511: 'You can't take these things seriously'

Plain Talk

North Dakota's primary elecitons this year were brutal. Attack ads and dirty tricks are endemic to politics, but I think most people would admit that, by the standards of our state, the Republican campaigns in this cycle were rough.

In legislative races, we saw ads suggesting that some incumbent lawmakers promote pornography to children, or that they would be unsafe to allow your children around. In the U.S. House primary, some unknown entity supporting Rick Becker's campaign was sending out text messages trying to fool voters into thinking Julie Fedorchak, who ultimately won that race, had pulled out. And in the gubernatorial race, Tammy Miller's campaign ran ads accusing Kelly Armstrong of enriching himself by helping child molesters avoid justice.

But when Armstrong appeared on this episode of Plain Talk to recap the race, he shrugged the attacks off. "You can't take these things seriously," he told me and my co-host Corey Mock.

Armstrong now faces Democratic-NPL candidate Merrill Piepkorn in the general election, but we asked him, if he should win in November, what the top priorities of his administration would be.

"Property taxes," he said, pointing out that consternation about those tax bills are running so high that a ballot measure to abolish them, which may appear on the November ballot as well, could well pass. "If it passes, you have a real problem," he said.

Armstrong said another problem is access to labor. He said past political leaders in North Dakota have campaigned on creating jobs, but that doesn't make a lot of sense right now. "We have 30,000 open jobs," he said. "Campaigning on jobs is great...trying to figure out how to get people here to take them is a harder conversation."

Also, in this episode, Mock and I discussed the seemingly intractable problem of property taxes, and what the primary election results mean for the future of the divide in the North Dakota Republican Party.

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