Incumbent Democrats suffer massive loss in Aberdeen City Commission races

Good gosh, incumbents did not fare well at all in tonight’s Aberdeen City elections.

If you had to call it anything, you might say it was a good, old-fashioned @$$ kicking, as both incumbents were crushed on better than a 2-to-1 basis.

Mike Levsen, a twenty year incumbent, might’ve been viewed as slightly more middle-of-the-road than Brown County Democrat chairwoman Jennifer Slaight-Hansen, but voters completely repudiated both, and elected Republicans Travis Schaunaman and Josh Rife.

Rife and Schaunaman were both supported by the local Brown County GOP organization and the State GOP, who sent out a postcard to some Republican households in the area.

When both take office, they will have five-year terms of office, some of the longest terms for city government in all of South Dakota.

Congratulations to both Josh and Travis for a well-deserved victory. They earned it!

11 thoughts on “Incumbent Democrats suffer massive loss in Aberdeen City Commission races”

  1. It is usually the kiss of death for a political campaign when Mr. H’s out of state name caller blog promotes that candidate.

  2. Cory H wrote an article today insinuating South Dakota paid for Noem’s daughter’s wedding.

    A Minnesota resident believed the fake news. I don’t know how many other democrats believed it.

    My educated guess is it is all for the money. He has no intellectual or journalistic integrity

  3. Should be fun to see how they spin this on the liberal blog!

    Nice wins Travis and Josh!

  4. The Democrats are snarky about these elections on Twitter. I just asked about the results early in evening, and they got snotty about it.
    The irony in that behavior about these “nonpartisan” elections is that the Democrats wrote the playbook on politocizing these elections in the Sioux Falls mayoral races or late. Apparently GOP was in the game in Aberdeen, but late to the idea of encouraging partisan voters to participate for a candidate in munincipal elections.

    1. Lee makes a good point. In 2019, non-partisan civic elections have become (mostly) an unrealistic aspiration. One candidate was the Democratic Party Chair. That’s inherently partisan. So, we can go through the motions. We can play out the charade. We can piously refuse to print R or D next to a name on a ballot. Yet, inevitably, candidates take positions. Candidates’ positions almost always reveal inner conservationism or progressiveness or libertarianism or [fill in your favorite “ism”]. In a debate, a candidate will propose something politically incendiary, something controversial that one party supports and the other party opposes. Often, the disingenuous candidate will then insult voters’ intelligence. He’ll call his divisive proposal non-partisan, e.g. “our becoming a sanctuary city isn’t about democrats or republicans. It isn’t even political. It’s a human rights issue!”

      I believe South Bend, Indiana’s current mayor claimed to be non-partisan when he sought that office. He seems *slightly* partisan now.

      Citizens have every right to support & elect the candidate they prefer, even if she’s the DNC chair (or whatever). That’s democracy. But calling these contests ‘non-partisan’ is, often, a farce. Same with cable news networks, btw.

  5. When the Democrats made the Huether run for mayor a partisan race, I told some Democrats they will regret waking the GOP political organization to become active in technically non-partisan races. Or course at the time they thought they were clever. Now they get to expand their universe of irrelevance.

    What a bunch of nincompoops. That’s all folks.
    https://binged.it/2Ik3Ct2

    1. No because they posted their most popular subject over there and that is WEED! About the election? They are used to losing.

    2. Back to their crazy anti-Catholic strawman rants. That blog just kills it for Democrats in the state.

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