North Dakota Gov. John Hoeven was in Sioux Falls on Wednesday for his first out-of-state fundraiser since announcing his run for the U.S. Senate last month.
South Dakota Sen. John Thune, a longtime friend of Hoeven's, hosted the event for the popular North Dakota governor. For Hoeven, it was a natural location for his first fundraiser outside North Dakota. Thune had been nudging him for months to run for Senate, and the two states share business alliances and common interests in Washington.
Hoeven is heavily favored to win the Senate seat after Democratic Sen. Byron Dorgan announced he wouldn't seek re-election. A win would make Hoeven the first Republican elected to the U.S. House or Senate in North Dakota since 1980.
Hoeven, who first won the governor's office in 2000, enters the race with numbers that most politicians can only dream about. His approval rating among North Dakota voters, according to a Rasmussen Reports survey released last week, stands at 85 percent. He topped 70 percent of the vote in both of his past two governor races.
Hoeven rides a wave of voter discontent that threatens to swamp Democratic House and Senate seats across the country this year, including the at-large House seats in North Dakota and South Dakota held by Reps. Earl Pomeroy and Stephanie Herseth Sandlin.
At first glance, North Dakota seems an unlikely source of voter discontent. The state is one of only two in the nation to be running budget surpluses. And, at the end of last year, the state had the lowest unemployment rate in the country followed by South Dakota and Nebraska.
But, Hoeven said, voters are worried about events on the national stage.
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Lloyd Omdahl, a former Democratic lieutenant governor of the state and professor emeritus of political science at the University of North Dakota, agrees that national deficits and debt are weighing on voters in North Dakota. North Dakota, like South Dakota, receives more money from the federal government than it sends to Washington.
"The federal government has been very good to North Dakota," Omdahl said. "Our economy has been very stable."
But, he added, "fiscally, this is a very conservative state. We have money hidden under bed mattresses in coffee cans."
Voters in the Dakotas worry about proposals in Washington that could harm both states' energy industries, Hoeven and Thune said. Both states have thriving ethanol producers, and North Dakota is gifted with oil and natural gas reserves.
The uncertainty about energy policies, Thune said, has put projects on the back burner and the jobs that go with them.
