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Senate Redistricting Committee updates on progress of redistricting meetings
by Senate Redistricting Committee 

The House and Senate Legislative Redistricting Committees spent three days traveling across South Dakota to take public input on what the state’s new legislative districts should look like. We started at 8:00 a.m. on Monday in Rapid City and ended at 8:30 p.m. on Wednesday in Sioux Falls. We traveled over 1,100 miles, making stops in Mission, Mobridge, Aberdeen, and Watertown along the way. More than 200 people attended our listening sessions.  We heard from about 100 people who took time to weigh in on South Dakota’s future legislative districts.

Several key themes emerged from public comments:

Many people indicated they generally like their current legislative districts. As we move forward, we are trying to preserve the core of the current districts as much as possible.  Because of changes in South Dakota’s population – an increase of about nine percent over the past ten years, primarily in the southeast part of the state – we know that at least 34 of the state’s 35 legislative districts will need to change to comply with our constitutional requirement of one person, one vote. The only district that doesn’t need any alteration is the one encompassing Lawrence County, which grew at the right pace to comprise a legislative district.

Voters and county auditors would like counties to be left whole where possible.  According to the census, seven of our state’s 66 counties are too large to fit within one legislative district. Brookings, Brown, Codington, Lincoln, Meade, Minnehaha, and Pennington counties will have to be split into more than one district, to satisfy the constitution’s equal protection clause.  As we work to assign the rest of the state into logical legislative districts, we are trying to minimize splitting any of the remaining counties as much as possible.

There were many comments about keeping urban districts as urban as possible, and rural districts as rural as possible, particularly near Sioux Falls.  The U.S. Census Bureau defines an urban area as 2,500 residents or more. As the Senate looks at growth patterns along the I-29 corridor, we are working to keep the urban districts as compact as possible, and the rural districts as rural as possible.

We heard from the Native American community about protecting minority voting rights. One of the ways our committee is addressing this is to follow the current boundaries for Districts 26, 27, and 28 as much as possible to meet the requirements of the Federal Voting Rights Act, while also meeting population requirements as required by the Constitution.

Protecting communities of interest is another theme that emerged from our listening sessions.  While this concept is not clearly defined in law, we heard how citizens see their local community of interest. As our state becomes more diverse, we expect this conversation to continue.

Over the next few weeks we will be working to incorporate these suggestions into a proposal for legislators to consider during the Special Session on Redistricting, set for November 8-9 in Pierre. Our over-arching goal is to develop a map that meets our constitutional obligations and statutory guidance, and is fair for the residents of our state.

Proposed maps are available for the public to view at sdlegislature.gov. Additional thoughts and ideas can be emailed to sdredistricting@sdlegislature.gov.

Boom. Hours after congressional challenger Taffy Howard filed her first FEC Report, Congressman Dusty Johnson more than doubled that haul with dozens more donors, and is left with over twenty times more cash on hand than his challenger.

Dusty Johnson 2021 3q by Pat Powers on Scribd

Congressman Dusty Johnson posted $219,020.01 raised against $43,516.89 in expenses. Leaving him a massive cash advantage of $1,713,182.55, over 23 times as much as Taffy has sitting in the bank.

And to his advantage, Dusty’s money isn’t primarily from one family, but from a broad base of donors including State Rep. Arch Beal, Former Ag Secretary Walt Bones, former State Rep. Deb Fischer-Clemens, State Senator Jean Hunhoff, former State Senator Al Kurtenbach, Former State Rep. Matt McCaulley, State Rep. John Mills, Regent & Former State Rep. Jeff Partridge, State Rep. Sue Peterson, State Rep. Taylor Rehfeldt, and a number of our state’s captains of commerce.

Plus, I don’t believe most of his donors have maxed out as Howard’s donors have.

Taffy Howard got her first FEC Report in…

Taffy Howard 2021 3q FEC by Pat Powers on Scribd

$86.523.18 raised against $13,922.22 spent. Leaving her $72600.96 cash on hand.

And apparently Taffy is big with the Assman family, as their donations comprised roughly $50,000 of that total, with poker playing insurance agent Luke Blindert adding another $5800 to the kitty, as well as Texans Dan Kreamer & his wife kicking in another $5800.

Who got Taffy’s money? Looks like Jordan Mason & the Lautenschlagers tag teamed to drain taffy’s coffers of $1000 for Consulting for Jordan’s Lunch Collective, and the Lautenschlager’s Red Mountain Direct took $6792 out of the campaign purse.

