“This is why I pray and ask God to close your womb so that you’ll never be able to get pregnant and have children, unless you repent,” read a threatening message Cara Mund ’16 received in the midst of her 2024 campaign for North Dakota’s lone seat in the House of Representatives.
Mund, a pro-choice Republican, is no stranger to threatening messages or uphill battles. She won Miss America—the first in North Dakota history—barely a year after graduating with her degree in business, entrepreneurship, and organizations and she challenged the local GOP establishment in 2022 and again in 2024, expressing the deeply held belief in abortion rights that she grounds in her support for limited government.
Though the Harvard Law graduate had previously thought about running for office, the 2022 Supreme Court decision in the Dobbs case—reversing nearly 50 years of women’s reproductive rights under Roe v. Wade—made that idea an imperative, especially after the only clinic that performed elective abortions in North Dakota closed down. “I couldn’t stand by and think for myself, let alone my future daughter, that these debates could go by without some of the facts of how this impacts people in North Dakota,” Mund says.
A self-described moderate and lifelong Republican, Mund has been vocally anti-Trump. While decrying the southern border as a crisis, she supported the bipartisan border security and foreign aid package that was killed after Trump opposition, and she believes in a more accessible path to citizenship.
Her late start in the 2022 election meant she could run only as an independent and she garnered an impressive 37 percent against a GOP incumbent, leveraging Facebook and TikTok in addition to traditional campaigning.
In 2024, Mund ran for the state’s House seat as an underdog Republican. Campaign finance records show that Mund’s campaign raised $26,472, whereas the frontrunner, Julie Fedorchak, who received a Trump endorsement, raised nearly two million dollars. Ultimately, Mund finished third in the Republican primary.
Her campaign received pushback from North Dakotan Republicans and, in an email she sent to USA Today during her 2024 campaign, she claimed that prominent Republicans in the state were scared to support her candidacy for fear of political retribution.
But by listening to and amplifying the stories of North Dakotan women denied health care, Mund feels like she won just by running. Plus, the readers of the Bismarck Tribune voted her 2024’s “Best ND Politician.”
After the campaign, she joined the large law firm of Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, certain that new and bigger challenges lie ahead. “Coming out of Miss America, I didn’t want to think I’d peaked,” she says. “If you peak at 24, you’re doing it wrong.”
