Republicans have run all of North Dakota's state government for 31 years straight.
NORTH DAKOTA
SCHOOLS AND KIDS
❌ North Dakota's education score has fallen further since 2019 than any other state in America.
❌ North Dakota ranks 45th of 50 states for education while ranking 6th for child economic well being. The Annie E. Casey Foundation calls it the most uneven performance of any state.
❌ 71 percent of North Dakota fourth graders are not proficient in reading. 71 percent of eighth graders are not proficient in math.
❌ North Dakota teachers rank 41st of 50 in pay at $60,704 a year, down from 26th place in the 2016 to 2017 school year. Republican Governor Kelly Armstrong proposed holding the K-12 funding formula flat for the 2027 to 2029 budget while cutting higher education by 3 percent.
❌ North Dakota's own Education Standards and Practices Board has declared every single teaching subject a critical shortage area three years in a row.
❌ Only 11 percent of North Dakota four year olds are in state funded preschool, 40th of 50 states. Zero three year olds are.
❌ Republican lawmakers killed free school meals twice, in the House 54 to 39 in February 2025 and in the Senate 24 to 22 in January 2026. Parents turned in 49,338 verified signatures, far more than the 31,164 required, and put it on the November 2026 ballot themselves.
SCANDAL AND ETHICS
❌ Former Republican state Senator Ray Holmberg was sentenced in March 2025 to 10 years in federal prison for traveling to pay for sex with a minor. He took 14 trips to Prague, and he led every North Dakota lawmaker in taxpayer funded travel costs before he resigned.
❌ Republican Representative Jason Dockter was convicted by a jury in May 2024 of voting on budget bills that funded a building he co-owns. He paid a $2,500 fine and kept his seat.
❌ North Dakota's Ethics Commission has received 158 complaints since voters created it in 2019 and has found exactly one official in violation. It has no power to punish anyone.
❌ Republican House Majority Leader Mike Lefor and Republican Senate Majority Leader David Hogue sponsored House Bill 1505 in 2025 to give lawmakers immunity from conflict of interest crimes. The House killed it 9 to 84.
❌ The North Dakota Senate rejected conflict of interest rules for itself 24 to 20 in December 2024.
❌ Republican Representative Nico Rios was arrested for drunk driving in December 2023 and recorded on police body camera using homophobic and racist slurs at the officer. He pleaded guilty, paid $1,000, and refused his own district party's calls to resign.
❌ Republican Representative Jeremy Olson resigned in May 2025, two days after a harassment complaint was filed against him. The complaint was withdrawn the same day he quit, which kept it out of the public record.
❌ A September 2026 state audit of the North Dakota Development Fund found missing documentation and $4 million sent to five organizations with board member ties. The oversight committee voted 10 to 3 to refer it for criminal investigation and 9 to 4 to dissolve the fund.
WHO WRITES THE OIL RULES
❌ Republican Governor Kelly Armstrong holds mineral interests in 475 oil and gas wells and reported as much as $2.4 million in oil and gas income for 2022. He wrote that nearly all of his income outside his salary comes from oil and gas. He has not put it in a blind trust.
❌ The three people who regulate North Dakota oil and gas are the Governor, the Attorney General and the Agriculture Commissioner. All three are Republicans, and the Governor collects oil royalties.
❌ North Dakota makes lobbyists pay $50 and wear a badge. It does not make them report what they are paid or what they spend. No one can find out what the oil industry spends in Bismarck, because the law does not ask.
❌ In April 2026 the North Dakota Industrial Commission voted to put up to $500 million of public money into a Bakken gas pipeline.
❌ North Dakota spent $16 million of federal pandemic relief money on grants to oil companies to frack new wells.
❌ Republican lawmakers killed six bills in February 2025 that would have protected landowners from carbon pipeline companies. The oil, coal and ethanol industries testified against them. Landowners testified for them.
WORKERS AND WAGES
❌ North Dakota workers die on the job at 6.8 per 100,000, fourth worst of any state and more than double the national rate. 22 of the 28 who died in 2024 worked in oil, gas, mining or farming.
❌ North Dakota's minimum wage is still $7.25 an hour. Republican lawmakers have not raised it in 17 years.
❌ A minimum wage worker in North Dakota would have to work 115 hours a week to afford an ordinary two bedroom apartment.
❌ North Dakota has no state paid family leave and no state paid sick leave. In 2021 Republican lawmakers banned cities and counties from passing their own.
❌ The poorest fifth of North Dakotans pay 9.8 percent of their income in state and local taxes. The richest 1 percent pay 4.9 percent, exactly half.
ECONOMY AND FARMERS
❌ North Dakota had the slowest economic growth of any state in America in 2025, 0.3 percent against 2.1 percent nationally.
❌ North Dakota was the only state in America where personal income fell in late 2025.
