WAHPETON, N.D. — Heidi Heitkamp still remembers the first time she led the Senate in the Pledge of Allegiance after her surprising win in 2012. How hard it was to get the words out.

“I can’t get through it because I’m too emotional,” she recalls to dozens of gangly teenagers graduating from the American Legion’s Boys State program. “How could a middle-aged, kind of a chubby woman, be standing in the United States Senate?”


The 61-year-old Heitkamp survived a brutal bout with cancer amid a failed 2000 campaign for governor, then ran for the Senate 12 years later in a Republican-dominated state. And now she is staring down an exceedingly difficult reelection campaign in a state where President Donald Trump is beloved.

Though every Democrat from the oil patch in Williston to bustling Fargo is banking on Heitkamp running, winning and reviving the party in this state, the plain-spoken, stridently moderate Democratic senator is months away from making it official. That’s in part because she’d far rather govern than spend 15 months talking about her campaign. But she says she's also undecided.

“There’s days I have doubts ... I mean this is a hard life. Actually, the happiest I am is on days like today,” she says on a sparkling June day as she crisscrosses the state’s southeastern corner. “You know, I haven’t made up my mind.”

A few minutes later, she’s convincing herself she must run again: Would her replacement care as much as she does about Native American children or changing the minds of Democrats who criticize fossil fuels?

“I think: What value do I add in the Senate? Why am I important to the institution? Not just to North Dakota,” she says. “I’m a very effective advocate for North Dakota. That’s easy.”

There is much riding on Heitkamp’s political prospects, which are central to Senate Democrats’ plans to ultimately retake the chamber by 2020 — few think any other Democrat could hold the seat. Heitkamp is a rare politician, the last Senate Democrat left that opposed universal gun background checks and who peppers her speech with mild expletives in her prototypical Plains State accent. Despite 12 years between her gubernatorial run and her Senate race, she still maintained near-universal name ID in the state.

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And the state’s Democratic Party couldn’t be in worse shape after the 2016 bloodbath, holding just 15 percent of the state Legislature’s seats. Republicans hold every statewide office except for Heitkamp’s seat.

“If we don’t have her as a Democrat at the top, it’s a big loss for the party,” says Tyler Axness, a former state senator swept away by the Trump wave. “When I say that I’m a Democrat, I’m a Heidi Heitkamp Democrat.”

Trump won North Dakota by 36 points, but Washington is a surprisingly cozy place right now for Heitkamp. She met with Trump about a Cabinet position in December, visited the White House three times since and speaks regularly to Trump’s chief of staff Reince Priebus and top economic adviser Gary Cohn, lately pestering Priebus to get the Export-Import Bank in high gear to help North Dakota’s economy.

“[Steve] Bannon’s on my side on this,” she says with satisfaction.

Heitkamp is plainly chummier with Trump than she was to President Barack Obama, whom she outran by more than 10 points in 2012 and “didn’t really have a relationship with,” she says. And in the Senate, she’s “much closer” with new Democratic leader Chuck Schumer than she was with former leader Harry Reid, who she opposed as party leader in 2014.

Democrats say when Heitkamp decides to buck the party, they don’t even bother trying to change her mind.

“It’s a complete waste of time trying to twist Heidi Heitkamp’s arm,” said Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin of Illinois.

Her independence, and her closeness to Trump, will be a boon if she does run again. Republicans respect Heitkamp, and Sen. John Hoeven (R-N.D.) said she will enter as the favorite.

But North Dakotans, Republicans say, will ultimately side with Trump’s party over Heitkamp’s.

“Donald Trump is as popular as ever in North Dakota,” said a Republican senator who has viewed recent polling. “If the election was held today we’d win, plain and simple.”

Today, Schumer is pushing her to soon announce for reelection and is offering major assistance from the party. People close to her insist she’s running again, noting her $1.6 million in fundraising in the first quarter of the year.

But on a long day on the road in this impossibly flat landscape, Heitkamp says another run would be something of a sacrifice. She’s pursued statewide office six times and dislikes long campaigns. She and her husband Darwin are well-off; she doesn’t need the job.

“The gestalt of being a senator is not motivating to me,” Heitkamp says a few minutes before speaking to the Boys State grads. “My everyday quality of life would be better if I lived in North Dakota all the time.”



***

North Dakota is booming, but it’s still a state of just 750,000. And Heitkamp’s outsized personality is her greatest asset.

Like Democrats Jon Tester in Montana and Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Heitkamp is a senator today and could win reelection because her state is small enough that everyone seems to know her.

“Heidi has a personal connection with people. She has a wonderful personality, she’s a delightful conversationalist,” admits Rep. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.), an upbeat and outspoken lawmaker weighing a run against her. “Politics in North Dakota is a personal thing.”

But Cramer says Heitkamp is more calculating than she comes off and could be too risk-averse to beat him: "She’s doing a good job politically. The question is: Is she there when the chips are down or when you really need her? That’s what would be exploited."

On this Friday’s 10-hour tour, her first stop is with Joel Heitkamp, her brother and a talk show host and former state Democratic lawmaker. Heidi guest-hosted the show during George W. Bush’s presidency. If the call lines went dead, she’d bring up Bush’s plans to privatize Social Security to rile folks up.

