North Dakota Politics: Conservative, but Trying to Pretend Trump Never Existed

My wife and I are up here in North Dakota visiting our daughter, and getting a feel for the local customs.  From a dietary perspective, things are pretty much what one would expect: lots of meat, scarce vegetables and fish.

The politics is deep red.  Republican John Hoeven is running for another term in the U.S. Senate on the basis that he “pushed back against the Biden administration’s call for vaccine mandates.”

As if this makes him special.  Anyone supporting science, as it applies to things like pandemic control, climate change mitigation, abortion, or anything else of consequence, would be run out of here on a rail.

I note that Hoeven’s ads don’t mention Trump.  Good idea.  For the first time since 2015, Trump has extremely negative approval ratings, even among many Republicans. Why take a chance associating yourself with a criminal conman when being anti-Biden is just as good, and completely noncontroversial?

This, btw, is indicative of precisely how the GOP will deal with Trump over the coming months.  There will be no admission that the former president was a person of zero personal integrity; at a certain point, he will be ignored, in the hopes that the American people will forget that he ever existed.