Governor Kelly Armstrong and Karl Rove In Conversation

Karl Rove in Conversation with Governor Kelly Armstrong
Bismarck, North Dakota · October 9 · Bismarck (location TBD)

In the summer of 1896, Theodore Roosevelt was thirty-seven years old and going nowhere in particular. A decade earlier he had buried a marriage and a political career in the North Dakota Badlands and come back east changed. Now he was a police commissioner in New York City — a job with more headlines than power — and the presidency was not a thing anyone was seriously discussing.

Then William McKinley won the election of 1896.

Within a year, T.R. had a post at the Navy Department. Within two, a war and a regiment. Within three, the governorship of New York. Within five, McKinley was dead in Buffalo and Roosevelt was the youngest president in American history, forty-two years old, taking the oath in a borrowed frock coat.

The 1896 campaign is the hinge, and it is the least understood election of its era — a contest fought over money, immigration, a disrupted economy, and a country that could not agree on what it was becoming.

Karl Rove spent years on it. His book The Triumph of William McKinley argues that the modern presidential campaign was invented that year, and that the governing majority McKinley assembled shaped the next three decades of American politics.

Join Governor Kelly Armstrong for an evening with Rove on the campaign that remade a party, the president history has largely forgotten, and the Badlands rancher who inherited what McKinley built.

About the speakers

Karl Rove is the author of The Triumph of William McKinley: Why the Election of 1896 Still Matters, praised by historians including Doris Kearns Goodwin, H.W. Brands, and Jon Meacham. He writes a weekly column for The Wall Street Journal and served as Senior Advisor and Deputy Chief of Staff to President George W. Bush.

Kelly Armstrong is the 34th Governor of North Dakota, sworn in December 15, 2024. He was born and raised in Dickinson, roughly thirty-five miles from the Badlands country where Theodore Roosevelt ranched.