Doug Burgum

Burgum's 2016 portrait.

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Doug Burgum (1956–) is the former Republican governor of North Dakota who announced his 2024 campaign for President of the United States on 7 June 2023.^[1] He previously had a rather successful business career, earning himself a net worth of one and a half billion dollars, making him the second richest candidate (only being beaten by Donald Trump).^[2] While he was able to qualify for the first two debates, he dropped out on 4 December 2023 after being unable to qualify for the third or fourth.^[3] He was apparently strongly considered for Trump's VP pick, but he was passed over in favor of J. D. Vance.^[4]

Bribing people to donate[edit]

Burgum faced an immediate name recognition problem: almost no one had ever heard of him, and few people know much of anything at all about the state that he's from except that it's north of South Dakota.

In order to get into the first Republican debate, one needs a certain number of donations in order to make sure the general public has at least some interest in them becoming President. In order to reach that threshold, Burgum had the idea to make it so anybody who donated one dollar would get a twenty dollar gift card in return.^{[5][note 1]}

In the end, all that bribery didn't help Burgum get any votes — he dropped out before the first primary election. As of 2024, he is the US record holder for most personal money spent per vote received — $14 million spent for 499 votes, or $27,997 per vote!^[7] Filthy rich people like to think that they're better than the rest of us — cough, cough.^[8]

Stopped clock[edit]

Burgum has pledged to achieve carbon neutrality in North Dakota by 2030, and has even announced a surprisingly decent plan to achieve this goal.^[9] He has even signed legislation specifically to make clean energy sustainable in his state.^[10] (Despite this, he has shown more than a little interest in supporting the fossil fuel industry, from supporting the Dakota Access Pipeline^[11] to threatening to sue his state's eastern neighbor Minnesota over a proposed plan which required energy in the state to be derived from clean sources.)^[12]

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