Heidi Heitkamp’s Presidential Candidate Thinks North Dakotans Are Backward

Back in 2015, at a Hillary Clinton campaign event in Washington D.C., North Dakota Senator Heidi Heitkamp endorsed Hillary Clinton for president alongside a dozen other female Democrat members of the Senate.

You can watch CSPAN’s video of the event here.

But Heitkamp was a Clinton backer long before then.  She signed a letter urging Hillary Clinton to run for President back in 2013, during her first year in the Senate.

So how does Senator Heitkamp feel about Clinton saying, in speeches overseas, that the parts of the country which didn’t vote for her are essentially backward?

“If you look at the map of the United States, there’s all that red in the middle where Trump won,” Clinton told an audience in Mumbai. “I win the coast, I win, you know, Illinois and Minnesota, places like that.”

“I won the places that represent two-thirds of America’s gross domestic product,” she continued. “So I won the places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward. And his whole campaign, ‘Make America Great Again,’ was looking backwards.”

She also summed up President Trump’s campaign message like this: “You didn’t like black people getting rights, you don’t like women, you know, getting jobs,” she said. “You don’t want, you know, see that Indian American succeeding more than you are. Whatever your problem is, I’m going to solve it.”

Here’s video:

As icing on the cake, Clinton also took some shots at female Trump voters, suggesting they cast that vote because they were pressured by the men in their lives. “Part of that is an identification with the Republican Party, and a sort of ongoing pressure to vote the way that your husband, your boss, your son, whoever, believes you should,” she said (and it’s not the first time she’s tried to make that point).

Are North Dakota women who voted for Trump in the thrall of their men? That insinuation is insulting.

Senator Heitkamp supported Clinton for President, but also hopes to get re-elected in a state where Clinton got less than 30 percent of the vote. Because Trump got about 63 percent of the vote, Heitkamp has made it a political strategy to at least appear to be supportive of some of the President’s policy agenda. Other North Dakota Democrats running for federal office have taken a similar tack.

They’re all saying they’re not going to campaign against Trump. They’re avoiding being overtly critical of the President.

But that positioning seems a bit hypocritical. Heitkamp and the various Democratic candidates for the U.S. House are all, after all, Democrats. Clinton was their candidate in 2016. Their party leaders to this day continue to rail on Trump, not just over policy disagreements, but on the notion that he’s fundamentally unfit for office and a racist tyrant to boot.

When Trump says or does outrageous things, North Dakota Republicans are asked about it. It seems only fair that, when Hillary Clinton suggests our state is backward, that Democrats be questioned similarly.