South Dakota Democrats only able to put together 2 legitimate victories out of 105 seats.

Pat Powers

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.

10 thoughts on “South Dakota Democrats only able to put together 2 legitimate victories out of 105 seats.”

  1. Hats off to Budmayr and the state GOP for recruiting our great candidates and allocating resources to the right spots. We’ve got good party leadership right now.

  2. When you list all the things a party should be and what it should do, the SDDP doesn’t even know there is a list. These results are so predictable.

    Think about it:

    1) No Statewide office holders and nary a person who realistically is viable state-wide.

    2) 15% of the South Dakota Legislature. If they had one less member of the State House, the committee allocation would be 1 Democrat and 12 Republicans.

    3) Despite only having 31% of the voter registration, their candidate’s performance is 31% is essentially their ceiling and not their basement.

    Extraneous: irrelevant or unrelated to the subject being dealt with

    Can you think of a better word to describe the reality of the SDDP?

  3. The ballot issues will not do much party building and they certainly will not be a substitute for actually trying to introduce bills and vote in the legislature. They need clean house and bring in new leadership.

  4. We also need a new governor instead of the liberal in office now. A lot of us are VERY disappointed in how Daugaard has been governing during his second term.

  5. This is the first time Huron hasn’t sent a Democrat to Pierre since I moved here in 1992. Incumbent Sen. Jim White defeated his opponent by 3-to-1. while newcomers Bob Glanzer and Roger Chase won by double digits in the House race. Peggy Gibson was term-limited in the House, but had the good sense not to challenge Mr. White.

    1. She would’ve beat Jim White. She was the top vote-getter in the House for years…and had a lot of support in that district. Jim White is white toast…without butter.

  6. IM 22 will allow more of the Democrats to be competitive again because they will fund their campaigns at the taxpayer’s expense. If IM 22 is not changed by the legislators, the response of the Republican Party needs to be to nominate and support true conservatives rather than anyone willing to put an R after their name on the ballot. As Ronald Reagan put it, we need “bold colors” instead of “pale pastels” to contrast ourselves with the secular-progressives who dominate the Democrat Party, even in South Dakota. Instead of celebrating Republican supermajorities in the legislature, we need to work to get a truly conservative majority in 2018.

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