Port: Don’t bet against Doug Burgum

MINOT, N.D. — Over the Thanksgiving holiday in November of 2015, I met soon-to-be governor Doug Burgum for the first time.

He’d asked for a meeting at his downtown Fargo office to ask me if I thought he could win if he ran for governor.

I didn’t tell him he couldn’t, though that thought was in my mind. I told him it would be a tall mountain to climb, and that it would cost him a lot of money, and that he probably wouldn’t win against Wayne Stenehjem, the long-time attorney general who had been winning landslide statewide elections for a generation.

So of course, Burgum mopped the floor with Stenehjem, picking up nearly 60% of the vote in the NDGOP’s primary on his way to turning North Dakota politics on his head.

What did I learn from that turn of events?