When former Congressman Earl Pomeroy looks at the protests today against the Trump administration and the so-called "big, beautiful bill" in Congress, he sees echoes of the 2009 protests that ended his tenure in elected office.

"There's going to be an election day reckoning," Pomeroy, a Democrat who represented North Dakota in the U.S. House from 1993 to 2010, said on this episode of Plain Talk. What was interesting about this discussion is that many of the 2009-era "tea party" protests in North Dakota were organized, in part, by me.

Pomeroy said that in 2009, there were times when voters would be "mad as hell out there" but Democratic leaders in Washington D.C. were dismissive. "The leadership would say to the nervous members not to worry. They'll get over it. Or, as has been said with the more recent demonstrations, or the passionate town halls, oh, these are paid agitators."

He says he still thinks the 2009 protesters were operating on bad information, but that they should have been taken seriously. "What I found is the the concern, the anxiety, the anger was very real."

North Dakota's political dynamics are different in 2025 than they were in 2009. At that time, our state was politically mixed, with an all-Democratic congressional delegation. Today, North Dakota's political landscape is more ideologically homogenous, and the protests against Congresswoman Julie Fedorchak, as well as Senators John Hoeven and Kevin Cramer, have quite reached the critical mass that the 2009 demonstrations achieved.

Still, Pomeroy has a warning for those Republicans: "I think these protests are real and I think that there's some people going to lose their seats over it."

Also on this episode, Zachary Taylor and former Fargo City Commissioner Arlette Preston, representing Strong Towns Fargo, joined to discuss my recent column about sprawl in North Dakota cities, its impact on property taxes, and how property tax reform recently passed by the Legislature may force local governments to have some meaningful debate about it.

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