Port: Book-banning, anti-vaccine culture warriors take control of the North Dakota Republican Party

MINOT, N.D. — For weeks I’ve

been writing

about an impending shift in the control of the North Dakota Republican Party, from the sort of pragmatic and traditional conservatism that has guided the party to 30 years of dominance, to a new strain of culture war populism heavily influenced by disgraced former President Donald Trump’s political movement.

Today, that shift was completed. Sandi Sanford, the wife of former Lt. Gov. Brent Sanford,

a conspiracy-addled activist who has promoted book bans and other culture war ephemera,

defeated Perrie Schafer to become chair of the NDGOP.

The vote was a close one, 29-28, but Sanford came out on top.

Long-time Fargo Republican activist John Trandem, who is very socially conservative, was elected vice chair by the same vote total, 29-28. He defeated John Oderman, a city commissioner from Dickinson.

Here’s an interesting bit of trivia, given how close the vote was. Senate Majority Leader David Hogue, who did not attend the reorganization meeting, made Sen. David Celemens of West Fargo his proxy. Clemens is an ardent culture warrior, and his vote, on Hogue’s behalf, may well have been the deciding one in these races.

Either way, this is a seismic shift for the party that dominates North Dakota politics.

Sanford’s victory was immediately feted by luminaries from the MAGA-universe, like Charlie Kirk, who recently explained to his audience how much time he spends wondering if the condiments in his refrigerator

are “woke” or not (I wish I was making that up).

Sanford

has called

for a primary challenge to sitting Congressman Kelly Armstrong over his vote to codify same-sex marriage in federal statute. She has been an outspoken critic of Gov. Doug Burgum, so much so that it’s widely rumored that her criticisms were why her husband, Brent, left Burgum’s administration late last year. She is one of the founders of an activist group called North Dakota Can that has been focused on

opposing vaccinations,

branding educators and librarians as “groomers,”

and promoting policies seemingly aimed at

driving the LGBTQ community out of the state.

Many observers of this year’s legislative session, including this one, thought the Republican majority in Bismarck spent far too much time obsessing over book bans and pronoun bills.

Sanford’s ascendency indicates that we can expect more of the same from the party in the future.

But let’s talk about some of the more practical impacts. What do Republicans like Burgum, Armstrong, and others do now that they find themselves at odds with the leadership of their own party?

Perhaps not much.

The question will be how active Sanford and her faction will be in going after sitting Republicans. Will she use her chair position to speak out against NDGOP incumbents?

Political parties typically function like a sort of social club that’s organized around promoting the candidacy of candidates of a particular ideology. If Sanford and her fellow travelers think they can use control of the party to control the candidates, they may end up demonstrating how little the party actually matters.

Statewide candidates like Burgum and Armstrong, and even other moderate executive office holders like Insurance Commissioner Jon Godfread or Treasurer Thomas Beadle, don’t need much from the party. They raise their own money. They have name recognition. While it may not be helpful to have the chair of your own party criticizing you, we’ve all lived through enough of the Trump era to understand that sort of weirdness.

We may see many moderate Republican candidates eschew their party’s local or statewide convention endorsement in favor of taking their candidacy straight to the June primary.

Last cycle, for example, Hoeven went to the NDGOP convention and was

nearly defeated by Rick Becker,

a populist crank from Sanford’s milieu. But Becker didn’t bother campaigning in the June primary, and the general election results showed us why.

Becker ran against Hoeven as an independent and lost in a landslide,

coming in a distant third

behind Hoeven and Democratic-NPL candidate Katrina Christiansen.

Which suggests that while Becker and Sanford’s faction have successfully taken over the NDGOP, they’re not representative of what North Dakotans want from their political leaders.