Although one of the less politically relevant states today, North Dakota plays a valuable role in perfectly demonstrating the mass exodus of working-class whites from the Democratic Party. Born as a left-wing Populist state, North Dakota now registers as one of the most conservative in the nation.
Early History – “The ‘Myth’ of North Dakota”
The land that would become North Dakota was acquired in the 1803 Louisiana Purchase and was sparsely populated and traveled. What little activity was there during the early-to-mid-1800s consisted of fur trappers from Hudson Bay and Montreal. In 1861, the Dakota Territory was formed, encompassing both present-day North Dakota and South Dakota. A year later, the Homestead Act took effect, accompanied by a strong marketing campaign to bring settlers to the region. In 1870, the state was barely populated by farmers, but by 1890, the state began to emerge as an agricultural trademark with about 200,000 residents. The “Myth of North Dakota” was a media broadcast that marketed the state as the very essence of the American Dream, settled by good and just people. Most settlers were of Scandinavian or German descent, as well as Northern Yankees, groups of people not dissuaded by the harshly cold environment.
While railroads populated the territory, the two lines connected North and South Dakota to different commercial hubs. North Dakota’s lines connected its eastern cities of Fargo and Bismarck to Minneapolis, while South Dakota’s lines connected it to Omaha and Chicago. Regional differences defined the two Dakotas, with North Dakota being the less populated, more rural, and more pugnacious of the two. North Dakota was home to markedly more skirmishes with the Native Americans, and a corrupt politician essentially “stole” the Dakota Territory capital of Yankton to present-day Bismarck. South Dakota also regarded North Dakota as a place of “wild folks, cattle ranchers, and fur traders.” Succinctly, South Dakota did not like North Dakota.
Since North Dakota was less populated and less connected, it found it cheaper to remain a territory than become a state, opposite South Dakota’s sentiment. The word from Washington, D.C., was to either enter the Union as one state or wait until North Dakota could qualify as its own and enter as two separate states. The final battle was over the name, as the name of “Dakota” became a brand associated with the region’s goods. North Dakota was almost named Lincoln, but the two shared the name and were admitted on November 2, 1889, starting the busiest period of state entries in the country’s history.
As a cheeky close on the disputes between the two Dakotas, President Benjamin Harrison (R-IN) shuffled the statehood papers and signed them blindly, forever obscuring which Dakota technically was admitted first.
Industrialization and 20th Century – The Nonpartisan League
With such heavy migration from the northeast, North Dakota started its history aligned with Republican values – the Territory actually sent Union battalions during the Civil War. However, its first election in 1892 actually delivered its three electoral votes to Populist James Weaver by a narrow margin. Since Weaver ran on a Populist-Democratic fusion ticket, one electoral vote went to Grover Cleveland (D-NY), and the third went to Benjamin Harrison on a technicality, resulting in the only time in history a state’s electoral votes were evenly distributed between three candidates.
The Populist movement did not last long in North Dakota, as the state’s heavy Catholic lean did receive William Jennings Byran’s (D-NE) Protestantism well. Although the mostly wheat-farming state suffered with drought and high interest rates, political sectionalism prevailed in resisting what many believed would be a new form of class warfare instituted by Bryan’s doctrine of free silver. North Dakota quickly became a Republican stronghold, except for Woodrow Wilson’s (D-NJ) narrow 1912 win due to GOP vote-splitting. The 1912 election in North Dakota is also the last time in history four candidates each carried at least one county in a presidential election in one state.
Industrialization meant heavy investments in and by railroads, as well as family farms, general stores, and small cities dominated by small business and manufacturing. On paper, the state should have leaned into the Populist column, but North Dakota’s obscure political factions and profiles made it difficult for alternate parties to appeal to the voters. The creation of the Nonpartisan League (NPL) in 1915 advocated for progressive and socialist policies, chief among them being the government control of farming-adjacent industries, such as mills, banks, and railroads. In 1916, the NPL effectively hijacked the GOP Primaries by running their own slate of candidates, and by 1918, the NPL dominated the state’s politics. Business leaders and corporations turned to their own capitalist alternative, the Independent Voters Association (IVA).
