District 7, in the Bismarck area, will be a battleground in North Dakota's legislative races this cycle. Republicans have two full slates of candidates for the one Senate and two House seats, and once the primary settles that dispute, the Democrats are also fielding their own three candidates.

One of those candidates, Jason Thoms, a professional musician who is seeking a House seat for the Democratic-NPL, joined this episode of Plain Talk, and talked about some of the factionalism that he sees across the partisan divide in the NDGOP. "To me, one of the things that I've been noticing a lot is more and more we have this kind of, I guess you call it MAGA, experience in our country. It says that what the leader or what the party says needs to happen overrides what the people say."

"Those kind of things, I don't know, they frustrate me quite a bit," he continued.

Thoms says his campaign will focus on issues important to him, including mental health, something he has a deeply personal experience with. "My wife died by suicide in 2020, and she had struggled for throughout her entire life, but she was an amazing and wonderful person. We fought we fought hard for her life," he said.

"Suicide is one of these words that we kind of try to make a taboo, we hide away from, but I'm 100% against that," he continued. "We need to talk about those things. We need to make sure that we have the resources, the 988 phone lines are working and they're funded. We need to make sure that the opportunity for folks in rural communities, and here in the larger cities, have the ability to get into mental health therapy and things like this on a timely basis."

Also on this episode, co-host Chad Oban and I respond to listener feedback and discuss the strong candidate recruitment efforts of the North Dakota Democratic-NPL. We also talked about the decision by the North Dakota Republican Party's candidates not to seek their party's convention endorsement. "The purpose of a political party is to win elections, and if people who are winning elections don't want to associate with you, what are you doing?" Oban asked.

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