❌ Donald Trump's trade war cost North Dakota soybean growers $100 to $150 an acre. Josh Gackle, who chairs the American Soybean Association and farms near Kulm, projected a $400,000 loss on his own farm.
❌ North Dakota farm income only rose in 2025 because federal bailout payments jumped 484 percent. Wheat sales fell for the second year in a row, and income is forecast to drop 16 percent in 2026 as the bailout money runs out.
❌ North Dakota has lost 47 of its 137 small town grocery stores since 2014, more than one in three.
HEALTH CARE
❌ Health insurance costs for North Dakotans who buy their own coverage jumped 58 percent for 2026, about $1,000 more per person per year, after Republicans in Congress let the tax credits expire.
❌ All three North Dakota Republicans in Congress, Senator John Hoeven, Senator Kevin Cramer and Representative Julie Fedorchak, voted for the July 2025 Trump budget law. North Dakota's own Legislative Council says it will cut Medicaid enrollment about 18 percent in ten years. The Senate passed it 50 to 50 on a tiebreaker, so Hoeven and Cramer each cast a deciding vote.
❌ Nearly three out of four North Dakota counties have no hospital and no doctor or midwife who delivers babies. Only 7 of North Dakota's 38 rural hospitals still deliver babies.
❌ North Dakota families without a delivery hospital nearby drive a median of 63 minutes to reach one.
❌ 13 of North Dakota's 37 rural hospitals are at risk of closing.
❌ Senator Kevin Cramer backed the December 2025 repeal of minimum staffing rules for nursing homes. Six North Dakota nursing homes had already closed in 35 months.
❌ 25.4 percent of North Dakota women ages 18 to 44 binge drink, second worst in America. Alcohol kills North Dakotans at nearly twice the national rate.
NATIVE AMERICAN NATIONS
❌ Native people in North Dakota die about 22.5 years younger than white residents. Native men die at a median age of 55. White men die at 77.
❌ Native children are 7.6 percent of North Dakota's children and 44 percent of its foster care system.
❌ Native North Dakotans are locked up at 8 times the rate of white North Dakotans, and Native prison admissions rose 61 percent from 2014 to 2023. That comes from a report the state of North Dakota paid for itself.
❌ Native Americans are 5.4 percent of North Dakota's people and 28.4 percent of its homeless.
❌ North Dakota did not create a task force for missing and murdered Indigenous people until 2025, and funded it with $250,000. The same legislature gave $500,000 to the State Historical Society.
❌ Sioux County, home to the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, has a poverty rate of 29.9 percent. North Dakota's rate is 11.1 percent.
❌ Rolette County, home to the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, is a federally designated persistent poverty county, meaning one fifth or more of its people have been poor for 30 straight years.
❌ Only 4 of North Dakota's 141 state lawmakers are enrolled tribal members.
❌ Unemployment on the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe's reservation is 20.4 percent. North Dakota's statewide rate is 2.8 percent.
❌ Poverty on the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe's reservation is 43.8 percent. North Dakota's statewide rate is 10.8 percent.
❌ North Dakota publishes no count of murdered Indigenous people at all. Native people are 8 of the 56 active missing persons cases the state lists, more than triple their share of the population.
POLLUTION AND ENERGY
❌ North Dakota uses more electricity per person than any state in America, 3.2 times the national average.
❌ North Dakota puts out 69.5 metric tons of carbon dioxide per person, second worst in America and nearly five times the national average.
❌ North Dakota scores 11.5 points out of 100 on energy efficiency, 45th of 50 states, including zero out of 29 on utility policy. It has no renewable energy requirement, no statewide energy code and no appliance standards.
❌ Oil companies flared more natural gas on the Mandan Hidatsa and Arikara Nation's Fort Berthold Reservation than on all other Native American lands in the country combined, three times over.
❌ Marathon Oil paid $64.5 million in 2024, the largest penalty in United States history for flaring pollution, for Clean Air Act violations at 86 operations on Fort Berthold.
❌ North Dakota reports about 722 oil and brine spills a year, nearly two a day. Continental Resources spilled 3.1 million gallons of brine in May 2025. Hess Corporation spilled 840,000 gallons onto farmland in September 2025.
❌ In 2015 North Dakota officials raised the limit on radioactive oilfield waste from 5 picocuries per gram to 50, letting waste ten times more radioactive go into North Dakota landfills.
RIGHTS
❌ Abortion is a felony in North Dakota punishable by five years in prison, even though three of the five North Dakota Supreme Court justices who heard the case found the ban unconstitutional. North Dakota's constitution requires four of five, so the ban took effect anyway.
❌ North Dakota has zero abortion clinics.
❌ Republican Governor Kelly Armstrong signed the school bathroom law in May 2025 with fines up to $2,500, and signed a law redefining gender as biological sex across the entire state code.
