"We have seen the future, and it's in North Dakota."

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Vultures! Elections! It’s September!

We have seen the future, and it’s in North Dakota.

By Gail Collins
Opinion Columnist

August 31, 2018

Happy International Vulture Awareness Day! Honest to gosh. No snickering. Vultures do a lot of good things for the environment, and they’re tired of being dismissed just because they look creepy and eat carrion. No vulture, for instance, has ever been known to drive a golf cart onto the putting green. Or brag about grabbing a lady vulture by her private parts. Or separate children from their mothers at the border. Go vultures.

I’m sure it’s a coincidence that this is also the start of the big election campaign season. Time to get focused. Lots of critical races all over the place, but let’s begin with North Dakota. Next week the president goes to Fargo to help raise money for Kevin Cramer, the Republican congressman who’s trying to knock off Democratic senator Heidi Heitkamp. President Trump was in the state for Cramer not too long ago, but he just can’t get enough of the place. It’s possible that by Election Day we will be able to calculate he spent more of the autumn with North Dakotans than with his wife.

Of all the states the Democrats are worried about this fall, North Dakota may be No. 1. And that is fine by North Dakota, which doesn’t usually get much attention. This may be, in part, because it has approximately as many people as visit Grand Central Station on an average day.

Yes. North Dakota’s population is about 755,000 residents. (State slogan: “Bigger than Wyoming!”)

Correction: North Dakota’s official motto is not really “Bigger than Wyoming.” We are fiends about accuracy and I don’t want you to get the wrong idea just because I made a joke. It’s “Liberty and Union Now and Forever, One and Inseparable.” Although I believe many of you will agree that mine is better.

North Dakota voted for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton by more than 35 points, so you can see that Heitkamp has her work cut out for her. One of the big issues is health care. She’s running hard on the cost of prescription drugs and Republican efforts to hamstring the Affordable Care Act — which she says could mean disaster for people with pre-existing conditions. The Democrats are making that argument all over the country, and it seems to be working pretty well. People, do you remember when everyone thought Barack Obama was destroying his party with an overambitious health bill? Now the vultures are picking away at the bones of Obamacare repeal plans.

And then there’s trade. When the president began strong-arming China, China retaliated with a 25 percent tariff on soybean imports. North Dakota grows a hell of a lot of soybeans. In fact, it brags that it grows “enough soybeans to make 483 billion crayons each year.”

We will pause for a minute to let those of you who did not know crayons were made of soybeans a chance to catch up. Actually, a lot of crayons are still made with petroleum byproducts, but soybeans are the environmental alternative of the future. Go soybeans!

“About two-thirds of our soybean market is in China,” Heitkamp told me in a phone interview, before launching into a detailed explanation of soybean pricing. The bottom line was that talking tough about trade sounds good in theory, until the other side starts putting tariffs on the stuff you grow. Republican Cramer, who frequently wraps himself around Trump like a famished boa constrictor, has had a certain amount of trouble trying to sound supportive on this front.

So, there are a few issues leaning Heitkamp’s way even in this very Trumpian territory. She’s also voted with the president on several important issues. He invited her to the bill signing after she gave the Republicans critical support on their attempt to water down bank regulations. It was a plan Heitkamp said was important to small banks, which she and a bipartisan group of House and Senate members worked hard to get through. Anyhow, she was the only Democrat at the party, standing very close to the president while her opponent, Representative Cramer, was sort of stuck in the back. “Have you ever watched the video? It’s obscene,” he complained in an interview with The Washington Post.

“He really did nothing but vote on the bill. I think he should be grateful to have been invited to begin with,” sniffed Heitkamp.

She’s a very likable woman — warm, outgoing — while her opponent can seem sort of cardboardy. That’s important in a state like North Dakota, where the voters not only expect to meet their senator frequently, they can often tell you about the last time they were at her house for dinner.

So the situation is far from hopeless. And North Dakota could wind up dictating who runs the Senate. A state with fewer people than Indianapolis gets to determine a large chunk of the nation’s future.

It’s true, people, it’s true. If you live in California your vote for the U.S. Senate is worth about 1/50th as much as a North Dakotan’s. Which is super fine with all of them.

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Gail Collins is an Op-Ed columnist, a former member of the editorial board and was the first woman to serve as Times editorial page editor, from 2001 to 2007. @GailCollins Facebook

A version of this article appears in print on Sept. 1, 2018, on Page A18 of the New York edition with the headline: Vultures! Elections! It’s September!.

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