There were plenty of reasons that would provoke a normal North Dakotan to vote for the bigoted puffy suit of peacock feathers known as Kevin Cramer over the impossibly more competent, intelligent and productive Heidi Heitkamp.

Mainly it was the letter behind Heitkamp’s name that was a provocation. Cramer had no record, so he relied on the letter “T” for smirk material, as his adopted Proud Boy hefty hefty hefty bag of cruel idiocy ran his mouth over the edge of the rally mob cliff.

Kevin clung to Trump like a jittery infant spider monkey. It should be a red flag. If a criminal huckster is your ace in the hole, you don’t have a lot of self-respect, self-awareness or self-control. But Donnie has the same base as Cramer, so Kevin followed DT on the low road next to a high wall like a loyal parrot.

If Trump ran a lie-riddled slimy racist terror campaign, so did Kevin. One Hundred percent. He admits it.

Every juicy glob of fearbasing the caravan of strollers dripped right on Kevin’s head. Every wild-eyed lie rained down like oil money.

Some pundits are trying to blame Heidi’s loss on her Brett Kavanaugh vote. Maybe, but I doubt it. Thousands of spare white conservative judges, just like Kavanaugh, are kept in a Federalist Society humidity controlled warehouse with Schlitz malt liquor on tap. Nobody would miss Brett. Send up Chad.

Could the conservative groups have directed Trump to pick someone without rabies and fewer assaults? Yes. But noooo. The Republicans had to have Brett. He was special to them for some reason — their precious —  but few people in the reality-based mainstream, or lesser streams, would be able to discern the difference between BK and the next prep school college legacy freshman.

But Trump got Cramer’s base wound up and they bought DT’s dribble. The red hats seem to like being lied to. He mocked Dr. Blasey Ford and called her a liar. Good enough for the gullible. Most wouldn’t know the difference between a solid, well-qualified judge/good person and a plate of cottage cheese.

Plus loudmouths in the Cult45 North Dakota branch couldn’t understand that Kavanaugh was actually made a Supreme, so Heitkamp’s vote didn’t change the result, and she wasn’t even on the judicial committee. Why would the disposition-impaired and lying East Coast-indoctrinated Kavanaugh matter that much to the average jamoke? Maybe a few hardcores who wouldn’t have voted for Heidi under duress, but not Larry next door.

Cramer thinks that Heidi’s record was the decider. Doubtful. But his plan to not have a record worked out fine for him.

Gosh, where has Kevin Cramer’s good fortune come from?

Was it trickery? North Dakota was gerrymandered to benefit Cramer, that’s for sure. It’s crawling with mad red hatters who believe every lie that Trump and Trump Lite spit out.

Was it because Cramer supported the farm-killing tariffs, the budget-busting tax scam for the rich and people killing health care?

Did Cramer get points for defending Trump’s cruel separation of children from their parents, 45’s jellylike kneeling before Vladimir Putin or Don’s mocking of a sexual assault victim?

Sidebar: Cramer and his assortment of surrogates said that Dr. Ford didn’t have corroboration for her claims, but these failed media types didn’t need evidence from the women who accidentally ended up on Heidi’s now-famous list of sexual assault victims in order to savage Heitkamp. Cramer and the boys suddenly became fluid on the corroboration thing. They believed whoever gave them scandal material, but not Ford. Heidi believed all of the women.

Maybe this is it. Cramer has President Donald Trump’s ear, or so Kevin’s boastful story goes. Not Van Gogh style, though. Evidently, Kevin thinks that talking into Don’s ear will have some effect on the raging bull’s brain when shouting into a gopher hole will at least irritate a rodent.

Most people don’t know this, but if you put your ear next to Trump’s you can hear a meadowlark in the distance.

“This is a priority for me,” Cramer told The Associated Press Wednesday. “President Trump has told me, ‘If you want me to push this through fast, I will get a good deal for farmers, but if you give me some time, I will get a great deal.'”

It’s adorable that Cramer thinks that Trump will change his speed, direction or incompetence for anyone. If Kevin was paying attention, he would have heard that thunder thighs doesn’t listen to anyone in the band.