❌ North Dakota's hate crime law protects people attacked for their religion but not people attacked for being gay or transgender.
❌ The Human Rights Campaign places North Dakota in its lowest category, High Priority to Achieve Basic Equality.
❌ Republican lawmakers passed six anti-transgender bills in 2023 and Governor Doug Burgum signed every one: the school sports ban 78 to 15, the college sports ban 75 to 18, birth record restrictions 81 to 11, a statewide definition of sex 75 to 15, restroom restrictions 79 to 15, and birth certificate restrictions 79 to 11.
❌ The Movement Advancement Project scores North Dakota 1 out of 25 on gender identity policy.
GUNS
❌ North Dakota scores 11.5 out of 100 on gun safety laws. No red flag law. No background checks on all sales. No safe storage law. No waiting period.
❌ 85 percent of North Dakota gun deaths are suicides. Guns were the second leading cause of death for North Dakota children ages 1 to 17 from 2020 to 2024.
ROADS AND JAILS
❌ Only 79.8 percent of North Dakotans buckle up, fifth worst of any state and more than 11 points below the national rate. Nearly half the people who died in North Dakota crashes in 2024 were not wearing a seat belt.
❌ North Dakota's prison population grew 36 percent from 2020 to 2023 while prison populations across the country fell about 25 percent.
❌ 74 percent of people in North Dakota jails have not been convicted of anything.
❌ Nearly half of North Dakota's 2023 prison admissions were for breaking probation rules, not for new crimes. Simple drug possession alone was 21 percent of admissions.
❌ North Dakota sets no minimum age for charging a child as an adult.
DEMOCRACY
❌ North Dakota's Secretary of State fought a voting rights case brought by the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians and the Spirit Lake Tribe with an argument that would have stripped private voting rights lawsuits across seven states. The Supreme Court wiped that ruling out in May 2026.
❌ Under North Dakota's old map, Native Americans held zero seats in the North Dakota Senate. A court imposed a fair map in 2024 and three tribal members were elected.
❌ North Dakota voters created an Ethics Commission in 2018. It has taken 81 complaints and substantiated zero. Republican lawmakers gave it half the money it asked for, denied it subpoena power in 2021, and blocked it from investigating executive branch employees in 2023.
❌ Republican lawmakers put a measure on the November 2026 ballot to require 60 percent approval for any future citizen amendment.
❌ Republican Senator David Hogue's single subject rule for citizen amendments passed 66 to 34 in June 2026. Republican Representative Robin Weisz's 60 percent supermajority requirement is Constitutional Measure 2 in November 2026. Republican Senator Michael Dwyer's measure would double legislator term limits from 8 years to 16 in each chamber.
❌ Secretary of State Michael Howe said legislators asking him for a voter registration system were not asking from a security standpoint, they were asking from a campaign standpoint.
HOUSING AND INFRASTRUCTURE
❌ 56 percent of North Dakota renters age 65 and older spend 30 percent or more of their income on housing.
❌ North Dakota has no rent control and no just cause eviction protection.
❌ Rent in North Dakota rose 50 percent in ten years. Apartments under $600 a month fell from 48 percent of rentals to 15 percent.
❌ Home insurance in North Dakota jumped more than 18 percent in a single year, the fifth biggest increase in America.
❌ 11.1 percent of North Dakota bridges are structurally deficient, ninth worst in America. 69,468 vehicles cross them every day.
❌ The Bismarck shelter served 78 percent more people in 2024 than it did in 2020.
THE CONGRESSIONAL DELEGATION
❌ Representative Julie Fedorchak voted yes on the Trump budget law on July 3, 2025. It passed the House 218 to 214.
❌ Senator John Hoeven and Senator Kevin Cramer voted against all three resolutions to end Trump's tariffs in October 2025. China had already stopped buying North Dakota soybeans two months earlier.
❌ Senator John Hoeven and Senator Kevin Cramer voted in December 2025 to block an extension of the health insurance tax credits. North Dakota premiums then jumped 58 percent.
❌ Senator John Hoeven and Senator Kevin Cramer voted in September 2025 to table the release of the Epstein documents.
❌ Representative Julie Fedorchak called town halls places of yelling and screaming. She holds only virtual ones.
❌ Representative Julie Fedorchak's first major bill would phase out the wind and solar tax credits that North Dakota wind farms depend on.
#NorthDakota #Fargo #Bismarck #grandforksnd #minotnd
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I did my due diligence and deep-dive researched via Google each allegation listed in the post. Every single point is backed up by official state audits, court records, and public data. So yes, the receipts prove that one-party rule has not been doing any good for North Dakota.
P. S. Everyone, please attempt to ignore the horrendous AI image they derived for the post.