In 1921, a true showdown between the two labels materialized in the form of Governor Lynn Frazier’s (R-NPL) recall, the first – and only, until 2003 – recall of a sitting governor in history. Frazier was defeated by IVA-endorsed Rangvald Nestos (R). At this point, the IVA had eroded the NPL support to make the state more reliably Republican, but the intrinsic Populist lean would not escape North Dakota.
World War I, automation, and the Great Depression gutted North Dakota’s farming industry, allowing FDR (D-NY) to revitalize the progressive spirit of the state. Out of the thirty-three elections in which North Dakota has participated, only five have been won by Democrats: 1912, 1916, 1932, 1936, and 1964, the latter three of which were national landslides.
As FDR capitalized on the state’s Populist tendencies, Republicans brought the Midwest back into the GOP fold in 1940. In 1956, the NPL merged with the Democratic ticket, a union that still exists today, and one that allowed Democrats to control all or most statewide offices and most of the legislature by the 1980s. Agrarian populism had allowed Democrats to remain dominant at the top of the North Dakota ticket for decades, while Republicans cleaned up the rest of the races.
North Dakota last voted Democratic in 1964 for Lyndon Johnson (D-TX). Since then, Republicans have won the state a fourteen consecutive times by large margins, while Democrats enjoyed shared control of the state on the local and federal side.
Current Political Leanings – A Paradigm Shift
From 1986 until 2010, Democrats would control all three seats in North Dakota’s congressional delegation. From 1960 until 2018, they held one of the state’s U.S. Senate seats.
Although North Dakota has been staunchly Republican on the presidential level, John McCain’s (R-AZ) shocking single-digit margin in 2008 signaled that Obama’s populist overtones were well-received by the state’s ancestrally populist crowd. However, as the state has moved away from family farming to agribusiness and oil and natural gas, the populist tendencies have somewhat faded. Mitt Romney’s (R-MA) clear, yet relatively poor, nineteen-point 2012 win essentially doubled McCain’s margin. In 2016, Donald Trump (R-NY) clobbered Hillary Clinton (D-NY) by a whopping thirty-six points, which he nearly repeated in 2020.
The state has become more intensely Republican when the ceiling was already presumed to have been hit, but with it, the state offices have completely fallen out of Democratic control, showing a deep resonance of the current populist wing of the current GOP. Not only is North Dakota a perfect example of the exodus of working-class whites from the Democratic Party, but it also questions Democrats’ theories of racial allegiance within the party. CNN’s Van Jones called Trump’s 2016 win a “whitelash against a black president and a changing country,” but North Dakota’s overwhelmingly white population was largely sympathetic to Obama’s message, so much that they almost broke a forty-year long streak to vote for him in 2008.
The bookend for Democrats’ fortunes in North Dakota came in 2018 when Senator Heidi Heitkamp (D) was defeated for re-election, solidifying a GOP takeover of all statewide offices.
Today, North Dakota prides itself on oil and natural gas production, clocking in at the number three and number ten spots nationally, respectively. Tourism exists in the form of Theodore Roosevelt’s namesake national park and the International Peace Garden on the North Dakota-Manitoba border.
The geography is simple: every county in North Dakota is intensely Republican, save for the red-leaning and occasionally swingy eastern counties of Cass (Fargo) and Grand Forks (Grand Forks), and the Democratic majority-Native American counties of Sioux and Rolette.
Democrats last held the state’s at-large Congressional district in 2010 and last held both Senate seats simultaneously in 2011. Democrats last won a gubernatorial race in 198, and they last controlled the State Senate in 1994 and the State House in 1984.
Once a truly split state, North Dakota is beyond out of reach for Democrats. Owing to its independent roots, third-party candidates still do well here, but it’s never enough to significantly cut into the GOP margins. Despite its modest profile on the national stage, North Dakota’s recent political upheaval perhaps best summarizes the fundamental shifts of the current party system.
