Burgum, Douglas

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      Who Is Doug Burgum? 5 Things to Know

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      Elected governor of North Dakota in 2016 in a major upset, Mr. Burgum is seeking an even bigger one in the Republican presidential race. Doug Burgum has at least a couple of things going for him: He is a sitting governor, which is the most common steppingstone to the United States presidency, and he has deep pockets.But Mr. Burgum, the two-term Republican governor of North Dakota, nonetheless entered the 2024 presidential race on Wednesday with a notable disadvantage: The 99.8 percent of Americans who don’t live in North Dakota are unlikely to know much about him.Here are five things to know about Mr. Burgum.His election as governor was a major upset.When Mr. Burgum began running for governor in January 2016, few people in North Dakota knew who he was either.A poll conducted the next month found him running 49 percentage points behind the state attorney general Wayne Stenehjem, who was the chosen candidate of the North Dakota Republican Party, the departing governor Jack Dalrymple and Senator John Hoeven.He ended up beating Mr. Stenehjem in the Republican primary by more than 20 points.“Stand up if you saw this coming,” Mike McFeely, a columnist for The Forum, a newspaper in Fargo, wrote after the primary. “OK, now sit down. Because no you didn’t.”Mr. Burgum, who had never held elected office, benefited from an anti-establishment campaign message — this was, after all, the year that Donald J. Trump showed Republican voters’ appetite for perceived outsiders — and from Democrats who crossed over to vote in the Republican primary, as state law allows.He also benefited from millions of dollars of his own money, which allowed him to significantly outspend Mr. Stenehjem despite only slightly surpassing him in fund-raising.He is a wealthy software entrepreneur.Mr. Burgum was raised in Arthur, N.D., a tiny town about northwest of Fargo, and went on to earn a master’s degree in business administration from Stanford.He then returned to North Dakota and bought a stake in a fledgling financial software company by mortgaging $250,000 of farmland that he had inherited. (His grandparents founded an agribusiness company that is still in his family.)In the mid-1980s, he and his relatives bought out the founders of the company, Great Plains Software, and assumed full ownership. Over the ensuing years, it became a major supplier of accounting and record-keeping software for small and midsize businesses and grew to employ more than 2,000 people.Mr. Burgum took the company public in 1997, and in 2001, Microsoft bought it for about $1.1 billion.Since selling Great Plains Software, Mr. Burgum has founded two more businesses: Kilbourne Group, a real estate development firm, and Arthur Ventures, a venture capital firm that invests in software companies.He supports fossil fuels and carbon capture.In 2021, shortly after beginning his second term as governor, Mr. Burgum announced an unusual goal for a Republican: to get North Dakota to carbon neutrality by 2030.However, he rejected transitioning to renewable energy, a central step that climate scientists say is needed to accomplish that goal. North Dakota is a major user of wind energy, but it is also heavily reliant on oil, natural gas and coal, and Mr. Burgum does not want to fundamentally change that. He argues instead that, by using new technology to capture carbon emissions, North Dakota can become carbon neutral while continuing to rely in large part on fossil fuels.That is a politically appealing position in a place like North Dakota. Thanks to the Bakken oil field in the western part of the state, North Dakota is one of the biggest oil producers in the country. It is also one of the largest coal producers, according to the federal Energy Information Administration.But experts say that, while carbon capture may be a useful tool for combating climate change, it is unlikely to be sufficient on its own — in part because high costs have made it hard for the technology to gain traction.Mr. Burgum has taken a number of steps to promote carbon capture, including signing a bill in 2019 that created a tax incentive for a particular form of it. More recently, local leaders and landowners have been fighting over a proposed pipeline that would funnel carbon from other states into underground storage in North Dakota.He has signed eight anti-transgender laws this year.North Dakota legislators have passed, and Mr. Burgum has signed into law, at least eight bills targeting transgender or gender-nonconforming people in recent months. That is more than almost any other state in what has been a record-breaking year for anti-transgender legislation.Mr. Burgum signed a ban on transition care for minors, as more than a dozen other states have done this year. The ban — which runs counter to the consensus of major medical organizations — makes it a misdemeanor to provide puberty blockers or hormones to minors for gender transition, and a felony to provide surgery.He signed one law defining sex as being determined by “sex organs, chromosomes and endogenous hormone profiles at birth”; one defining “male” and “female”; and another prohibiting most sex changes on transgender people’s birth certificates.He signed a measure restricting transgender people’s use of bathrooms and showers in state facilities, and another one allowing public school personnel to misgender students and requiring schools to inform parents of students’ “transgender status.” (He vetoed a bill that would have gone further by mandating that schools misgender many trans students.)He also signed two measures restricting transgender girls’ and women’s participation in sports — one applying to public schools and to private schools that compete against them, and the second applying to colleges with the same public/private criteria.He signed one of the nation’s strictest abortion bans.In April, Mr. Burgum signed a law banning almost all abortions. Exceptions for rape or incest are allowed only in the first six weeks of pregnancy, when many people do not yet know they are pregnant. After six weeks, the only exception is to prevent “death or a serious health risk.”Previously, abortion had been legal in North Dakota through 22 weeks of pregnancy.Like many other states, North Dakota had a “trigger ban” that was set to take effect when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year. But that law — under which doctors could have faced felony charges for performing an abortion even to save a woman’s life, and the burden would have been on them to prove an “affirmative defense” that the abortion was medically necessary — was struck down by the North Dakota Supreme Court.The new ban that Mr. Burgum signed, which state legislators passed in response to the court’s rejection of the trigger ban, allows abortions in medical emergencies without the need for an “affirmative defense” — though in practice, fear of prosecution has stopped many doctors from providing abortions for medical reasons even in states whose laws have such exceptions. More

