top soybean and wheat producers, among a collection of other crops. Veterans issues are also critical: The state has a sizable veteran population, and both Minot and Grand Forks are home to Air Force bases.

Oil and gas extraction accounts for close to half of the state’s tax revenues, while agriculture still accounts for the majority of the state’s gross domestic product, Sanford said.

“The thing you'll hear in the legislature more than anything, more than partisan differences, is we can't have an east versus west battle,” he added.

Demographically, nearly 90 percent of the state is white, which means the power of each minority voting bloc is extremely limited. The largest is Native Americans, who make up about 5 percent of the state’s population. There are five reservations at least partially geographically in North Dakota. Native Americans represent a critical voting bloc: Sioux County and Rolette County—the only two counties Hillary Clinton won in the state in 2016—both have populations that are more than 75 percent Native American.

A new voter ID law implemented for the first time this year—and upheld by the Supreme Court earlier this month—requires a street address to vote. Many residents on reservations use post office boxes to collect mail rather than permanent street addresses, potentially limiting their ability to vote this fall. The Associated Press reported last week that tribes were scrambling to get full identification for voters, including handing out free IDs and hosting a Dave Matthews concert on Standing Rock reservation to draw attention to the change in law. One tribal leader told ABC News the law could potentially galvanize Native American voters, increasing turnout. Any small change in either direction could be significant.

For now, Cramer holds the inside track to a promotion from the House to the Senate, as he leads most public polls by a comfortable margin. But North Dakota’s infamous polling errors loom large.

Six years ago, a grinning Heitkamp stood in front of a large American flag and held a copy of the Fargo Forum with a headline touting Berg’s 10-point lead in the race, her personal “Dewey Defeats Truman.” If Heitkamp pulls off another improbable victory next week, she will surely have her choice of headlines to restage the triumphant moment once again.