Jan. 10—GRAND FORKS — Trygve Hammer has announced his candidacy for North Dakota’s seat in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Hammer previously ran as a candidate for the North Dakota Public Service Commission and serves as District 5 chairman for the Democratic-NPL Party. Hammer lives in Minot with his wife, Kelly, and has three adult children. He is a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy and holds a bachelor’s degree in chemistry.
The former Marine has served as a helicopter pilot and air traffic controller and also served in Iraq. He has taught science to high school students, worked as a roughneck in the Bakken oil fields and was a freight rail conductor. He is originally from Velva, North Dakota.
Hammer is running as a Democrat and will face incumbent Republican Rep. Kelly Armstrong in November. Armstrong was first elected as North Dakota’s representative to Congress in 2018, taking over when Kevin Cramer moved to the Senate.
For Hammer, a big issue is getting the U.S. House of Representatives to work and, in his opinion, functional.
“You’ve got this subset of (Republicans) that have absolutely no reverence for the institution and no desire for any kind of decency or decorum,” Hammer said. “They’ve got a pretty loose association with the truth, let alone get anything done.”
Describing the current state of the House of Representatives, Hammer said the Republican majority is a “little cabal of bomb throwers.”
He is running as a pro-choice, pro-labor and pro-democracy candidate and thinks Congress needs to pass more election-integrity legislation to help prevent party gerrymandering.
“We need to address the disappointment that didn’t get addressed when Democrats had the majority,” Hammer said. He then made reference to a national controversy that occurred in the NFL in 2015.
“I cannot believe that in a country that gets a little upset about a slightly under-inflated football in an AFC championship that gerrymandering is allowed to continue.”
Hammer also said that he also hopes his election bid will help strengthen the Democratic-NPL Party in the state.
“To make a stronger Democratic Party, we need a strong campaign as a Democrat,” Hammer said. “That’s good for Republicans, as being the supermajority has not been good for the Republican Party (in North Dakota), as we’ve seen with the
Ray Holmberg scandal
and
Representative Nico Rios
.”
Holmberg, a former Republican state lawmaker from Grand Forks, faces accusations of traveling out-of-country with the intent of having sex with a minor. Rios, a Williston resident and current Republican member of the state House of Representatives, recently was arrested for DUI and used disrespectful language and racial and homophobic slurs when confronted by law officers.
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