South Dakota Democrats only able to put together 2 legitimate victories out of 105 seats.
So, about those South Dakota Democrats…
Do you realize that in the Senate, they did not win a single, solitary race. Only uncontested ones. And in the House of Representatives, of the ten seats they won, six were uncontested, 2 were contested against Independents, and only two wins out of 70 seats – one in D17 (Ray Ring over Debbie Pease), and one in D25 (Dan Ahlers over Roger Hunt) were head to head runs against Republicans.
Think about that.
The Democrat party was only able to put together legitimate head to head victories over Republicans in only 2 out of 105 seats. That’s just staggering for a political party who, not much more than 20 years ago in the 1992 election was able to capture a majority in the State Senate.
The intervening years have not been kind to the opposition, but in many cases, they’ve brought it onto themselves.
As opposed to recruiting and running a full slate of candidates, they’ve relied on the stopgap placeholder to put a warm body into candidate positions with hopes of filling it later, in all too many instances.
As opposed to trying to appeal to the middle in center-right to conservative South Dakota, they keep pushing farther and farther left. When you bring in candidates for the head of your ticket who want to raise taxes all over the board and tell us we need to stop oil production, farmers who might possibly be sympathetic to your cause are just going to shake their head and pull the lever for the GOP that much more earnestly.
As opposed to party building, the Democrats have fallen into this trap of working ballot issues, thinking that they’re going to build their potential mailing lists, and the electorate is going to reward them for their ideas they can’t get pushed through during session.
Now that they’re at their lowest point of elected officials IN OVER 50 YEARS (since ’53), you would think that maybe they would get the hint that their path which meanders towards extinction isn’t working for them anymore.
But somehow, I just don’t think they get it.