KINDRED, N.D. — Rep. Kevin Cramer is standing in front of his modest childhood home and pointing next door to the church he attended growing up.
The scene unfolds as the Republican, 57, takes a short break from jogging the annual Kindred Days parade through his speck of a hometown, glad-handing and taking selfies with everyone who will let him. It’s symbolic of the friendly confines of Cramer’s closely watched bid to oust Democratic Sen. Heidi Heitkamp in the midterm election, and the extent he and his party would have to go to blow it.
“I just like what he supports, what he stands for — the fact that he’s a Republican and I’m a Republican,” Cramer supporter Nate Nieman, 39, told the Washington Examiner on a sweltering August morning, after greeting the congressman along the parade route in Kindred, a farming community about 30 miles southwest of Fargo.
Heitkamp is a tough campaigner, and she’s throwing everything she can at Cramer, North Dakota’s third term, at-large congressman. She’s tried to veer Right on immigration, while targeting her challenger on healthcare and trade, key issues in a rural state that is heavily dependent on agriculture exports.
But Cramer has partisanship on his side.
Republicans dominate at all levels of elected office because of shared values with a majority of voters who are quite like Nieman. Plus, rather significantly, Cramer’s got President Trump. More than just conservative, North Dakota less than 75 days before the midterm elections is predisposed toward Trump — the man and his agenda.
Cramer, who has strapped himself to the president on most issues and done his best to minimize their differences, said the Senate campaign is about who demonstrates greater support for “the North Dakota agenda.”
Then he adds: “It just so happens, President Trump largely supports the North Dakota agenda, and that’s evidenced by the fact he got 63 percent of the vote here, promising certain things, he’s been doing the things he’s promised … While we don’t agree on everything we agree on the vast majority of things.”
So what are Republicans worried about?
Absent Trump, this was pretty much how the Senate race lined up in 2012. Yet Heitkamp in that open seat contest over-performed President Barack Obama by 22 percentage points and defeated Rick Berg, the sitting Republican congressman. Public polls just before Election Day put Berg well in front, only to see Heitkamp pull a narrow upset.
North Dakota Republicans, conceding the Democrat might be more formidable than outsiders realize, cautioned that the race could tighten late. They recalled a picture from just after Heitkamp’s first race that featured her holding an Oct. 20, 2012, copy of the Fargo Forum newspaper with the banner headline: “Berg has 10-point lead.”
Stan Stein, chairman of the state GOP six years ago, said in an interview that Heitkamp benefited in that campaign because Republicans were too complacent, but predicted: “It’s going to be different this year.” He cautioned that Cramer vs. Heitkamp will be competitive regardless of the polling (early polling has shown the Republican with an advantage.)
Heitkamp has worked with Trump to enact legislation overhauling the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation passed under Obama. She has supported some of his top nominees to the executive and judicial branches, like Gina Haspel, now director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and Neil Gorsuch, now an associate justice on the Supreme Court. It won’t be surprising if Heitkamp backs Trump’s latest nominee to the high court, Brett Kavanaugh, in a vote expected this fall.
But on most issues that GOP voters care about — the $1.3 trillion tax overhaul and Trump’s immigration agenda, Republicans claim, not without some evidence, that Heitkamp has been AWOL. Heitkamp’s extended record on economic and immigration issues, beginning with Obama’s second term and running through the first 19 months of Trump’s tenure, is the “biggest reason” for Cramer’s optimism.
“She won [in 2012] not having a voting record, so she could kind of be on all sides of every issue and use her personality and convince people,” Cramer said. “That’s not working as well this go-around because she’s got a voting record to defend.
The congressman’s one major red flag is trade.
Trump initiated a dispute with China earlier this year in an effort to secure more favorable terms for U.S. exports. But the short-term result has been an impasse that has halted orders for North Dakota exports to Beijing, mainly soybeans, worth billions of dollars annually. If the disagreement isn’t resolved before Election Day, farmers could be left with crops they can’t sell, unable to pay off their bank loans.
North Dakota’s economy could be devastated. It’s why Cramer has pushed aggressively on the White House to resolve matters quickly, and in the meantime, lobbied for the administration’s proposal to spend $12 billion to keep farmers afloat during an extended trade war.
Cramer is still in good shape however, yet again bolstered by the Trump factor. Voters here back the president’s trade policies in principle, if not completely in execution, and are willing to give him some space to negotiate.
The couple that lives in Cramer’s childhood home, retirees Bob and Leaha Clarke, are old family friends that are both sticking with the congressman. That’s despite concerns about Trump’s trade policies, which self-described “ag man” Bob Clarke conceded could sabotage the income he earns as a part-time farm hand since retiring from the military.
“I like what he stand for,” Leaha Clarke said.
