FARGO U.S. Sens. John Hoeven, R-N.D., and Heidi Heitkamp, D-N.D., issued statements Saturday, Oct. 8, regarding inappropriate comments presidential candidate Donald Trump made in a recently released 2005 video.
and have him lose the senate over these tariffs. what happened is the opposite. claire mccaskill lost. joe donnelly lost. heitkamp lost in north dakota. so that play failed. trump won all of the rural areas. in the house where his losses were were in the suburbs. the chinese took their kill shot and it failed. what that means is going in, trump doesn t mind the sanctions because the trump voters backed him and gave him a mandate to get tough with beijing. martha: we ve been talking about this issue with china for decades. in terms of having the fortitude to stand up to them, we really have never actually done it. and there s an interesting conversation that was outlined in a very interesting wall street journal piece today about the years.
since basically the day she was first elected. their plan, their mission was to make sure heitkamp would never win statewide election in their state again. and that plan started with a bill, we ve talked about it a ton on this show, right after heitkamp was elected with a ton of rock solid support from native americans, republicans in the north dakota state legislature pushed through a bill that made it a new law in the state that in order to vote, you would need an i.d. with a street address on it. what that bill was quite clearly designed to do was to choke off the native american vote in north dakota. thousands of native americans in north dakota live on rural reservations where they don t have street addresses. they use p.o. boxes instead. that voter i.d. law was aimed right at them. it made it next to impossible for them to vote, especially in the kinds of numbers they have voted in in the past. native americans generally form a pretty strong vote for democrats in north dakota.
so one thing went according to plan. the democratic senator from north dakota, as you know, did not win reelection last week. heidi heitkamp lost her seat in north dakota by double digits. a democrat winning reelection in a state that went for trump by dozens of points, it was always going to be an uphill climb. but republicans in north dakota have been laser focused on making that climb as steep as possible for heidi heitkamp since basically the day she was first elected. their plan, their mission was to make sure heitkamp would never win statewide election in their state again. and that plan started with a bill, we ve talked about it a ton on this show, right after heitkamp was elected with a ton of rock solid support from native americans, republicans in the north dakota state legislature pushed flew a bithr bill that made it a new law in the state that in order to vote, you would need an i.d. with a street address on it.
eight to ten seats and even 40 votes in the senate. we had ten states where donald trump won the election in 2016, our senators won in six of those ten with one still florida still in contest. and in the three states that carried trump to victory, pennsylvania, wisconsin and michigan, not only did democratic senators win by double digits in two of them, but republicans told trump he couldn t even set foot in those states because he was so unpopular. and so this is a great victory. for donald trump to claim because he won a senate race in north dakota or indiana or missouri, states he won by 19, 19 and 36%, that shows how weak i would be very worried if i were donald trump and the republicans about the 2020 elections if all they can claim is they won in north dakota. we greatly regret the loss of wonderful people, great senators like heitkamp, donnelly and