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      Doug Burgum, Wealthy North Dakota Governor, Enters Presidential Race

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      As the leader of a deep-red state, Mr. Burgum has promoted staunchly conservative policies, signing into law a near-total ban on abortion.Gov. Doug Burgum, the Republican governor of North Dakota who rose from a chimney sweep to become one of the richest men in the state, announced a campaign for president on Wednesday, entering an increasingly crowded race in which he faces exceedingly long odds.“We need a new leader for a changing economy,” Mr. Burgum wrote in an opinion essay in The Wall Street Journal that focused heavily on his business acumen. He plans to appear at an event around midday in Fargo, N.D.The size of the field signals that former President Donald J. Trump, the Republican front-runner, has not scared off many challengers. But he has also yet to fully consolidate support behind his candidacy, and numerous rivals apparently see a path to the nomination, no matter how narrow it might be.As the leader of his deep-red state, Mr. Burgum has overseen a period of significant economic expansion and promoted staunchly conservative policies.This year, Mr. Burgum signed into law a near-total ban on abortion and created significant restrictions on gender transition care, including banning any requirements that teachers or school administrators use a student’s preferred pronouns.He is the second sitting governor to enter the race, after Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who has staked out aggressively conservative social policy positions and attracted the national spotlight for dust-ups with major corporations like Disney.Yet Mr. Burgum’s aides say he is planning a campaign less focused on social issues and more on his business background and fiscal stewardship of the state, which included cuts to both local property taxes and state income taxes. He is set to emphasize the economy, energy and national security in his early campaigning, viewing the current debate as too focused on social issues and not on voters’ biggest concerns.In a recent interview with the editorial board of The Fargo Forum, a local news outlet, Mr. Burgum said he believed that 60 percent of American voters had been neglected as the fringes dominated political debate.“All the engagement right now is occurring on the edge,” he said. “There’s definitely a yearning for some alternatives right now.”Though his national media appearances have been scarce, Mr. Burgum has been able to break through during debates over energy policy, offering a window into how he might frame his proposals in contrast to those of Republican rivals and of President Biden. In March, he told Fox News that the Biden administration’s economic plan was “disconnected from economics, it’s disconnected from physics and it’s disconnected from common sense.” He argued that Japan and other Asian countries were ripe markets for American energy exports.On Monday, his campaign sought to address his scant national name recognition with a glossy biography video in which the governor tells his life story, set to sweeping vistas of North Dakota bluffs and energy fields. His campaign’s confidence that he can rise from a relative unknown to legitimate candidate derives from his own political career in North Dakota. When Mr. Burgum announced his bid for governor in 2016, he was an outsider with little name recognition outside Fargo, and his main opponent, Wayne Stenehjem, the state attorney general, received the North Dakota Republican Party’s endorsement.But with ample resources and a campaign that ran to the right — Mr. Burgum endorsed Donald J. Trump for president in May 2016 — he cruised to a 20-percentage-point victory that The Bismarck Tribune proclaimed “upended the North Dakota Republican Party establishment.” He has not been seriously challenged in North Dakota since.“There’s a value to being underestimated all the time,” Mr. Burgum told The Fargo Forum. “That’s a competitive advantage.”As the only candidate not from the East Coast and with an upbringing deeply rooted in the rural Midwest, Mr. Burgum is likely to focus most of his efforts in Iowa, a state with an extensive agricultural community. Mr. Burgum grew up in Arthur, N.D., a town of barely 300 where his family owned the only grain elevator.While attending North Dakota State University as an undergraduate, Mr. Burgum began a chimney sweeping service in Fargo out of a friend’s pickup truck. His newfound business attracted the attention of local newspapers, who ran photos of a soot-laden Mr. Burgum clad in a tuxedo hopping from roof to roof, picking up roughly $40 per chimney.Mr. Burgum attached those newspaper clips to his applications for business school, and he soon enrolled in Stanford Business School. After earning his M.B.A. at Stanford, Mr. Burgum joined Great Plains Software, a Fargo company that specialized in accounting software, and quickly rose to chief executive.Far from the more fertile tech hubs of Silicon Valley, Mr. Burgum built Great Plains Software into a major industry player, eventually selling to Microsoft for $1.1 billion. He would then serve as a senior vice president at Microsoft until 2007.Mr. Burgum’s worth stretches into nine figures, certainly enough to help finance a nascent presidential run, and his aides expect his business network to help pull in major donors as well. But as of the start of his campaign, no super PAC or outside group has emerged supporting Mr. Burgum’s candidacy. More

