DICKEY COUNTY, N.D. — “He’s one of my Republicans,” Sen. Heidi Heitkamp says with pride, pointing to Jim Pritchard, a 55 year-old contractor who gives President Trump rave reviews but plans to vote for the vulnerable Democratic incumbent in the midterm election.
Pritchard and Heitkamp embraced and shared a few words this month, after the senator delivered remarks dedicating the groundbreaking of a 35,000-acre wind farm here in in south-central North Dakota, roughly a half-dozen miles from any paved road and about twice that distance from the nearest incorporated town.
The $200 million project, Xcel Energy officials said, would have languished without Heitkamp’s hard work securing federal tax breaks. Heitkamp was North Dakota’s only senior elected official to grace the ceremony, which attracted about two dozen or so potential voters. The first-term senator endeavored to talk to every one of them.
It’s part of her aggressive effort to create more people like Pritchard, convincing Trump supporters that the power of incumbency trumps the comfort of partisanship, a tall order in a state that voted 63 percent for the president and has few regrets.
“He is doing excellent. I think if he sticks to his guns he’s going to do tremendous things … I look at him as an outcast in a bad cesspool of things going on, and he’s doing his best that he can do,” Pritchard told the Washington Examiner.
He offered a similar assessment of Heitkamp to explain his preference for a Democrat who has opposed Trump on key initiatives like tax reform and attempts to repeal Obamacare, over her challenger, Republican Rep. Kevin Cramer, whose vows of fidelity to the White House form the backbone of his campaign pitch.
“She’s done tremendous things for North Dakota. She’s a senator that went to work for us. She’s not a politician when she’s [in Washington.] She doesn’t vote in party lines,” Pritchard said.
Republicans are in danger of losing their majority in the House in a midterm election cycle that is shaping up to be a rebuke of Trump driven by female voters in America’s affluent suburbs.
But the party’s opportunities for gains in the Senate are high, precisely because the battleground for control of the chamber runs directly through states like North Dakota, with sizable blocs of rural and working-class voters that prefer the GOP and are satisfied with Trump. His job approval rating here hit 50 percent in July, according to a Morning Consult survey, significantly higher than his mediocre national average.
Just how red is this predominantly agricultural state of 755,000? Heitkamp, since winning a narrow, upset victory over a disliked Republican six years ago, has been the only Democrat here with any measurable influence, either federally or in the state house. It all adds up to a tough road to re-election for Heitkamp. Her supporters are hopeful, but realistic.
“Her biggest challenge is all the Republicans in North Dakota,” Deborah Elhard, 69, from nearby tiny Ellendale, said with an acknowledging chuckle, after kibitzing with Heitkamp at the wind farm groundbreaking. “As you know, it was [63 percent] for the other character last presidential election.”
“I’m very aligned with the Democratic Party line,” added Michelle Steinwand, 50, a Heitkamp supporter, from Kulm, another nearby small farming community. “However, I recognize that I live in a sea of conservatism.”
As with most Senate Democrats in her precarious political position, Heitkamp is running on healthcare and increasingly on Trump’s trade policies. Personable and engaging on the stump, she isn’t pulling any punches.
She’s attempting to cast Cramer’s support for repealing the Affordable Care Act, and by extension, his ties to an administration that has endorsed a lawsuit against the healthcare law that could result in it being found unconstitutional, as equal to backing the removal of government regulations that force insurers to cover pre-existing medical conditions.
As North Dakotans’ anxiety about trade has mounted, Heitkamp has blamed the potentially disastrous repercussions on Cramer. The state’s $10 billion agriculture industry, especially the $2 billion in soybean exports to China, drives local economies. It’s being jeopardized by the trade dispute Trump has instigated with China in a bid to secure more favorable trading terms for U.S. exports.
But on perhaps the No. 1 issue — loyalty to Trump, a contest with Cramer that Heitkamp will never win — she is trying to turn the tables.
“He said he would vote [with] the president 100 percent of the time. Not more dependable, he’s going to vote [with] the president 100 percent of the time,” Heitkamp said, critically. “I think this time around, what you talk about — I talked about it here. I said look, I rolled up my sleeves and stabilized the production tax credit. I didn’t get any help from Kevin Cramer doing that. I will tell you that.”
“Those folks go, ‘well, you might not always agree with her, but man, she works hard and she gets the job done,’” she added. “And there’s probably the vast majority of people here voted for Trump.”
And in case it appears Heitkamp has forgotten the political task before her this fall; when a reporter errs in stating that she over-performed former President Barack Obama by 12 percentage points in 2012, she quickly corrects him with the actual figure: 22 points.
