Iran Is Huge Right Now in North Dakota

The day after the U.S. and other world powers announced an agreement to curtail Iran’s ability to build a nuclear weapon, a check for $19,618 was cut to KFYR, the NBC affiliate in Bismarck, N.D. The money came from a nonprofit called Citizens for a Nuclear Free Iran, which opposes the deal. It gave the station instructions to begin running ads against the agreement “until further notice,” according to records filed with the Federal Communications Commission. The first one aired during KFYR’s broadcast of the Today show on July 17, only three days after the Iran accord was announced.

The ads were part of a campaign to sway Democratic Senator Heidi Heitkamp, a swing state centrist, to join a handful of Democrats who haven’t said whether they’ll back the agreement. If North Dakota, the country’s 48th-biggest state by population, were a city, it would sit behind Baltimore, Denver, and Philadelphia for the volume of Iran-related ads that have run this year and ahead of New York City. More than 960 spots ran on broadcast TV in Fargo and Bismarck through Aug. 24, according to CMAG. “I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a bigger ad campaign aimed at a specific issue apart from an election in North Dakota,” says Representative Kevin Cramer, a Republican who lives in Bismarck and opposes the Iran deal. “To see this level of advertising is unusual, for sure, and certainly indicative of the seriousness of the issue and the importance of a single Senate vote.”