5 things you should know about Doug Burgum

Doug Burgum has at least a few things going for him: he’s a sitting governor, which is the most common stepping stone to the presidency of the United States, and he’s got deep pockets.

But Mr. Burgum, North Dakota’s two-term Republican governor, nevertheless entered the 2024 presidential race on Wednesday with a notable disadvantage: The 99.8 percent of Americans who don’t live in North Dakota probably don’t know much about it.

Here are five things you should know about Mr. Burgum.

His election as governor was a great shock.

When Mr. Burgum ran for governor in January 2016, few people in North Dakota even knew who he was.

A poll performed the following month found himself 49 percentage points behind Attorney General Wayne Stenehjem, who was the elected nominee of the North Dakota Republican Party, outgoing Governor Jack Dalrymple and Senator John Hoeven.

In the end, he defeated Mr. Stenehjem in the Republican primary by more than 20 points.

“Stand up if you saw this coming,” says Mike McFeely, a columnist for The Forum, a newspaper in Fargo, wrote after the primary. ‘Okay, sit down. Because no, you didn’t.”

Mr. Burgum, who had never held elected office, benefited from an anti-establishment campaign message — after all, this was the year Donald J. Trump showed Republican voters hungry for perceived outsiders — and from Democrats crossing over to vote in the Republican primary, as state law allows.

He also benefited from millions of dollars of his own money, which enabled him to significantly surpass Mr. Stenehjem despite only slightly surpassing him in fundraising.

He is a wealthy software entrepreneur.

Mr. Burgum grew up in Arthur, ND, a small 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 share into a fledgling financial software company by taking out a $250,000 mortgage on farmland he had inherited. (His grandparents started an agribusiness company that still runs in his family.)

In the mid-1980s, he and his family members bought out the company’s founders, Great Plains Software, and took full ownership. In the following years, it became a major provider of accounting and bookkeeping software to small and medium-sized businesses, growing to 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 the sale of Great Plains Software, Mr. Burgum founded two more companies: Kilbourne Group, a real estate development company, and Arthur Ventures, a venture capital firm that invests in software companies.

It supports fossil fuels and carbon capture.

In 2021, shortly after beginning his second term as governor, announced Mr. Burgum an unusual goal for a Republican: to make North Dakota carbon neutral by 2030.

However, he rejected the transition to renewable energy, a central step that climate scientists say is necessary to reach that goal. North Dakota is a major consumer of wind energy, but also heavily dependent on oil, natural gas and coal, and Mr. Burgum does not want to fundamentally change that. Instead, he argues that by using new technology to capture carbon emissions, North Dakota could become carbon neutral while remaining largely dependent on fossil fuels.

That’s a politically attractive 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 largest oil producers in the country. It is also one of the largest coal producers, This is reported by the Federal Energy Information Service.

But experts say that while carbon capture could be a useful tool for mitigating climate change, it’s unlikely to be sufficient on its own — in part because its high cost has made it difficult 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 would create a tax incentive for some form of it. More recently, local leaders And landowners have fought over a proposed pipeline that would bring carbon from other states to underground storage in North Dakota.

He signed eight anti-transgender laws this year.

North Dakota lawmakers have passed at least eight bills in recent months targeting transgender or gender-nonconforming people, and Mr. Burgum signed into law. That’s more than almost any other state in what was a record year for anti-transgender legislation.

Mr Burgum signed a ban on transitional care for minors, as more than a dozen other states have done this year. The ban — which goes against the consensus of major medical organizations — makes it a crime to provide puberty blockers or hormones to minors for sex reassignment, and a crime to perform surgery.

He drew a law define sex as determined by “genital organs, chromosomes and endogenous hormone profiles at birth”; An definition of “male” and “female”; And another banning most gender changes on transgender birth certificates.

He drew a value restricting the use of bathrooms and showers by transgender people in state facilities, and another allow public school staff to misinterpret students and require schools to inform parents of students’ “transgender status.” (He vetoed a bill that would have gone further by mandating that schools misinterpret many trans students.)

He also signed two measures restricting the participation of transgender girls and women in sports: An apply to public schools and to private schools that compete against them, and the second apply to colleges with the same public/private criteria.

He signed one of the strongest abortion bans in the country.

In April, Mr Burgum signed into law a law banning almost all abortions. Exceptions for rape or incest are only allowed in the first six weeks of pregnancy, when many people do not yet know they are pregnant. After six weeks, the only exception is the occurrence of “death or serious health risk”.

Previously, abortion was legal in North Dakota up to 22 weeks of pregnancy.

Like many 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 be criminally prosecuted 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 was necessary – was struck down by the Supreme Court of North Dakota.

The new ban Mr. Burgum signed, which state lawmakers 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 the fear of prosecution has deterred many doctors from performing abortions for medical reasons, even in states whose laws provide for such exceptions.