Besides:

“Once the U.S. loses the Chinese market for a product, it is unlikely to get it back even if this round of the trade war ends and tariffs are lifted,” said Edward Alden, a trade expert at the Council on Foreign Relations. “This is both because it will establish new sourcing patterns, which tend to be sticky, and because Chinese buyers will not want to run the risk of future U.S. tariffs.” — Axios

So where is the deal? Was it Cramer’s overabundance of modesty that tipped the scales in his favor? Especially for such a big fish like him, as he explains. Probably not.

“He said, ‘We’ve come a long way since that first time, that long Oval Office visit where you said no,'” Cramer said. “He (Trump) always has to remind me that I said no to him, which I have to kind of admire and appreciate because, for him, this was a big recruitment effort.” — Bismarck Tribune

Here’s the thing:

Trump had an approval rating of 55 in North Dakota according to the latest Morning Consult poll released on Nov. 5. It had a 3 percent margin of error, as did the same poll a month earlier when the state gave Trump a 52 percent approval.

Based on these two polls and the 3-point margin, one could surmise that Trump’s approval in early October could have actually been 49 percent and truly 58 percent just before the election.

A nine-point swing for Trump and the Cramer Crew.

What happened in that 30-day stretch?

You mean besides hundreds of huge lies about most everything? And Trump ignoring the right-wing terrorism. Actual shooting and bombs in the mail. Even after Kevin Cramer, stressed the need for civility in Washington, Cujo didn’t heed Kevin?

After Trump quit messing around with everyday racism and went nuclear on the caravan, the misnamed sanctuary cities and the “invasion.” Troops were called in. Don called for the end of birthright citizenship, which really got the white nationalists swooning.

“The new surge in nakedly racist appeals shows that, for a segment of the country at least, racism is no longer anything to be ashamed of,” said Kevin Kruse, a history professor at Princeton University in New Jersey. “While these attacks would have been seen as huge mistakes in previous decades, they’re now seen by some strategists as a savvy move to mobilize a certain segment of white conservatives. Republican candidates do seem to be following the proven Trump blueprint of appealing to the fears and prejudices of white voters to a considerable degree.” —  USA Today

Cramer played the white identity strategy 17 percent less repugnantly than POTUS, but he was a recipient of DT’s wildman’s flurry of racial resentment and victimization and Kevin knew.

Here is just a small sample of Trump’s falsehoods and be-scared-of-the-brown-man tactics.