Waiting for her radio hit, she chats up the hulking weatherman, “Too Tall” Tom Szymanski. Conversation of weather is ever-present in this agricultural state, where bars boom after drought-stricken farmlands receive rain.

“The weather guy is the most highly powerful person in the media,” she informs this Washington reporter.

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With a striking shock of curly red hair and an informal demeanor, Heitkamp is known in the Capitol for her sense of humor and a laugh that rattles around the Senate chamber. In North Dakota, her easygoing nature is on full display: After her radio appearance, she bursts out of the station while cracking to the receptionist: “Tell Joel he’s an asshole. He’s an asshole.”

As she’s shuttled from Fargo to Wahpeton to Mapleton to Casselton and finally to Valley City, Heitkamp grows more serious when discussing her state’s challenges. She hates the White House’s budget’s agriculture cuts and believes they’d devastate North Dakota. But she carefully blames White House Budget Director Mick Mulvaney, not the president.

“I call it the Mulvaney budget, not the Trump budget,” she says, diverging from Democratic talking points.

After meeting President Donald Trump face-to-face three times and talking frequently with his top staffers, Sen. Heidi Heitkamp wants to use her White House connections to prod Trump to take a softer view on trade. | AP Photo

After meeting Trump face-to-face three times and talking frequently with his top staffers, she wants to use her White House connections to prod Trump to take a softer view on trade. She doesn’t talk about the scandal-plagued White House, and says Democrats concentrate too much on Trump’s ties to Russia. She believes, however, that there is a global leadership void with Trump as president.

At Mapleton's Horsch farm equipment factory she receives her first and only Trump question of the day from Ryan Johnson, an employee moving to Kindred, North Dakota, who wants to know what the president is really like.

“He’s very much committed to working people,” Heitkamp concludes.

That’s not the answer liberal activists are looking for, but it underpins her brand. Heitkamp is not part of the Democrats’ “resistance” and she has no plans to join it.

“There is a part of Heidi that has a very progressive streak,” says former Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.). “And there is a part that respects the conservative side of issues.”

A self-described conservative Republican, Johnson says he’s likely to support Heitkamp. Informed she just won over a Trump voter, Heitkamp shrugs and hops in the car to Country Kitchen in Casselton for lunch with local leaders.

As she leaves lunch, she strikes up a conversation with a 76-year-old local who identifies himself as “Mr. Livingston.” He says he doesn’t have long to live.

“Can you stay alive until the election so you can vote for me?” she cracks.



***

After surviving cancer, Heitkamp learned to measure the days to maximize her time on earth. Campaigning isn’t at the top of her list.

“I calculated how many hours I’d have to be awake and do something until the age of 80. And when I think about: Do I want to do this thing?” Heitkamp says. “It’s this highly competitive, really aggressive environment ... And so, do you want to do it? Do you want to invest your time in that?”

And though her schedule on this day contains zero political events, the looming Senate race won’t ever truly recede. After revving up the Boys State grads, she’s approached by Rick Berg, the former House member she beat in 2012, who tells her: “You even motivated me.”

Berg might run against Heitkamp again, according to state insiders. State Sen. Tom Campbell is also mulling a run. But the current favorite to challenge Heitkamp is Cramer, a blunt-spoken congressman who’s held the at-large seat since 2013 and is stringing out the drama.

“Here’s the thing, I have the luxury of never having to say: ‘I’m not running.’ So that will frustrate people for a long time,” Cramer says in an interview in the Capitol. “I’d say it’s 50/50. I don’t know if I’ve ever told anybody that, but that’s sort of how I measure that today.”

After surviving cancer, Sen. Heidi Heitkamp learned to measure the days to maximize her time on earth. Campaigning isn’t at the top of her list. | AP Photo

Deepening the intrigue further, Heitkamp and Cramer are competing for influence with the president.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell tried to avoid a competitive election, advising Trump to pluck Heitkamp from the Senate and make her Agriculture secretary, according to a source with knowledge of the conversation. In a transition meeting with Trump, Cramer told him that if he picked Heitkamp: “I’ll be a senator in 90 days” and would win in 2018.

Trump replied: “Why don’t you just run in two years if you want to do that?” A few days later, Heitkamp announced she’s staying in the Senate.

And that leaves Heitkamp in a most unique political situation, a one-woman North Dakota Democratic Party simultaneously shouldering national Democratic hopes of eventually taking back the Senate. Her future amounts to a crucial test of whether the Democrats’ big tent still stands.

Paradoxically, Trump’s win may have eased Heitkamp’s path to reelection, as mid-terms often devastate the president’s party. And if being a Democrat is dragging her down, it’s not immediately apparent here.

Her most pointed interaction comes at the end of the day at Red Pepper, a local joint famous among inebriated college students. An elderly man spies Heitkamp from a booth. When they make eye contact, he tells her: “I’ve got beef with you.”

He’s mad that Heitkamp has her boat dock in the Missouri River back home in Mandan and that he’s not allowed to put his in. He threatens to change his party registration in protest.

As she walks to the car, Heitkamp notes that in North Dakota, voters don’t register by party anyway.