Gov. Doug Burgum, the Republican governor of North Dakota, former software program govt and billionaire, introduced on Wednesday he would run for president on his financial report, coming into an more and more crowded race because the stolid candidate of enterprise and expertise.

“If you want more small-town common sense in Washington and our big cities, we’ll make that happen,” Mr. Burgum instructed the group 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 bottom he would want to make as much as achieve his social gathering’s presidential nomination however mentioned he had been underestimated earlier than.

The measurement of the sphere indicators that former President Donald J. Trump, the Republican front-runner, has not scared off many challengers. But he has additionally but to completely consolidate assist behind his candidacy, and quite a few rivals apparently see a path to the nomination, regardless of how slender it is likely to be.

As the chief of his deep-red state, Mr. Burgum has overseen a interval of great financial growth, however he has additionally assented to staunchly conservative social insurance policies, at the same time as he has downplayed his position in them.

This 12 months, Mr. Burgum signed into regulation a near-total ban on abortion and created important restrictions on gender transition care, together with banning any necessities that lecturers or college directors use a scholar’s most popular pronouns.

Such social insurance policies had been nowhere to be present in his marketing campaign launch, which largely eschewed partisan appeals to a conservative base and targeted on three points: the financial system, vitality and nationwide safety. Workmanlike in his supply, with eyes glued on the teleprompters, Mr. Burgum could not seem like a political pure, however his hope is that Republican voters will need a stable technician to return the social gathering to its low-tax, deregulatory entrepreneurial roots.

Outside the transformed Lutheran church the place his rally was held, a clutch of protesters appeared decided to not let him run away from his newer report. Cody J. Schuler, an advocacy supervisor on the North Dakota American Civil Liberties Union, acknowledged that as a enterprise chief, Mr. Burgum embraced L.G.B.T.Q. rights pretty much as good for all residents and good for enterprise.

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

Even Mr. Burgum’s most ardent supporters on the rally expressed doubts that the governor of a state of 775,000 may qualify for the all-important major debates, a bar that now requires 40,000 distinctive donors and 1 p.c in nationwide Republican polls.

“He’ll have the resources to be competitive,” mentioned Tony Grindberg, a senior supervisor at North Dakota’s electrical firm who beforehand served within 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 coverage positions and attracted the nationwide highlight for dust-ups with main companies like Disney.

Yet Mr. Burgum’s aides say he’s planning a marketing campaign much less targeted on social points and extra on his enterprise background and financial stewardship of the state, which included cuts to each native property taxes and state revenue taxes.

At his launch, he by no means talked about transgender points or abortion, and put himself ahead 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 mentioned. “We should all be fighting to unite the country.”

Though his nationwide media appearances have been scarce, Mr. Burgum has been in a position to break via throughout debates over vitality coverage, providing a window into how he would possibly body his proposals in distinction to these of Republican rivals and of President Biden. In March, he told Fox News that the Biden administration’s financial plan was “disconnected from economics, it’s disconnected from physics and it’s disconnected from common sense.” He argued that Japan and different Asian nations had been ripe markets for American vitality exports.

His marketing campaign’s confidence that he can rise from a relative unknown to reputable candidate derives from his personal political profession in North Dakota. When Mr. Burgum introduced his bid for governor in 2016, he was an outsider with little identify recognition exterior Fargo, and his essential opponent, Wayne Stenehjem, the state lawyer normal, acquired the North Dakota Republican Party’s endorsement.

But with ample sources and a marketing campaign that ran to the correct — 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 significantly 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 in all few main candidates not from the East Coast, and with an upbringing deeply rooted within the rural Midwest, Mr. Burgum is more likely to focus most of his efforts in Iowa, a state with an in depth agricultural neighborhood. Mr. Burgum grew up in Arthur, N.D., a city of barely 300 the place his household owned the grain elevator that also dominates the tiny farming neighborhood.

While attending North Dakota State University as an undergraduate, Mr. Burgum started a chimney sweeping service in Fargo out of a good friend’s pickup truck. His newfound enterprise attracted the eye of native newspapers, who ran photographs of a soot-laden Mr. Burgum clad in a tuxedo hopping from roof to roof, choosing up roughly $40 per chimney.

Mr. Burgum connected these newspaper clips to his functions for enterprise college, and he quickly enrolled in Stanford Business School. After incomes his M.B.A. at Stanford, Mr. Burgum joined Great Plains Software, a Fargo firm that specialised in accounting software program, and shortly rose to chief govt.

Far from the extra fertile tech hubs of Silicon Valley, Mr. Burgum constructed Great Plains Software into a serious trade participant, finally promoting to Microsoft for $1.1 billion. He would then function a senior vp at Microsoft till 2007.

Mr. Burgum’s value stretches into 9 figures, definitely sufficient to assist finance a nascent presidential run, and his aides anticipate his enterprise community to assist pull in main donors as properly. But as of the beginning of his marketing campaign, no tremendous PAC or exterior group has emerged supporting Mr. Burgum’s candidacy.