This interview originally aired on "In the Moment" on SDPB Radio.
According to Wednesday morning's unofficial tallies, a surprising number of incumbents lost their races against their fellow Republicans in Tuesday's South Dakota primaries.
We turn to our Dakota Political Junkies for analysis.
Jon Hunter is publisher emeritus of the Madison Daily Leader and was inducted into the South Dakota Newspaper Hall of Fame in 2022.
Mike Card, Ph.D., is a political scientist and professor emeritus at the University of South Dakota.
And Lee Strubinger is SDPB's politics and public policy reporter.
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The following transcript was auto-generated.
Lori Walsh:
It is primary week in South Dakota. We are coming off of last night's primary elections.
And according to the unofficial tally, so we'll say that a couple of times throughout this segment that everything has to be canvassed so we're dealing with the Secretary of State's unofficial tallies for votes.
It looks like at least 14 Republicans lost their races against fellow Republicans in yesterday's primary. Several incumbents have lost their seats, and we are going to just unpack all those numbers with our Dakota Political Junkies today.
Jon Hunter is publisher emeritus of the Madison Daily Leader. He's been inducted into the South Dakota Newspaper Hall of Fame, and he is here in Sioux Falls in SDPB's Kirby Family Studios. Hey Jon.
Jon Hunter:
Hi Lori. Thanks for the invitation.
Lori Walsh:
And now Michael Card, political scientist and professor emeritus at the University of South Dakota. He is joining us from our studios on USD's campus in Vermillion. Dr. Card. Welcome.
Mike Card:
Thank you for inviting me. It's great to have statewide coverage today.
Lori Walsh:
Well, let's hop the river and bring in SDPB's Lee Strubinger, who is seated in our Black Hills Surgical Hospital studio in Rapid City. Lee is our politics and public policy reporter. Hey, Lee, welcome.
Lee Strubinger:
Hey, Lori. Good to be here.
Lori Walsh:
All right, Jon, let's start with you because the incumbents struggled. It looks like five incumbent senators out, six incumbent representatives out, and three people tried to switch houses and lost. This is newsworthy and noteworthy for a lot of reasons.
What comes to mind when you look at some of these unofficial results coming in?
Jon Hunter:
Well, naturally you think of incumbents having a slight advantage of visibility, name recognition and that sort of thing. So to me, incumbents losing is always a surprise or maybe just worth looking into. In some cases, I think there's something going on very locally, remember these are district races, usually a county or two. There's something going on there that we may not know at a statewide level.
Two, I think this cycle, at least my observation, I haven't done any calculations, but there was a fair amount of influence of PACs. I think I counted just the advertisements that I looked, probably 20 different PACs that were in advertisements that were paid for by South Dakota Strong, the Peter Norbeck Leadership PAC, Dakota First Action and so on. So they may have had some influence in those.
If the incumbent wasn't voting with that particular special interest, they may have put some money into that and campaigned for their opponent. So I think have to, Lori, really analyze them condition by condition. Each situation is different rather than making a blanket conclusion.
Lori Walsh:
Yeah. Michael Card, some big names. Julie Frye-Mueller out. Jean Hunhoff out. Erin Tobin out. Tamara St. John out. Tyler Tordsen out. Becky Drury. There are all kinds of, I don't know if those are all surprises, but what are you making of the turnover and the struggle that some of these incumbents had?
Mike Card:
Well, as Jon noted, each of these races has their own dynamics, but there does seem to be a continuation of some of the challenges that we saw in the legislative session that the new Republicans, is the label I'm sticking with for a little while, versus what I would call a stalwarts and that's an old label that may be derogatory. And I certainly don't mean either one to be derogatory because everybody's entitled to your own opinions and perspectives on life.
But I think that there were lots of heuristics. One part comes from political action committee money, another one comes from report cards. And when we have an election such as the one that we had, turnout is relatively low. My look at the Secretary of State's website shows that Republicans turned out at about 26%, and Independents turned out at about 7%. But without Democratic races, without presidential primaries, without state-level primaries, we would expect turnout to be low.
And so people are looking for clues as to who to vote for because the unfortunate part of our reality across the United States is the local government, our local representatives, are the ones that we don't know who they are as a general population. And so we look for clues from various sources. And that's where we get political action committee mailers, we get report cards that often end up on political action committee mailers and we see a certain amount of negative campaigning.
