the Republican Party. As a candidate for the NPL, he unsuccessfully ran for attorney general in 1934 and 1940, state senator from Cass County in 1936, and lieutenant governor in 1942. Burdick, who believed the NPL was dividing the state's progressive vote, began to advocate aligning the NPL with the Democratic Party. He subsequently ran for Governor of North Dakota in 1946 as a Democrat, but was again unsuccessful. He was a delegate for former Vice President Henry A. Wallace, who ran as a candidate of the Progressive Party, in the 1948 presidential election. In 1956, the NPL aligned with the Democratic Party to create the North Dakota Democratic-Nonpartisan League Party. That same year, Burdick suffered his sixth and final electoral defeat when he ran against Republican incumbent Milton Young for the U.S. Senate. Congressional career U.S. House of Representatives In the spring of 1958, Usher Burdick, who worried about being defeated for re-election in the Republican primary, offered to withdraw his candidacy if the NPL agreed to support his son as the Democratic-NPL candidate for his seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. Quentin subsequently received the NPL endorsement in April, and was elected to North Dakota's At-large congressional district the following November. He was the first Democrat-NPLer to be elected to the House of Representatives from North Dakota. During his tenure in the House, Burdick served as a member of the House Interior Committee, where he promoted the Garrison Diversion Project to provide water from the Missouri River to North Dakota. He received high ratings from organized labor and the Americans for Democratic Action. An opponent of the Eisenhower administration's farm policies, in his maiden speech on the House floor, Burdick called for the resignation of U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson. U.S. Senate After the death of Senator William Langer in November 1959, Burdick ran in a special election on June 28, 1960 to fill the remaining four and a half years of Langer's term. His Republican opponent was Governor John E. Davis. During the campaign, Burdick received strong support from the National Farmers Union. He called for high price supports and strict production controls on grains with high surpluses. His campaign slogan, "Beat Benson with Burdick", referred to Agriculture Secretary Benson, whose policies were unpopular with the state's wheat farmers. Burdick narrowly defeated Davis by a margin of 1,118 votes. Nine days after the election,