The North Dakota Democrat Party Is An Out Of State Special Interest Group

How do I reach that conclusion? From studying the campaign disclosure documents available at the North Dakota Secretary of State website. From there I was able to download lists of all contributions made to the North Dakota Democrats and North Dakota Republicans. I was then able to divide those lists of contributions into in-state contributions and out-of-state contributions. Here are the lists in Microsoft Excel format:

Totaling these numbers shows that Republicans get approximately 1/3 of their money from outside of North Dakota:

And Democrats get approximately 1/2 of their money from outside of North Dakota (in-state numbers adjusted to exclude a $9,000+ refund from the Post Office):

Unfortunately for the Democrats, however, the above pie chart doesn’t quite represent an accurate comparison of their in-state vs. out-of-state money situation. If you look at their list of in-state contributors you see that it is dominated by two massive contributions from the campaign committees for Senator Kent Conrad, who gave $280,136.01 and Representative Earl Pomeroy who gave $124,010.07. There is also a smaller contribution from Senator Byron Dorgan’s campaign committee for $7,500.00.

If we consider that these three North Dakota politicians get the vast majority of their money from out of state we’re presented with a much different situation. According to campaign disclosure database OpenSecrets.org, Kent Conrad got 93% of his money from outside of North Dakota during the 2006 election cycle. Byron Dorgan was at 92% and Earl Pomeroy was at 68%. If we adjust the contributions from their campaign committees to the state Democrat party to reflect those percentages, the amount of in-state contributions to the North Dakota Dems drops dramatically:

By these numbers, during the 2006 election cycle North Dakota Democrats got less than 1/3 of their political contributions from actual North Dakotans.

Now consider this: Despite all that out of state money, which gave the Democrats a heavy fundraising advantage over Republicans, the North Dakota Democrats are still in the minority in both houses of the state legislature and still lost every single race for state-wide office with the single exception of Ag Commissioner.

Which isn’t to say that the tax-and-spend happy North Dakota Republicans, under the milquetoast leadership of Governor John Hoeven, deserve to be in the majority of elected offices in the state, but still. One wonders how many Democrats would even hold office in North Dakota if they weren’t able to drown out their Republican opponents with a flood of money from out-of-state liberal interests.