It’s a Saturday in January. Just weeks ago, she was the state’s junior senator, a moderate Democrat in deep-red rural America. Now, after a long, acrimonious campaign—among the highest-profile ever in this sparsely populated state —that ended with her being soundly defeated by Republican Kevin Cramer, she’s telling a crowd of her supporters to keep fighting.

But no more. Since the early 1990s, the party has lost the governorship, the entire congressional delegation, and 50 seats in the legislature, leaving the GOP with overwhelming majorities in both chambers. The 2016 Democratic US Senate candidate, Eliot Glassheim, raised a total of around $21,000 while incumbent Republican John Hoeven raised millions in what was never a competitive race. Donald Trump won the state with nearly 63 percent of the vote. Heitkamp’s defeat was just the last domino to fall; it could be a generation or more before Democrats’ power returns.

This is an important distinction for North Dakota’s Democrats, who have been losing election after election for years. But it’s surely a bitter pill for those who remember their party’s history. As recently as 1990, Democrats held both of North Dakota’s US Senate seats as well as its House seat and dominated state politics. Heitkamp herself was attorney general from 1992 to 2000, winning both her elections for that office with more than 60 percent of the vote.

“We didn't win, but we did not lose. We did not lose because we're still standing, we're still working, and we're still engaging,” she says. “And that's what you remember. Losing is when you quit. Losing is quitting. And I'm not ready to quit.”

Ralph Honda, a retired letter carrier for the US Postal Service, listens while former Senator Heidi Heitkamp speaks at a coffee shop on the campus of the University of North Dakota. Photo by author

Heitkamp is a useful avatar of Democrats’ decline here, but it’s hard to pinpoint a culprit for the party’s unraveling. There’s the success of the state’s oil industry. There’s the national party’s progressive reputation—on guns and abortion and more—that rural Democrats can’t outrun. There are questions about a changing media landscape, of shifts in farm politics. There are questions about race.

“I think now we understand that we are a conservative state,” state House Minority Leader Josh Boschee told me. “When Heidi Heitkamp can’t win North Dakota, someone who has been a bread-and-butter person for 30 years of her life here, everyone knows her, 99 percent name ID—but because she’s associated with the Democratic Party, she was not able to be sent back. By a large margin.”

He’s now bespectacled, white-haired, and nearing 60, but he was there at the beginning—when North Dakota’s GOP, battered by losses and seeking relevance, began its nearly 30-year conquest. He came ready to fight.

“Take, for example, a state like Wisconsin, which is the kind of state the Democrats really need to win,” said David Hopkins, an associate professor of political science at Boston College. Democrats will win plenty of votes in Milwaukee and Madison, he argued, but they’ll only win the state by forcing narrower GOP margins elsewhere.

And as the 2020 campaign begins, that long list of factors has profound resonance beyond North Dakota’s borders. The Peace Garden State is almost certainly out of reach for Democrats in 2020, but it will be a tall task to win the White House without at least a handful of states in the heartland like Iowa or Ohio or Michigan. Those victories will still likely depend on votes from rural counties, places that in many ways resemble North Dakota.

The state grew wealthier, with average household income surging roughly $35,000 from 1990 to 2017. There was a massive oil boom, which generated mountains of tax money and drew a new industrial influence into the state’s politics. Many Republicans I spoke with credited their popularity to their party’s stewardship of the state in this period. Others see a fading recollection of the Democrats’ heyday.

But all agree on one thing: Schafer’s victory was the birth of the modern North Dakota GOP. The new governor used appointments and the bully pulpit to launch careers and build the party’s political bench—including Cramer. Soon the future senator was a member of Schafer’s administration, first as tourism director, and later as the governor’s economic development chief.

In 1992, the party’s big break came when Republican Ed Schafer won the governor’s mansion. Former Grand Forks Herald publisher Mike Jacobs blamed that outcome on a “fratricidal” Democratic primary. (Disclosure: I worked at the Herald from 2015 to 2018.) Jim Fuglie, who directed the state Democratic machine 1980s and 2000s, called it a “shitty” Democratic campaign. Schafer himself told me Democrats had grown too distant from the concerns of the state.

In 1990, Cramer, then the state GOP director, found himself in a war of words with one of the state’s Democratic senators, who called him a “hired gun who belongs to the attack dog school of politics,” per a local press report. Cramer said he’d send the senator to his room for those remarks “if he were my son.” That pugnacity didn’t slow him down: In 1991, Cramer ascended to state party chairman; one local newspaper called him a “political pit bull.”

“One (reporter) during the (2018) campaign said, ‘A lot of people say you were Donald Trump before Donald Trump,’” Cramer told me last month. “I don’t think my rhetoric has ever been quite as extreme, but it’s always been very honest. And I think what people who don’t understand Donald Trump misunderstand… is that people are attracted to his authenticity.”

The past 30 years have seen the state transformed, slowly shifting from populist farm politics toward a future with more industry. All the while, Cramer’s star has risen—to Congress in 2012, and now to the Senate.

These states have turned red as the idea of who a Democrat is have changed. According to Pew , Democratic voters have become more diverse more quickly than Republicans since the late 1990s. Democratic voters are also increasingly more urban and educated than those supporting the GOP. A survey from 2017 showed the Democratic base had grown more liberal since 2000. Experts say the parties are realigning less around populism or big business, and more around ideas of culture and local values.

North Dakota Democrats aren’t alone. Rural Democrats have begun slamming into an electoral wall throughout the Midwest, with marquee Senate losses last year in Indiana and Missouri. Yet in the early 1990s, eight of Indiana’s ten House representatives were Democrats. In Missouri, the same was true for six of its nine House members.

Those changes go back to at least the Bill Clinton years. Bo Wood, a professor of political science and public administration at the University of North Dakota, said the rise of conservative talk radio helped Republicans sweep through the 1994 midterms. Hopkins, of Boston College, said that during the 1990s, the evangelical right surged, and Republican arguments against the president “emphasized culture.”

“That left some, I think, long-term residue on where rural voters saw themselves in terms of the parties,” he said. “Trump amplified that, but it was happening before Trump came along. We can see it in the data—starting with the 2000 election, rural America just sort of keeps drifting towards the Republicans, and then there’s a big jump between 2012 and 2016.”

When I asked, many experts hesitated to draw a simple cause-and-effect relationship between Fox News and right-wing political power, often pointing out that the cable news channel could not have thrived if its content had not found an already-receptive audience. But Wood noted that partisan media can have an entrenching effect on voters’ beliefs, and a 2017 study demonstrated the channel’s ability to influence viewers. This is to say nothing of the degree to which the highly rated channel has become enmeshed with the Trump administration itself.