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      Chris Christie, Mike Pence and Doug Burgum to Announce for 2024 This Week

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      Chris Christie, Mike Pence and Doug Burgum are set to announce their presidential campaigns this week, the latest entrants in a rapidly growing Republican primary.The growing field of Republicans running for president is set to expand by three this week, with the entry of former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, former Vice President Mike Pence and Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota. The field continues to expand in part because hopefuls see opportunity in the struggle of Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida to become the undisputed challenger to former President Donald J. Trump.Mr. DeSantis trails Mr. Trump by about 30 points in national polls of Republican voters. No one else is within hailing distance, but with one in four Republicans still looking for an alternative to the two front-runners, a fierce competition to be that other option is emerging.All three of the latest entrants have to be considered long shots, at least for now.But each will get a momentary burst of attention when declaring his candidacy, with the hope that from small sparks a brush fire will spread.Chris ChristieWhen: Tuesday, June 6Where: A town-hall-style event at the New Hampshire Institute of Politics outside Manchester.The strategy: Mr. Christie, who dropped out of the 2016 primary early and became a supporter of Mr. Trump’s, has cast himself as the former president’s harshest critic in the Republican field. He says Mr. Trump is unfit to serve after inciting the attack on the Capitol. Mr. Christie’s team recently said that he would run a campaign focused on “mixing it up in the news cycle and engaging Trump.”But being an outspoken Trump critic has so far paid little dividends. Among 10 declared or potential 2024 candidates tested in a Monmouth poll last week, Mr. Christie was viewed the most negatively by Republican voters (21 percent viewed him favorably and 47 percent unfavorably). His strategy is to make it onto a debate stage, where his trademark pugilism, he has promised, will be aimed at Mr. Trump.Mr. Christie is likely to campaign heavily in New Hampshire, where a large number of independents are expected to vote in the primary next year, offering Mr. Christie his best opportunity to damage Mr. Trump.Mike PenceWhen: Wednesday, June 7Where: A rally with voters in Des Moines, followed by a CNN town hall at 9 p.m. Eastern.The strategy: The former vice president brought credibility with social conservatives to the 2016 ticket, but his star faded with the party base after he refused to comply with Mr. Trump’s efforts to block President Biden’s victory. As an evangelical Christian and former Indiana governor, Mr. Pence is a natural fit with Iowa conservatives, and he is likely to focus much of his campaigning there in the hope of a strong showing in the first nominating contest next year. His campaign intends to reintroduce him to voters as his own man, not just Mr. Trump’s No. 2.But Mr. Pence, who espouses traditional Regeanesque views on economic and foreign policy — he supports aid to Ukraine — finds himself at odds with the current populist thrust of the party. In the Monmouth poll, he had the second highest unfavorable number (35 percent, versus 46 percent favorable). When Sean Hannity of Fox News mentioned at a town hall with Mr. Trump on Thursday that Mr. Pence would soon join the race, there were boos.Doug BurgumWhen: Wednesday, June 7Where: Fargo, N.D.The strategy: North Dakota’s governor, who is little-known outside his home state, made a large fortune in computer software, and is in a position to self-fund his longer-than-long-shot campaign. He has said he believes that 60 percent of American voters constitute a “silent majority” that feels ignored by intense ideological debates that dominate politics. “There’s definitely a yearning for some alternatives right now,’’ Mr. Burgum told a Fargo news site.Energy policy is central to his message: As governor, Mr. Burgum set a goal of reaching carbon neutrality in North Dakota by 2030. He aimed to do so not by diminishing dependence on fossil fuels, a key part of the state’s economy, but by accelerating technology to capture carbon emissions in the ground.The governor is low-key and notably not aligned with Trump-style populism. That means that, in addition to being little known, he will be paddling against the current in today’s Republican rapids. More