ND Gov. Burgum and Former VP Pence Jump Into Already Crowded GOP Race for President

FARGO, N.D. (AP) — North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, a former software entrepreneur who enacted a slate of laws this year advancing conservative policies on culture war issues, highlighted his small-town roots and business experience as he announced his candidacy for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination on Wednesday.

Burgum, 66, joins a long list of contenders hoping to dent former President Donald Trump’s early lead in the race. The governor of the nation’s fourth-least populous state made the announcement in the The Wall Street Journal and kicked off his campaign in Fargo, near the tiny farm town of Arthur where he grew up.

“It shouldn’t be a surprise that small-town values have guided me my entire life,” Burgum told the crowd. “And frankly, big cities could use more ideas and more values from small towns right now.”

Burgum spoke under a sign declaring him “A new leader for a changing economy,” echoing a slogan he first used as his successful 2016 gubernatorial campaign. Reelected in 2020, he’s eligible to run for a third time in 2024.

In 1983, he founded Great Plains Software, which was acquired by Microsoft in 2011, and Burgum stayed on as a Microsoft vice president until 2007.

His first presidential campaign event, held at a former church in downtown Fargo, was attended by many prominent North Dakota Republicans, including two former governors and top state lawmakers.

Burgum will campaign Thursday and Friday in Iowa, home of the first-in-the-nation Republican caucuses, and Saturday and Sunday in New Hampshire, which hosts the first GOP primary.

Former Vice President Mike Pence opened his bid for the Republican nomination for president Wednesday with a firm denunciation of former President Donald Trump, accusing his two-time running mate of abandoning conservative principles and being guilty of dereliction of duty on Jan. 6, 2021.

Pence, launching his campaign in a suburb of Des Moines, became the first vice president in modern history to challenge the president under whom he served. He said Trump had disqualified himself when he insisted that Pence had the power to keep him in office — even though he did not.

Trump, he said, “endangered my family and everyone at the Capitol” on the 6th. “But the American people deserve to know that on that day, President Trump also demanded I choose between him and our Constitution. Now voters will be faced with the same choice.”

“I believe anyone that puts themselves over the Constitution should never be president of the United States, and anyone who asks someone else to put them over the Constitution should never be president of the United Sates again,” he said.

Pence has spent much of the past two-and-a-half-years obliquely criticizing Trump, trying to navigate his political future in a party that has been transformed in Trump’s image. But Wednesday, as he made his pitch to voters for the first time as a declared candidate, he did not hold his tongue.

With Pence’s entry into the race, on his 64th birthday, the GOP field is largely set. It includes Trump, who’s leading in early polls, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who remains in second, former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson and North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, who also launched his campaign Wednesday.