And when we have that in front of us, we're likely to have more turnover. Statewide, we tend at legislative level, about 25% have turned over, about 33 to 35% have turned over since we had term limits. When we look at all the people who retired, when we look at the 14 turnovers, this is pretty high.
Lori Walsh:
Yeah. I have about 13 senators not running, I think maybe 14, or trying to switch houses, 20 representatives not running. So when you start adding up the numbers, I guess what I'm saying, the number itself maybe isn't important, but the idea of how many people are not coming back, this is going to be a very different Senate and House of Representatives next term.
Mike Card:
Well, and coming off of a year when almost half of the Republican caucus was new this last two legislative sessions.
Lori Walsh:
Lee Strubinger, I want to bring you into the conversation. I'm hearing a lot about PACs and you've done some digging to see the relevance of at least one of those. Tell me some of the things that you're finding as key takeaways from last night's primary.
Lee Strubinger:
Yeah, I might be contradicting Jon Hunter a little bit here, but I did zero in on one specific PAC in general. But more broadly, I spoke with some who said that this particular primary result is a response to many of the things that came up during this last legislative session. So there were efforts to move constitutional officer nominations from the convention to the primary ballot. There was also a last minute effort to prevent county ballot questions that would require hand counting and paper ballots only.
And then another really big factor that sort of played across a lot of this was the carbon pipeline issue. Representative Scott Odenbach is a Republican from Lawrence County in the northern Black Hills, and he handily won his re-election. I spoke to him this morning and the reason why I did was he has this political action committee called Liberty Tree PAC.
I took a look at the list of candidates that his political action committee endorsed and then took a look at how many of them won. And of the 37 Republican legislative candidates that Liberty Tree backed this primary, 27 of them won. So there was about a 73% success rate.
When I spoke to Odenbach, he attributes that success to great candidate recruitment and having good people who are motivated by the overreach of lawmakers who were pushing the carbon pipeline bill package earlier this year.
Take a listen.
Representative Scott Odenbach:
As much as they tried with spin and with spending to try to sell the Green New Deal as conservative, that faction in our party who's been moderate to liberal for a couple generations now, couldn't do it. And the people saw right through it and said it's overreach. And that was a big, big factor in this. I also think when you have a low turnout election, the activity of grassroots Republicans was a big factor. And you take a look at the bills that were ran this session to try to basically delete the ability of those precinct people to be part of the process, to delete the petition process that was done in response to some of that hand-counting stuff, those grassroots activists were awake and they were motivated and they showed up.
Lori Walsh:
Jon Hunter, what do you want to add to this? Because I'm hearing a lot of themes emerge here about what politics looks and sounds and feels like in South Dakota right now.
Jon Hunter:
Well, I think you have to add in at least a little bit the effect of low turnout. Naturally, you're going to get more volatility out of that kind of thing rather than if you have 70 or 80%. In some Democrat races it was very low, but even in the Republican races. So the influence of one factor or one campaign or any other thing is amplified. So I think it sets the possibility of more upsets in low turnout elections.
We actually had one in Madison years ago, the mayor, we had abysmally low turnout, and it was like 5% was this thing, and the opponent won. I think you just sign up your family, if you can get them to come, you can influence an election.
So I think low turnout does have a factor in these things. It does add some influence to some of the advertising and political action. And as Mike said, scorecards. So I think it's a big factor.
Lori Walsh:
Yeah. Mike Card, whose job is it to get voters to the polls?
Mike Card:
Well, it's the candidate and the candidate's committee. I mean, unfortunately, what is the most likely to influence people's lives, actual lives, is the least turnout elections. And those are our local elections. We saw it in Sioux Falls with about 7% during their municipal election. We're seeing it here where the two parties that basically had only absolutely local candidates, had a 7% turnout between the no-party affiliation and the Democrats and then the Republicans, they had to turn out the vote.
You need your base to get out and whatever level of politics you're in, you need to have a grassroots campaign to turn out the vote. And that is people going door to door, candidates going door to door, phone banks calls. These are things that increase the cost of running for election, but they're really the way to win.
Especially when we have, as Lee pointed out, some of these real differences between candidates that are also highlighted by mailers, phone calls, forums, and real close-to-home issues such as the eminent domain and the carbon pipelines. I mean, this was one that was sort of teed up to be a challenging election for the stalwart Republicans as I'm referring to them.
Lori Walsh:
Yeah. I'm going to ask another question about that in a minute, but Jon, what do you want to add to?
