If you are one of those people who are frantic for the 2024 Republican presidential field to get “winnowed” as rapidly as possible either to ensure or prevent the nomination of Donald Trump, you may find North Dakota governor Doug Burgum profoundly annoying. The obscure chief executive of an obscure state (back in the day the joke question “Have you ever met anyone from North Dakota?” was a conversation starter in my home state of Georgia) has parlayed heavy spending from his vast personal fortune into …well, two appearances in presidential candidate debates. His persistently low poll numbers will almost certainly keep him from appearing in next week’s third debate in Miami.
At this point, Burgum’s legacy as a presidential aspirant can be summed up with three data points: (1) his success in flatly buying donors to reach the RNC’s required thresholds by offering $20 gift cards to anyone make a $1 donation; (2) his efforts to demand attention at the second candidate debate by loudly squawking out of order, adding materially to the bad quality of the event; and (3) his remarkable eyebrows, which make him look like North Dakota’s answer to Eugene Levy. He is not going to be the GOP nominee for president. Yet he sojourns on, buttressed by a (reported) near-billion-dollar fortune he gained by building and selling a software company before he entered politics.
According to the New York Times, Burgum ain’t hanging it up until everyone hears his message, which is basically advancing old-school notions of free-market-oriented small-state economic development:
Mr. Burgum is committed to staying on the ballot in Iowa and New Hampshire, where he says he regularly meets people who are eager to vote for him. “They are the ones that are going to decide how the field gets narrowed, not some other group,” he said.
He first needs to get them to answer calls and emails from pollsters. He’s at 1.5 percent in the RealClearPolitics polling averages of Iowa, and at two percent in New Hampshire, despite relatively heavy advertising in both states bearing his unique Rotarian message.
In Burgum’s defense, he’s not strictly speaking buying attention with his own fortune: He’s done well in getting his rich friends to buy him attention via his super-PAC, the Times reports:
Friends from the business community have also jumped in with support. The super PAC backing him, called Best of America, had taken in more than $11 million as of the end of June from about two dozen wealthy supporters, including people with links to his business world.
“Anybody who’s donated significantly so far is someone who’s known us for a long time,” Mr. Burgum said. “Because they’re like, OK, this is the real deal.”
In his persistent determination to light money on fire despite a limited return on investment, Burgum is actually a piker compared to 2020 Democratic presidential candidates Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg. Like Burgum, Steyer was a billionaire tech dude. Unlike Burgum, he had never been elected to anything, and made a poor impression on my colleague Eric Levitz at the time:
Tom Steyer has the résumé of a hedge-fund manager and the charisma of an accountant. His public speaking skills are minimal, political experience, negligible, and taste in ties, unforgivable. His natural constituency is ostensibly that subset of progressive Democrats who want their party’s nominee to be both a populist outsider and early investor in private prisons.
But Steyer sure turned on the money spigots and left them on, spending an estimated $175 million on his campaign. His money and message did earn him more support than Burgum has so far obtained. After desultory showings in Iowa and New Hampshire, Steyer won 9 percent of the vote in Nevada, and then 11 percent in South Carolina, where for a hot minute his massive TV spending made him a threat to the Joe Biden breakthrough that made the 46th president truly viable. He finally dropped out at that point.
Steyer, however, was himself a piker in the money-burning business compared to Bloomberg, the multibillionaire former New York mayor who spent (according to one final estimate) a cool billion on a late-developing campaign that he blew up in a few minutes of abject disaster on a debate stage in Las Vegas (his skewering by Elizabeth Warren was the high point of her own far less expensive campaign), creating the opening that Biden so expertly exploited.
Steyer and Bloomberg, of course, were running in a completely topsy-turvy contest compounded by the arrival of COVID; at various points it looked like the front-runners were Biden, then Warren, then Buttigieg, then Sanders, then Bloomberg, then Sanders again, and then Biden again. Burgum is running in a race dominated by Trump, whose enemies are frantically trying to winnow the field in order to create some sort of momentum for somebody — anybody — else.
Soon enough, we’ll probably realize that Burgum’s profligate spending doesn’t matter to anyone other than the media outlets running his ads, and perhaps his heirs. His grousing about being barred from the stage of debates with shrinking viewership and no impact on the contest will be forgotten, along with the endless speculation over when Republican primary voters will finally realize they need to move on from Trump. Let Doug Burgum enjoy his time on the outer margins of the national political scene, where if nothing else he will redistribute some income.