Since Sen. Byron Dorgan is set to retire and being a life long resident of North Dakota. I'm going to throw in my two cents on our open Senate Seat.
Now that Dorgan is out, I can fill in my fellow KOSers on what may happen to his Senate Seat.
I'm going to be honest I can safely say that more than likely this seat will go to the republican party.
Now the number one man on the republican side who may go for the gold is current three term Gov. John Hoeven.
John Hoeven started out as a member of the democratic party. He even went as far as to write/sign a paper stating the such before he ran for office and was going to run against then Gov. Ed Shaffer but choose against it and choose to hold off until Shaffer retired.
My guess he switched to make it easier for him to win office.
To tell you the truth I can't really tell what his stances on big topics that concern our country because our Gov. has never really spoke about his opinions about anything. He's never in the papers/tv making comments about anything
Our Gov is totally weak. He doesn't have a lot of power, our House and Senate has all of the power. The Gov's job is to basically sign bills, write a budget, tour disaster areas and every summer shoot a new tourism tv ad.
Hell Hoeven could disappear for 6 months and if the congress wasn't in session no one would miss him really unless a staffer or family member reported him missing.
His poll numbers are so high not because he is such a great gov. Its because he keeps his mouth shout and doesn't do stupid stuff. The key to a ND gov to get a 56%+ approval rating is to just STFU.
Honestly a lot of his high numbers comes from the fact that our state is sitting on a crap ton of oil and we are raking in the cash.
If Hoeven doesn't run for some reason I think that former gov and former Bush Ag sec Ed Shaffer may run. I say this not because I have sources I say this because once Ed Shaffer left the gov's office he left ND and then got his bush gig then suddenly Shaffer returned to do a few round of Tea Party events.
Its pretty bleak for Dems in the state. We have no big named people to run.
The only person I can see that has a chance is Rep. Pomeroy but if Hoeven or Shaffer runs I cannot see Pomeroy giving up his seat but my guess is that Pomeroy is going to hang back until the republicans pick their person.