Minot, N.D.

“No! No! No!” cried Heidi Heitkamp. She’s the Democratic senatorial candidate in North Dakota. I had just asked her whether residents of her state think it’s unfair that, in the Senate, each North Dakota voter has the clout of approximately 50 Californians.

She doesn’t.

That was the top thing I had always wondered about the politics of North Dakota, whose two U.S. senators serve a population of around 680,000. (Campaign-wise, it resembles the Iowa caucuses. Voters expect to have met the candidates personally. Sometimes they seem to expect the candidates to invite them home for dinner.)

I was wandering around the state this week, mulling its Senate race. Really, we can’t possibly focus on Barack Obama and Mitt Romney for another three months without an occasional reprieve.

So, North Dakota. Heitkamp, a former attorney general, is running against Representative Rick Berg, the state’s sole member of the House. In the beginning, the national Democrats wrote this one off as a long shot at best, but Heitkamp seems to have, at minimum, pulled even. On the campaign trail, she’s a happy warrior with the endless energy you’d need if you were running for office in a state where there’s a two-hour drive between even the smaller clumps of voters. She also has a dramatic story that centers on the year 2000, when she ran for governor and was diagnosed with Stage 3 breast cancer, but she stayed in the race, campaigning even while she had chemotherapy and her trademark red hair fell out. She lost but seems to have made an indelible imprint on the public.