OK. I’ll Bite. Who’s Doug Burgum?

Update, Aug. 23, 2023, at 2:30 p.m.: While playing pickup basketball with his staff on Tuesday, Burgum suffered a “high-grade tear of his Achilles tendon,” an injury requiring him to be on crutches, and a less-than-ideal situation. He will make a last-minute decision on Wednesday about whether to participate in the debate.

Among the eight candidates occupying the Republican presidential debate stage Wednesday night is a fellow named Doug Burgum.

Who in the Sam Hill is that? And how the dickens did he get on the debate stage?

… Or so all you coastal elitists ask.

Doug Burgum is the popular two-term governor of North Dakota who decided to run for president because North Dakota basically runs itself and, as a very rich man, he can afford to do so.*

Burgum began his rise to fame as a chimney sweep. No, seriously! In his senior year of college, he began a chimney-sweeping service, and a newspaper published photos of him hopping around rooftops in a tuxedo. You know who loved this? Stanford University! It admitted him to its MBA program. (Kids of today: Take note.)

Flush with knowledge of business, Burgum started a tech company in the 1980s called Great Plains Software, which Microsoft acquired in 2001 for $1.1 billion. (You can tell he’s “good at software” because check out his website: You scroll down and the website moves sideways. It’s like living on Mars!) Burgum worked for Microsoft until 2007 and remained friendly with bigwigs there, including Bill Gates, who would eventually donate to his gubernatorial campaign. Since many Republican primary voters believe that Gates cares enough about them to want to clandestinely track them via vaccine-introduced microchip, this connection could be a problem if Burgum’s campaign ever goes anywhere.

After leaving Microsoft, the rich Burgum got richer with a couple of other companies, including a real-estate development firm in Fargo and a venture capital company.

Burgum entered the 2016 governor’s race as a dark horse business candidate. He used his secret weapon (money) to pull off a substantial upset against the powers that be, some of whom had funny surnames. The state Republican Party endorsed North Dakota Attorney General Wayne Stenehjem to replace incumbent Gov. Jack Dalrymple at the state convention, but Burgum pulled off a comfortable victory in the primary. It was politics in 2016, and out-of-left-field businesspeople were all the rage.

What is Burgum like? Aesthetically, we’re looking at a smiling Midwestern version of Jeremy Irons’ coldblooded investment bank CEO character in the persistently underappreciated 2011 film Margin Call.

As a governor and presidential candidate, Burgum seems like a McKinsey consultant who just wants to focus on taxes and regulation but understands he’s got to throw people a bone on the cultural stuff to get them all jazzed up. His very brief “Why Doug?” page on his website says this in so many words. After listing his “top priorities” as “the economy, energy, and national security,” the website says: “Make no mistake, Doug’s a conservative on other issues too.” For sure, for sure. “But he knows if we get the economy, energy and national security right, we will unlock the best of America and improve every American life.”

Whether or not Burgum actually cares about hot-button cultural issues as much as he does the possibilities of carbon sequestration—the way he’s attempted to marry his concern for carbon emissions with his state’s dependence on oil and gas production—he doesn’t seem to have any problem signing all sorts of harsh bills the North Dakota Legislature throws his way.

This spring, Burgum signed one of the country’s strictest post-Dobbs abortion laws, effectively banning abortion with exceptions up to a mere six weeks in cases of rape, incest, or medical emergencies. (He’s said he would not sign a federal abortion ban if elected president.) And in this year’s session, the state Legislature sent him about eight bills, most of which Burgum signed, targeting the roughly seven trans people in North Dakota. He did at least veto one that “would generally prohibit public schools teachers and staff from referring to transgender students by pronouns other than those reflecting the sex assigned to them at birth,” which narrowly survived a legislative override.

Has Burgum posted any quality polling yet? No. His name recognition is among the lowest in the field. To the extent Burgum has made an impact on the race thus far, it’s to show how stupid the Republican National Committee’s donor requirement for debate participation is. Burgum—who, again, is rich and can self-fund—offered $20 gift cards to those who donated $1 to his campaign, allowing him to meet the requirement of 40,000 unique donors spread across the country. That may sound sleazy—because it is. But the alternative that the RNC’s system promotes is keeping candidates hostage in the Fox News greenroom all campaign rather than giving them space to prove their retail politicking skills and ability to forge connections, which is the theoretical basis of the much-celebrated first-in-the-nation Iowa caucuses.

Unlike his fellow debate-stage backbencher, former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, Burgum has not been trying to build national name recognition the time-tested way: by going after Trump, and enticing Trump to punch back. Burgum, after all, is still a sitting governor in an extraordinarily red state, and governors like to remain popular at home.* And going after Trump does necessarily limit your potential appeal among members of the Republican electorate just as you’re introducing yourself to them.

When asked this week on NBC’s Meet the Press why he barely mentions the former president and refuses to weigh in on Trump’s many (alleged) crimes in many jurisdictions, Burgum suggested that now just wasn’t the time for that.

“If I had 100 percent national name recognition, if I’d run for president before, if I was living in a major media market and everybody in the country knew me,” Burgum told host Chuck Todd, “that’d be a different spot.”

We should expect Burgum to apply a quintessential first-debate strategy: He’s not going to pick many fights. He’s going to use the platform to repeatedly introduce a few key talking points and build up his national name recognition. Maybe he’ll toss a zinger or two in there if he’s feeling spunky. Would it be fun if he came prepped with a party trick, like chugging a pint of liquefied natural gas freshly fracked from the Bakken Formation that morning? Yes. But Burgum’s commitment to fun, in these early stages, appears limited.