MINOT — Minot’s District 3 is home to Reps. Jeff Hoverson and Lori VanWinkle, two of the most controversial members of the Legislature, but maybe not for much longer.

District 3, like all odd-numbered districts in our state, is on the ballot this election cycle, and the House incumbents there

have just drawn two serious challengers.

Tim Mihalick and Blaine DesLauriers, each with a background in banking, have announced campaigns for those House seats. Mihalick is a senior vice president at First Western Bank & Trust and serves on the State Board of Higher Education. DesLauriers is vice chair of the board and senior executive vice president at First International Bank & Trust.

The entry into this race has delighted a lot of traditionally conservative Republicans in North Dakota

Hoverson, who has worked as a Lutheran pastor, has frequently made headlines with his bizarre antics. He was

banned from the Minot International Airport

after he accused a security agent of trying to touch his genitals. He also

objected

to a Hindu religious leader participating in the Legislature’s schedule of multi-denominational invocation leaders and, on his local radio show, seemed to suggest that Muslim cultures that force women to wear burkas

have it right.

Hoeverson has also backed legislation to mandate prayer and the display of the Ten Commandments in schools, and to encourage the end of Supreme Court precedent prohibiting bans on same sex marriage.

VanWinkle, for her part, went on a rant last year in which she suggested that women struggling with infertility have been cursed by God

(she later claimed her comments, which were documented in a floor speech, were taken out of context)

before taking

a weeklong ski vacation

during the busiest portion of the legislative session (she continued to collect her daily legislative pay while absent). When asked by a constituent why she doesn’t attend regular public forums in Minot during the legislative session,

she said she wasn’t willing to “sacrifice” any more of her personal time.

The incumbents haven’t officially announced their reelection bids, but it’s my practice to treat all incumbents as though they’re running again until we learn otherwise.

In many ways, VanWinkle and Hoverson are emblematic of the ascendant populist, MAGA-aligned faction of the North Dakota Republican Party. They are on the extreme fringe of conservative politics, and openly detest their traditionally conservative leaders. Now they’ve got challengers who are respected members of Minot’s business community, and will no doubt run well-organized and well-funded campaigns.

If the 2026 election is a turning point in the

internecine conflict among North Dakota Republicans

— the battle to see if our state will be governed by traditional conservatives or culture war populists — this primary race in District 3 could well be the hinge on which it turns.

In the 2024 cycle, there was an effort, largely organized by then-Rep. Brandon Prichard, to push far-right challengers against more moderate incumbent Republicans.

It was largely unsuccessful.

Most of the candidates Prichard backed lost, including Prichard himself, who was

defeated in the June primary

by current Rep. Mike Berg, a candidate with a political profile not all that unlike that of Mihalick and DesLauriers.

But these struggles among Republicans are hardly unique to North Dakota, and the populist MAGA faction has done better elsewhere. In South Dakota, for instance, in the 2024 primary,

more than a dozen incumbent Republicans were swept out of office.

Can North Dakota’s normie Republicans avoid that fate? They’ll get another test in 2026, but recruiting strong challengers like Mihalick and DesLauriers is a good sign for them.

On this day in 1993, Jamestown native and astronaut Rick Hieb visited Fargo’s Roosevelt Elementary School, captivating students with stories of his record-breaking spacewalks and the daily realities of life in orbit.

Here is the complete story as it appeared in the paper that day:

By Tom Pantera, STAFF WRITER

Like some astronauts, Rick Hieb downplays the importance of the profession. “We have an astronaut office; there’s a hundred of us in there,” he said. “My office-mates are astronauts. My neighbor one street over is the commander of my last flight. The next street over is the commander of the previous flight. We’re kind of a dime a dozen around where we all live” in Houston, he said.

“We sort of realize that if we make a mistake, it’s going to be of historic proportions,” he said. “But you don’t really think of yourself as being some kind of historic figure.”

But the 37-year-old Jamestown, N.D., native said his importance as a role model comes home when he speaks to children, as he did Thursday at Fargo’s Roosevelt Elementary School.

He kept the kids spellbound with a description of the May 1992 space shuttle mission in which he was one of three astronauts who walked in space to recover an errant satellite — the largest and longest space walk in history. He illustrated his talk with slides and film of the mission, including the capture of the satellite.

But he drew perhaps his biggest reactions when he explained how astronauts handle going to the bathroom during long spacewalks — adult-size diapers — and the peculiar cleanup problems that come with getting nauseous in a weightless environment.

Hieb already has started training for his next mission, when he will be payload commander aboard the shuttle Columbia in July 1994, although he noted the schedule “might slip a little bit.”

It will be an international spacelab mission, meaning a pressurized laboratory containing 80 different experiments will be housed in the shuttle’s payload bay.

“Every one of those scientists wants to teach us their science we’ll be doing on that flight,” he said.

About 40 percent of the experiments will be done for Japanese scientists, about 50 percent will be for Europeans, 5 percent for Canadians and the rest for Americans. The flight will last 13 days, and the shuttle will carry enough astronauts for two work shifts.

Hieb and others in the crew spent much of December in Europe for training and will be going to Europe and Japan for more training until about June.

He said he could have put in for a flight that featured another spacewalk, but he wanted to be a payload commander of a spacelab instead.

A 1973 graduate of Jamestown High School, Hieb earned degrees in math and physics from Northwest Nazarene College in Nampa, Idaho, in 1977 and a master’s degree in aerospace engineering from the University of Colorado in 1979. He joined NASA right out of graduate school, becoming an astronaut in 1986.

His first mission was in spring 1991 as a crew member of the shuttle Discovery.

Hieb would not say Thursday if the 1994 mission would be his last.

“I’m not promising anybody anything beyond this,” he said. “A spacelab flight is not nearly as sexy as putting on a spacesuit and going outside and grabbing onto satellites and stuff like that. But for me, it’ll kind of fill out the checklist of all the kinds of things that mission specialists can do. I’ll have kind of done everything that we do. I’m not for sure going to quit, but I’m not for sure going to stay either.”

Kate Almquist is the social media manager for InForum. After working as an intern, she joined The Forum full time starting in January 2022. Readers can reach her at kalmquist@forumcomm.com.

MINOT — “I just didn’t get it prioritized to get out the door.”

That’s what Attorney General Drew Wrigley said on this episode of Plain Talk when asked about the state’s annual crime report, which is typically released over the summer, but this year wasn’t made public until New Year’s Eve.

The delayed report comes amid an intense debate over crime in North Dakota. The most recent report, covering the year 2024, showed some declines from recent peaks in serious crime categories, but they’re still significantly up over the last decade.

“Violent crime and robbery crimes against the person … came down 2%,” Wrigley said, “but that 2% … makes last year the 10th highest of the last 11 years. You’re talking over 4,000 more victims every year than was the case in 2014.”

Wrigley said he plans to continue his push for stricter sentencing policies in next year’s legislative session. He was unsuccessful in winning enough votes among lawmakers for his proposed reforms during the first two legislative sessions of his tenure in office.

Wrigley also addressed delays in his office in responding to open records and open meetings complaints filed by the public, and the news media — “the number of requests is quite robust,” he said — and said that he planned to address a legislative request for an opinion on Retirement and Investment Office bonuses in “weeks” not months.

Also on this episode, co-host Chad Oban and I react to my story about top executives at the F5 Project giving themselves personal loans out of the nonprofit’s revenues, as well as my report about Legislature’s potentially preempting, during their upcoming special session, a ballot measure for universal school meals with a proposal of their own.

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