Doug Burgum, North Dakota Governor, Enters 2024 Presidential Race

Gov. Doug Burgum, the Republican governor of North Dakota, former software executive and billionaire, announced on Wednesday he would run for president on his economic record, entering an increasingly crowded race as the stolid candidate of business and technology.

“If you want more small-town common sense in Washington and our big cities, we’ll make that happen,” Mr. Burgum told the crowd at a rally in Fargo, N.D. “We need the governor and business leader who understands this changing economy. I want to earn your vote.” He acknowledged the ground he would need to make up to gain his party’s presidential nomination but said he had been underestimated before.

The size of the field signals that former President Donald J. Trump, the Republican front-runner, has not scared off many challengers. But he has also yet to fully consolidate support behind his candidacy, and numerous rivals apparently see a path to the nomination, no matter how narrow it might be.

As the leader of his deep-red state, Mr. Burgum has overseen a period of significant economic expansion, but he has also assented to staunchly conservative social policies, even as he has downplayed his role in them.

This year, Mr. Burgum signed into law a near-total ban on abortion and created significant restrictions on gender transition care, including banning any requirements that teachers or school administrators use a student’s preferred pronouns.

Such social policies were nowhere to be found in his campaign launch, which largely eschewed partisan appeals to a conservative base and focused on three issues: the economy, energy and national security. Workmanlike in his delivery, with eyes glued on the teleprompters, Mr. Burgum may not look like a political natural, but his hope is that Republican voters will want a solid technician to return the party to its low-tax, deregulatory entrepreneurial roots.

Outside the converted Lutheran church where his rally was held, a clutch of protesters appeared determined not to let him run away from his more recent record. Cody J. Schuler, an advocacy manager at the North Dakota American Civil Liberties Union, acknowledged that as a business leader, Mr. Burgum embraced L.G.B.T.Q. rights as good for all citizens and good for business.

But in signing the bills passed by the conservative North Dakota legislature, Mr. Schuler said, the governor “threw away the lives of North Dakota citizens for his presidential aspirations.”

Even Mr. Burgum’s most ardent supporters at the rally expressed doubts that the governor of a state of 775,000 could qualify for the all-important primary debates, a bar that now requires 40,000 unique donors and 1 percent in national Republican polls.

“He’ll have the resources to be competitive,” said Tony Grindberg, a senior manager at North Dakota’s electric company who previously served in the State Legislature. “The question is, can he connect with the rest of country? That will be fun to watch as a North Dakotan.”

Mr. Burgum is the second sitting governor to enter the race, after Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who has staked out aggressively conservative social policy positions and attracted the national spotlight for dust-ups with major corporations like Disney.

Yet Mr. Burgum’s aides say he is planning a campaign less focused on social issues and more on his business background and fiscal stewardship of the state, which included cuts to both local property taxes and state income taxes.

At his launch, he never mentioned transgender issues or abortion, and put himself forward as a unifying voice — “a smart guy who has achieved a lot,” as his campaign video put it.

“In a country built on neighbors helping neighbors, we’ve become a country of neighbors fighting neighbors,” he said. “We should all be fighting to unite the country.”

Though his national media appearances have been scarce, Mr. Burgum has been able to break through during debates over energy policy, offering a window into how he might frame his proposals in contrast to those of Republican rivals and of President Biden. In March, he told Fox News that the Biden administration’s economic plan was “disconnected from economics, it’s disconnected from physics and it’s disconnected from common sense.” He argued that Japan and other Asian countries were ripe markets for American energy exports.

His campaign’s confidence that he can rise from a relative unknown to legitimate candidate derives from his own political career in North Dakota. When Mr. Burgum announced his bid for governor in 2016, he was an outsider with little name recognition outside Fargo, and his main opponent, Wayne Stenehjem, the state attorney general, received the North Dakota Republican Party’s endorsement.

But with ample resources and a campaign that ran to the right — Mr. Burgum endorsed Donald J. Trump for president in May 2016 — he cruised to a 20-percentage-point victory that The Bismarck Tribune proclaimed “upended the North Dakota Republican Party establishment.” He has not been seriously challenged in North Dakota since.

“There’s a value to being underestimated all the time,” Mr. Burgum told The Fargo Forum. “That’s a competitive advantage.”

As one of few major candidates not from the East Coast, and with an upbringing deeply rooted in the rural Midwest, Mr. Burgum is likely to focus most of his efforts in Iowa, a state with an extensive agricultural community. Mr. Burgum grew up in Arthur, N.D., a town of barely 300 where his family owned the grain elevator that still dominates the tiny farming community.

While attending North Dakota State University as an undergraduate, Mr. Burgum began a chimney sweeping service in Fargo out of a friend’s pickup truck. His newfound business attracted the attention of local newspapers, who ran photos of a soot-laden Mr. Burgum clad in a tuxedo hopping from roof to roof, picking up roughly $40 per chimney.

Mr. Burgum attached those newspaper clips to his applications for business school, and he soon enrolled in Stanford Business School. After earning his M.B.A. at Stanford, Mr. Burgum joined Great Plains Software, a Fargo company that specialized in accounting software, and quickly rose to chief executive.

Far from the more fertile tech hubs of Silicon Valley, Mr. Burgum built Great Plains Software into a major industry player, eventually selling to Microsoft for $1.1 billion. He would then serve as a senior vice president at Microsoft until 2007.

Mr. Burgum’s worth stretches into nine figures, certainly enough to help finance a nascent presidential run, and his aides expect his business network to help pull in major donors as well. But as of the start of his campaign, no super PAC or outside group has emerged supporting Mr. Burgum’s candidacy.