North Dakota governor, GOP presidential candidate Burgum stops in Mason City today

MASON CITY — North Dakota governor and Republican presidential candidate Doug Burgum made a campaign stop in Mason City today. Burgum has vowed to stay in the race through the Iowa Caucuses and New Hampshire primary despite not making the stage for last week’s GOP presidential debate in Miami and was seventh with only 3% support in the latest Des Moines Register Iowa Poll released on October 30th.

Burgum tells KGLO News that he wants to get his face out in front of as many voters as possible in the next two months.  “I think the key thing for us because we just launched on June 7th is we’re the least-well-known candidate in the field, and people have to get to know us. We’ve got to get out and do more events like we’re doing in Mason City today, we’ve got to just keep getting in front of people, because like the events we were at yesterday, whether it’s in a farm shop or in a restaurant, somebody’s house, it doesn’t matter. When people hear and understand who we are and what we stand for, and then they understand when we announced on June 7th, we said there’s three issues that we’re going to run on, economy, energy and national security. Those are the policies that affect every American.”

Burgum says he’s heard so many stories of people being impacted by fentanyl overdose deaths spurred by people bringing over an unsecure border. “We’ve lost five Vietnams worth of overdose deaths since Joe Biden took office, and we’ve had between the six-and-a-half million asylum seekers that have been let into the country and the one-and-a-half million known got-aways, that’s the equivalent of two Iowas. Take everybody in Iowa, double them, make a clone of them standing right next to them, that’s how many people. Every person in Mason City, in Des Moines, in Dubuque, everybody that would have come into the country in the last two-and-three-quarters years under Biden. There are eight million people, two Iowas worth were coming in.”

Burgum says the economy continues to be a hot-button issue on the campaign trail.   “We can fix all of this stuff, we can fix the federal spending. We cut 27% of North Dakota’s general fund budget my first four months in office. $1.7 billion we cut out, and every train still ran on time. There’s ways to do this, just the way a family has to do it, which is you reduce your spending but then you increase your revenue by cutting the red tape.”

Burgum, who’s in the middle of his second term as North Dakota’s governor, invested in a software company in his home state in 1983. He became the company’s president in 1984 and sold it to Microsoft in 2001.