SDGOP website and communications efforts not exactly current as we move towards the fall election.

I hate to be that guy, but a month after the State Republican Party convention, I was going to go back and pull some information on the State GOP’s stances on the ballot measures, and went to the portion of the website where it seemed to let you look at what the party platform is:

Clicking into the part that says “Party Platform of the South Dakota Republican Party..”  I’m given this:

 

You get information from the National “COVID Convention” Republican platform in 2020, which was just a restatement from the national platform for 2016.  …which was not at all what I was looking for, since I was looking for what’s in the state party platform.

But it leads into a number of other issues where a lot of the references on the State GOP website are for trainings back in 2023.  Facebook isn’t much better, where the featured posts are telling people to “Head on over to SDGOP.com to get your tickets for our rally with President Donald J. Trump” from July of 2023 on Facebook, and except for the occasional re-post to Twitter, communications from the party have largely shut down.  I won’t get into the number of newsletters that the party hasn’t done since some members of the State GOP Central Committee got a burr in their saddle about me, and demanded that the GOP quit hiring me to produce one.

It’s kind of frustrating to see how quickly that something that was built up so strongly over the past couple of decades can turn on a dime in the face of internal divisions, as populists try to turn the SDGOP into their own ideological megaphone as opposed to an organization that reflects state Republicans as a whole.

Struggling to raise funds, lacking additional campaign season staff, and devoid of any current communications, the populist factionalism in the South Dakota GOP has created an environment where the party is not in a position to capitalize on the dominance of the top of the ticket for the down ballot races, much less influence people on how to vote on ballot measures.

And what about influencing where South Dakotans sit on those ballot measures?  Which was the point of what got me started on my trip down the rabbit hole.  By all indications, we’re in for a wild ride as we approach the fall.

Which is a post for another day, since I have to go dig up the information I was looking for elsewhere.