As I was writing yesterday, there were 3 races that I was keeping a particular eye on in 1, 12 & 27. I was very pleased with the outcome in 2/3 of them.
In District 1, despite spending thousands in the last 2 weeks to reclaim her Senate Seat, Mike Rohl took Susan Wismer to school. And defeated her on a 59-41% basis.
In District 12, Arch Beal showed everyone that strong name ID aid important as he sent Democrat challenger Jessica Meyers packing.
District 27 was the sole disappointment, as David Jones was within 200 votes of capturing the Senate seat from Red Dawn Foster after leading the race all night. Ugh.. so close, yet so far.
What else do we know? District 15 was crazy close between the two parties, showing this former black hole of despair for Republicans can be flipped with the right effort. We’ll be back.
District 18 got redder.. all three seats are now in Republican hands. Good thoughts for the future.
District 32 had always had hints of blue, but now it might be considered a purple district. Republicans Helene Duhamel, Becky Drury and Steve Duffy all came out of the election victorious, but it was touch and go for a while, showing that future races need to be closely targeted as numbers flipped all night as the returns came in.
The final numbers for the SDGOP came in with 31 Senate victories and 63 House. We lost several close ones overnight, as the red wave we were expecting nationally wasn’t big enough to surf on as we might have originally thought.
Our super-majority increased by 1 in the House but decreased by 1 in the Senate.
While it would have been nice to pick up the close ones, we can be extremely happy in holding on to historic numbers.
Good night for the SDGOP. A very good night.
Terrific summary, Pat! Thank you!
Sad to see all three of the D10 seats go blue. 🙁
Someone explain why redistricting worked for D10?
Dems had roughly 600 more registered in the new district.
… we got screwed.
They took them from D24 who lost their Democratic rep. It looks like they thought their candidates would pick up the independents and win. Unfortunately the democrats found really good candidates two of which would have won without the 600 votes. Republicans have to get much better candidates who can attract independents.
All the republicans were against Medicaid. They turned off independent voters. Bad republican decision to fight the people.
Bye bye cwach in Yankton
Bad night for Trumpism though, hallelujah.
South Dakota did as expected. But nationally the “Red tsunami” turned out to be a pink ripple.
Probably the reason republicans lost close races is because of republicans. Generally republicans (for stupid reasons) opposed Medicaid. If all democrats voted for it and 80% of independents voted for it, 20% of republicans voted for it. You can’t slap 20% of your party and expect everything to go well.
D10 is the new D15. D15 has turned purple as will all of the SF “urban” districts in the next 10 years. 😉 Sioux Falls and the reservations will be like what Minneapolis is to Minnesota, Portland to Oregon, or Nebraska2 to the electoral college. Enjoy your Republican victories while you have them. Sioux Falls will have 300,000 people by 2040. You were warned. 🙂
True. The very reason the Republican Party should support Republican candidates who can appeal to both sides of the aisle. If not, the slots will be taken by Dems. Work smarter and support all flavors of Republicans.
drilling down a bit into the numbers for Districts 10 and 15 reveals some interesting stuff.
District 10 has 15,012 registered voters.
7917 voted for one of the two state Senate candidates, for a voter turn out of 52.7%
District 15 has 19,566 registered voters and 7007 of them voted for one of the two candidates for state senate, for a voter turnout of 35.8%
Both districts had enough registered Republicans (4812 in 10, 6446 in 15) to win the races, if they had shown up to vote. But they didn’t.
So let’s look at who was responsible for getting out the vote: Minnehaha County had 48 precinct committeemen and 62 committeewomen who volunteered to shoulder the responsibility of conducting the political campaigns in their precincts. Of those, 24 of them were in District 10 and 20 of them were in District 15. In other words, 40% of Minnehaha County’s Precinct Committee people were located in the Districts the Republicans could have won, but didn’t.