MINOT — The North Dakota Democratic-NPL didn’t respond to Gov. Kelly Armstrong’s State of the State address this week.

It was odd.

Usually, the opposition party always has a response. Do they agree with Armstrong’s priorities? Is this a product of Armstrong’s broad appeal as a leader and a policymaker?

Our Democratic friends haven’t elected a governor in North Dakota since the dawn of the Clinton administration. Maybe they’ve given up?

It’s not like they took the day off. The party did

issue a press release

about President-elect Donald Trump and wind jobs on the day of Armstrong’s address — specifically Trump’s vow to block the construction of new wind turbines — which is what I wanted to write about in this column.

“We’re gonna try and have a policy where no windmills are being built,” the incoming president said in a speech in which

he also seemed to blame wind turbines for killing whales.

The Democrats, not unfairly, pointed out that a lot of North Dakotans are employed by the wind industry.

“He’s not even president yet, and Donald Trump is already putting the livelihoods of hundreds of North Dakotans at risk by demanding that the important work they do be completely stopped,”

Dem-NPL Chair Adam Goldwyn said in a press release.

“Wind is the second largest electricity-generating source in North Dakota.”

I’m critical of American wind policy, but not wind energy. I think wind energy can be a very useful part of the mix for American power. I also think that many misguided laws have subsidized wind (and other intermittent energy sources) to the point where it has endangered the sustainability of our power grids.

From that perspective, Trump is wrong to treat wind energy as some inherent wrong. We shouldn’t be blocking wind turbines. We should reform our energy policies so that wind power is built to meet actual demand and not merely collect production subsidies.

But are the Democrats doing anything all that differently from Trump?

Trump is treating wind power like it’s some ideological wrong. It’s a power source Democrats like, ergo, it’s bad. Democrats do the same thing with energy sources like coal and oil.

Don’t believe me?

Consider that the Democratic-NPL, on the day North Dakota’s newly elected governor was delivering his first address to the Legislature, opted to send out a press release about wind jobs, but haven’t once, in my memory, said anything about President Joe Biden’s policy excesses that have endangered thousands of North Dakota jobs maintained, directly and indirectly, by the oil, gas and coal industries.

This is galling because North Dakota Democrats like to assure us that they’re different from national Democrats. If that’s true, why not prove it by pushing back on national policies that put North Dakota livelihoods at risk?

This economic partisanship has to stop. Republicans like Trump treat wind and solar jobs like Democratic jobs. Democrats treat oil and gas jobs like Republican jobs.

But do you know who fills every one of those jobs? Americans.

This myopia is a part of what’s tearing this country apart.