From the Federal Elections Commission, looks like it’s been slow going for the Whalen for US Senate committee so far:

I’d heard that this was coming, and it looks like Speaker of the House Spencer Gosch refused to release the votes of the House members on who was calling for the Special Session to consider impeachment, and now he finds himself trying to defend keeping a vote of the legislature secret:

The Argus Leader and the South Dakota Newspaper Association jointly filed a lawsuit Wednesday with the South Dakota Supreme Court. The complaint alleges the Glenham Republican, who presides of the state House, is in violation of state open records laws by refusing for weeks to make public the names of lawmakers who formally signed a petition calling for the special session into Attorney General Jason Ravnsborg next month at the capitol.

“It’s inexcusable for Speaker Gosch to continue hiding this information from the public,” Argus Leader News Director Cory Myers said, noting attempts to work with Gosch and his private attorney to resolve the matter were unsuccessful. “There’s a constitutional requirement to record legislative votes, and at the very least, an obligation of elected servants to be transparent about their processes.

Read the entire story here.

The Senate had already released the information, because in the minds of most people, it’s kind of hard to justify keeping a vote of the legislature secret. And except for a few, just about everyone believes that votes of the legislature are public information.

As I’d noted before, keeping the vote secret was ill-advised at best, and an affront to open government at worst. I don’t see how this goes the house’s way.

I’m hearing tickets are going fast for this event!  Click on the post to find out more, and to reserve yours!

KELOland’s story on the Taffy Howard congressional announcement doesn’t seem to have done her any favors..

Howard will try to capitalize on a shift within the Republican Party that is largely based on loyalty to former president Donald Trump. She has positioned herself to the political right of Johnson, a popular imcumbent who has held the seat for three years. Howard has echoed Trump’s baseless claims of widespread voter fraud, and has criticized Johnson for voting to voting to certify the results of the 2020 presidential election.

Watch it here..

Maybe she shouldn’t have been part of the Republican bashing “Dynamic Duo” at the pillow guy forum and signed that letter.

People might get ideas..

Just a few housekeeping items worth mentioning.

The SDWC Political Twitter feed is back for a trial run, as long as it manages not to bog down loading times. I had pared down a number of the scripts appearing on the page, but as soon as I went to cloudflare to kill some of the bots, traffic from China, and other things scanning my site, load times are much better so I’m able to give it a return shot.

I’ve had several inquiries, but I do still have a couple prime spots available for advertising on the website. Drop me a note today if you’d like to get locked in. (And as I love my long term advertisers, I do discount 1 month for every 6 month commitment.)

Had a speaking engagement with the SDSU Political Science Club last night, and it went very well. I’m usually pretty speaking-engagement averse, as I really hate talking about myself. And when I post, I edit and re-edit. But I managed to fill a half hour without too much difficulty and don’t think I sounded too stupid.  It’s my ultimate goal to start doing a weekly vlog post, so that might mean forward motion in that direction. We’ll see.

This morning, I had a legislator reach out on why I haven’t written anything about the House ‘Grouse’ redistricting map. I told him that important thing to note is the three previous columns on redistricting were all guest columns. If a member of the House committee wants to send me a column on why their map is best, if they want to write it up, I will run it.

And that goes the same for guest columns on other topics.  I always welcome those who want to contribute on current topics of political interest, as I’m usually crazy busy and that’s good content I don’t have to write.   Is that an invitation to send me stuff bashing candidates? No. It’s an invitation to expand the knowledge of readers on topics they might be misinformed about or should be better versed in.  Send me a note here, and we can discuss.

Other that that, as we’re getting into the campaign season, I’m planning to discuss candidate and campaign related topics. Any facet of campaigning you are interested in discussing or knowing more about? As I was telling the SDSU students last night, I’ve been doing this stuff for more than 30 years, so hopefully I can provide some insight candidates and workers can find useful. Leave a note in the comment section, and I’ll cover it in the weeks coming up.

Stay tuned!

41 more people hospitalized this week for COVID over last week, plus a few more in the ICU in Sanford’s latest infographic on their COVID cases.

So, Taffy Howard posted this photo from her announcement this AM in Sioux Falls..

Not a large crowd on this one.. I’m seeing State Rep. Tom Pischke, Former State Rep. Manny Steele, a couple family members, and a smattering of others.  Her announcement in Rapid City ended up being canceled due to weather.

Funny that Tom Pischke is there, as he was a big backer of Liz May last primary. I think May had more people at her announcement for that race.

What are your thoughts?