Dark horse Republican candidate ‘undaunted’ as he launches 2024 presidential campaign

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EXCLUSIVE – Former software company CEO turned two-term North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum realizes he faces an uphill climb as he launches his campaign for the 2024 Republican presidential campaign.

But Burgum seems unfazed about facing off against the likes of former President Donald Trump, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former Vice President Mike Pence, and other much more well-known politicians in the GOP presidential field.

"We’re undaunted about being unknown. I think it’s a great place to being to tell our story. We’ve got a great story to tell," Burgum told Fox News Digital, in his first on-camera interview as he formally declares his candidacy for president at an event Wednesday in Fargo, North Dakota.

Burgum is used to challenges. He steered his one-time small business, Great Plains Software, into a $1 billion software company. His business — and its North Dakota-based workers — were eventually acquired by Microsoft, and Burgum stayed on board as a senior vice president.

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In 2016, the then first-time candidate and long shot convincingly topped a favored GOP establishment contender to secure the Republican nomination in North Dakota before going on to a landslide victory in the gubernatorial general election in the solidly red state. Burgum was overwhelmingly re-elected in 2020 to a second term as governor.

Burgum is highlighting his small-town roots and his success story in North Dakota as he jumps into the White House race.

"My dad died when I was 14. Freshman year of high school. They pulled me off our basketball team bus and told me the news," he said in a campaign-style video that was first reported by Fox News on Monday. "I grew up in a tiny town in North Dakota. Woke was what you did at 5am to start the day. A place where neighbors rally around you. My mom was our rock, our hero."

Burgum highlighted that he "started a shoe-shine business, worked at the grain elevator, and as a chimney sweep" to pay his way through college and an MBA at Stanford.

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"I ignored those who said North Dakota was too small, too cold, and too remote to build a world-class software company, so I literally bet the farm to help build a tiny start-up into a billionaire dollar company with customers in 132 countries," he said in his video.

Pointing to his record as governor, Burgum told Fox News that "North Dakota’s on track to have the highest GDP of any state in the nation. And that’s what we want to do for this country."

Burgum says he’ll focus his presidential campaign on three issues — the economy, energy, and national security.

"We’re running because we want to unleash the American economy and we want to improve every American life and the way we do that, of course, is to get our economy really rolling. To get our economy really rolling we’ve got to make sure we’ve got to make sure we’ve got an energy policy that’s 180 degrees different than the one we have under the Biden administration. When we fix energy policy, then we have an opportunity to really stabilize the world," he argued.

President Biden’s energy policy, Burgum said, is "empowering dictators like Putin to invade Ukraine."

While he’s anything but a household name outside of North Dakota, Burgum enters the 2024 presidential race as one of the wealthiest members of the Republican field, along with multi-millionaire entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy and Trump.

Asked how much of his own money he’ll invest in his 2024 campaign, Burgum wouldn’t give a dollar figure, but said "in every other venture that I’ve started, I’ve been willing to invest in myself and I wouldn’t ask donors to invest in this race if they didn’t know that I was investing in myself."

"This is going to take a team effort and we’ll be fully funded but we’re going to do that because we’ll have a broad base of support that want to see this message delivered in this race," he added.

The governor is also undaunted about another challenge he faces: making the debate stage at the first GOP presidential primary debate, which Fox News is hosting on August 23 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

To reach the debate state, the Republican National Committee is mandating that candidates must have 40,000 unique donors and hit at least 1% in three national polls, or 1% in two national polls and 1% in a poll conducted in one of the four early voting states in the GOP presidential nominating calendar – Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada.

"Yes. absolutely," Burgum insisted when asked if he will qualify for the August debate.

"40,000 may seem like a daunting number, but way, way, way more people than that have voted for us in North Dakota," he added. "There’s a lot of people that would like to see us on stage in August and I’m confident that that’s a threshold we’re going to easily meet."

And Burgum, a stranger to voters in the early-voting states, is going to try and remedy that situation immediately. As Fox News first reported earlier this week, he’ll head to Iowa on Thursday and Friday, with stops in New Hampshire Saturday and Sunday. The two states for half a century have led off the GOP presidential nominating calendar.