ND-Sen: One month after he announced he wouldn't run for the Senate, GOP Rep. Kevin Cramer put out a Facebook invite for a "Cramer for Senate Announcement & Rally” set for Friday, so it's safe to say he's in. (Or to put it another way: If Cramer holds a "Senate Announcement & Rally" to announce he's not running, he's either a troll or beyond indecisive.) While wealthy state Sen. Tom Campbell remains in the race as of Thursday night, Campbell all but said he'd run for Cramer's House seat a few days ago, and it's very unlikely Cramer would face a tough primary in the Senate race.
National Republicans began the 2016 cycle wanting Cramer to be their nominee against Democratic Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, and they spent the last month vigorously encouraging him to reconsider his decision not to run, but a whole lot happened in the middle, none of it good. Cramer represents the entire state of North Dakota in the House, and he's always decisively won. But as far back as April, CNN's Manu Raju reported that "[t]op Republicans in Washington" were signaling that they did not want Cramer to run. These officials, who went unnamed, worried that Cramer's shoot-from-the-lip style would get him into trouble against Heitkamp, who won her seat in a 2012 upset in part thanks to her opponent's clumsy attempts to woo women voters.
And those same women voters were a real source of concern for the GOP. Most infamously, Cramer declared during the winter that female Democratic members of Congress who wore white to Trump's initial address to lawmakers had donned "bad-looking white pantsuits in solidarity with Hillary Clinton to celebrate her loss." When Cramer was told they were wearing white in recognition of women's suffrage, he dug in and said not only that he did not "buy their argument," but they "should be celebrating the fact that there were women members of Congress sitting in a joint session." Cramer also defended then-White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer's ahistorical comments about Hitler never using chemical weapons—even though Spicer had already apologized for forgetting, you know, the Holocaust.
Cramer pushed back that April CNN report by insisting that D.C. Republicans (aka the guys who now are allegedly happy he's running) didn't understand North Dakota, arguing, "This is what the people in the swamp think: We can't have this overexposed guy who has 100 percent name ID and says things that are on his mind." Politico reported later that national Republicans began trying to recruit other candidates. But after they all said no, Team Red decided Cramer would be their best bet after all, and Trump even helped encourage him to run. Cramer made it seem as though all the flattery had worked, bragging in late December that he had led “in every poll I've seen," though he declined to release any numbers. However, Cramer surprised the political world the next month when he abruptly announced he'd stay in the House.
But that wasn't the end of it. While North Dakota backed Trump by a giant 63-27 margin, Heitkamp is a formidable candidate. And though national Republicans were reportedly ready to settle on Campbell, the Washington Examiner's David Drucker recently wrote that national Republicans felt that he was too weak after they conducting some routine opposition research on him. Trump, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and NRSC Chair Corey Gardner, meanwhile, continued to encourage Cramer to run. On Friday, Cramer said he was only "very mildly" reconsidering, but by Tuesday, Team Red was optimistic they'd landed him.
Well, they finally have Cramer, so what now? National Republicans will certainly make this seat a top target, but they would have done that under almost any circumstance. Cramer ended 2017 with just shy of $1 million in the bank to Heitkamp's $4.5 million, but Team Red will help him make up for his months of dithering. Cramer also starts out with statewide name recognition.
Still, as we wrote after Cramer temporarily decided to sit out the race in January, he has some flaws that aren't limited to his big mouth. In 2014, Cramer actually faced a credible Democratic challenge from then-state Sen. George B. Sinner, the son of former Gov. George A. Sinner. The GOP wave and North Dakota's conservative lean helped propel Cramer to an easy 56-38 win, but the congressman didn't exactly demonstrate he was ready for a tough race. Cramer ran the entire campaign without any paid staff, which helps explain how his "campaign" managed to air an ad that was illegally shot in a state veterans' cemetery.
Cramer will presumably be better-staffed this time out, but it doesn't speak well to his campaign skills that he let all that happen. Cramer's year-long indecision about the Senate race, especially when Republicans were hungering for a candidate, doesn't exactly make him look good, either. But North Dakota is still a red state, and if Cramer can keep his worst instincts in check, he could end up being a very tough opponent after all.