• “We’re the only country in the world where a person comes in, has a baby and the baby is essentially a citizen of the United States for 85 years with all of those benefits. It’s ridiculous. It’s ridiculous. And it has to end.”
• “That’s an invasion. I don’t care what they say. I don’t care what the fake media says. That’s an invasion of our country. I am telling the caravans, the criminals, the smugglers, the trespassers marching toward our border, turn back now, because you are not getting in. Turn back.”
• “At this very moment, large well-organized caravans of migrants are marching towards our southern border. Some people call it an invasion. …These are tough people in many cases; a lot of young men, strong men and a lot of men that maybe we don’t want in our country. … This isn’t an innocent group of people. It’s a large number of people that are tough. They have injured, they have attacked.”
• “I didn’t say shoot, I didn’t say shoot.” The day before. “They want to throw rocks at our military, our military fights back. I told them, consider it a rifle.”
• “All I’m doing is just telling the truth.”
• “We’re not doing releases. What’s been happening over years is they would come in, release them, and they would never show up for their trial. And we now have 25 or 30 million people in this country illegally, because of what’s been happening over many years.”
• “Tester joined every other Senate Democrat in supporting open-border legislation from the now-legendary Dianne Feinstein.”
• “We have the best unemployment numbers, the best median income numbers for all of these groups. We have the best numbers we’ve ever had. …They should be worried about the African-Americans, because they’re going to lose them.”
• “The Democrat plan would obliterate Medicare.”
• “I think I am a great moral leader and I love our country.”
• “Donnelly also supports open borders.”
• “We oppose efforts from Democrats to raid Medicare to fund socialism, robbing seniors of their benefits.”
• “Every single Democrat in the U.S. Senate has signed up for the open borders, and it’s a bill, it’s called the ‘open borders bill.’ What’s going on? And it’s written by, guess who? Dianne Feinstein.”
• “A lot of money’s been passing through people to come up and try to get to the border by Election Day because they think that’s a negative for us. No. 1, they’re being stopped, and No. 2, regardless, that’s our issue.”
• “They wanted that caravan and there are those that say that caravan didn’t just happen. It didn’t just happen.”
• “In the House, Republicans dramatically outperformed historical precedents.”
• “The Democrat plan would just obliterate Medicare and terminate Medicare Advantage … seniors who have been paying for this for years (and) will not be taken care of anymore.”
• “Democrats let him (cop killer Luis Bracamontes) into our country,” and “Democrats let him stay.”
• “The Democrats want to invite caravan after caravan of illegal aliens into our country. And they want to sign them up for free health care, free welfare, free education and for the right to vote.”
• “Democrat sanctuary cities release these criminal aliens out of jail and right onto your streets. They strongly support sanctuary cities that refuse to cooperate with federal law enforcement and release known gang members, predators, criminal aliens into our communities.”
• “Democrats want to give illegal aliens free welfare, free health care, and free education. Give them a driver’s license. Give them a driver’s license. Next thing you know, they want to buy them a car. Then they’ll say the car’s not good enough, how about a Rolls-Royce?”
• “Democrats oppose any effort to secure our border.”
• “With what happened early today, that horrible, horrible attack in Pittsburgh, I was saying maybe I should cancel both this and that (the speech in Indianapolis). And then I said to myself, I remember Dick Grasso, a friend of mine, great guy. He headed up the New York Stock Exchange on Sept. 11. And the New York Stock Exchange was open the following day. He said — and what they had to do to open it, you wouldn’t believe. We won’t even talk to you about it, but he got that exchange open. We can’t make these sick, demented, evil people important.”
• “I’ll soon sign into the law the largest legislative effort in history to address the opioid crisis where just this year we got $6 billion from Congress — thanks to (Ohio Republican Sen.) Rob Portman and a lot of others — thank you, Rob — but Rob and so many others helped. Very little Democrat support.”
• “I don’t think we like sanctuary cities up here. By the way, a lot of people in California don’t want them, either. They’re rioting now. They want to get out of their sanctuary cities.”
• “With all that being said though, we have $450 billion, $110 billion of which is a military order, but this is equipment and various things ordered from Saudi Arabia, $450 billion. I think it’s over a million jobs. That’s not helpful for us to cancel an order like that (re Jamal Khashoggi murder). That hurts us far more than it hurts them.”
• “Three thousand people did not die in the two hurricanes that hit Puerto Rico. When I left the Island, AFTER the storm had hit, they had anywhere from 6 to 18 deaths. As time went by it did not go up by much. Then, a long time later, they started to report really large numbers, like 3000. … This was done by the Democrats in order to make me look as bad as possible when I was successfully raising Billions of Dollars to help rebuild Puerto Rico. If a person died for any reason, like old age, just add them onto the list. Bad politics. I love Puerto Rico!”
• “Google search results for ‘Trump News’ shows only the viewing/reporting of Fake New Media. In other words, they have it RIGGED, for me & others, so that almost all stories & news is BAD. Fake CNN is prominent. Republican/Conservative & Fair Media is shut out. Illegal? Ninety-six percent of … results on ‘Trump News’ are from National Left-Wing Media, very dangerous. Google & others are suppressing voices of Conservatives and hiding information and news that is good. They are controlling what we can and cannot see. This is a very serious situation-will be addressed!”
• “U.S. Steel just announced that they are building six new steel mills.”
• “Wow, highest Poll Numbers in the history of the Republican Party. That includes Honest Abe Lincoln and Ronald Reagan.”
• “When Heidi ran for office, she promised to be an independent vote for the people of North Dakota. Instead, she went to Washington and immediately joined Chuck … and Nancy,”

“You cannot disgrace a disgraceful man; you cannot make a shameless man feel ashamed; you cannot make a cockroach a cockroach, because it is already a cockroach!” — Mehmet Murat ildan