Jon Hunter:
Well, I've said for a long time that these local legislative races tend to be a little bit more nonpartisan. That we vote for people that we know, that we see, that we work with, that you see at school events or whatever. I think this one feels a little bit more partisan. This feels a little bit more, and of course, you kind of the two parts of the Republican Party battling, I don't think we're necessarily voting or some people, at least in this election, didn't necessarily vote for the person, but for the issue.
Lori Walsh:
Yeah. Lee, let's talk more about that issue of the carbon pipeline landowner rights. Broadly speaking, when Representative Will Mortenson was on this show, and I think, I'm sure he said it to you and everybody else, but I remember when he was here in the studio saying, I hope that we don't become a state where we can't build things. And he was talking about the economic development of a carbon pipeline.
But I listened to that clip you just played, and there's a very different opinion from Odenbach there and from some of the people he was supporting. How big of a deal is the pipeline, the carbon capture pipeline, as an issue, Lee?
Lee Strubinger:
I mean, you definitely knew when those bills were up in the state Legislature this past session. I mean, a lot of people packed the capital and I wasn't covering the carbon pipeline bills as much as some of our other colleagues, but you could definitely get a sense of the fact that everybody in the building was in those committee rooms when those bills were being heard. It was a very, very massive issue and it was really big and a lot of people were really, really galvanized by it.
Lori Walsh:
Yeah. All right, so what have we learned about the next session or the November election or any vulnerabilities that might come from. I'm wondering if there's any Democratic candidates that feel an opportunity now. Jean Hunhoff is out, maybe my race looks a little bit different now than it did before.
What else are some of the key takeaways? And we'll just maybe go around to each of you to see if you have any other key takeaways from last night that you want to elevate. We'll start with Michael Card.
Mike Card:
I think the biggest takeaway is that the leadership of each of the chambers is more in doubt than certainly, I thought it was, and I think many people thought it was. Certainly we're going to have a new speaker, a new president pro tempore in the Senate. And with the number of individuals from the new Republicans that have been elected, even though a couple lost, there's still the possibility of change in leadership, which is likely to mean a change in committee chairships, a couple committee chairship, people lost certainly, then Senator Hunhoff lost. There's just all kinds of opportunities for continued factional fighting in the legislature as we saw in this Republican primary.
Lori Walsh:
The pipeline legislation passed.
Mike Card:
How many times did they have to compromise within the House to get it through? And I guess that's the question that I asked. Yes, it passed, but grudgingly. They know they needed to do something.
Lori Walsh:
Yeah. So Lee, what happens next with that then in the next session? The legislation passed, but yet you see some people maybe arguably lost their seat because they couldn't answer to people who define themselves as landowners in that. So what? Is the big question. It's already moving forward, isn't it?
Lee Strubinger:
Yeah, I mean certainly any bill can be introduced. So if somebody wants to overturn that, they can certainly do that. But I believe there are still efforts to refer the law that was passed by the legislature this year. So it might even be on the November ballot.
Lori Walsh:
Interesting.
Lee Strubinger:
Which is yet to be seen.
Lori Walsh:
All right, Lee, other big takeaways that you want to elevate before we run up against the clock? We've got some time, but what is something else that you want to pivot to here?
Lee Strubinger:
I guess I have two thoughts that come to mind. One of them is that this is kind of the system and how it's designed. The large turnover is kind of baked into the structure of our state legislative elections where everybody's up for vote every two years and you throw in term limits on top of that, there's always going to be this kind of large turnover. And so that's by design.
My other sort of key takeaway, and it might not necessarily be about what the legislature is going to look like, but it's more about voter apathy. And this, my vote doesn't count. If you're one of those people, then you should be looking forward to voting in a South Dakota primary because it clearly does count. I mean, all you have to do is take a look at the State Senate District 34 race where Jason Green lost by about 34 votes. And so if you want your vote to count, the South Dakota primaries is the place to do it, is the place to start voting.
Lori Walsh:
All right, Lee, so West River, you're watching the signs, you're watching the people showing up at the restaurants or donut shops or wherever they go to talk to voters. People come to your door, don't come to your door. I want to get at this idea of is it voter apathy or is it poor campaigning where you cannot get out your vote because you're not focused on that, you're not focused on getting people to the polls and there's strategies to do that that are not being deployed? What are your thoughts on how you saw campaigns unfold and do they bring up anything other than just falling back on, hey, voters don't care, they're busy?
Lee Strubinger:
Yeah. Well, I'm not a campaign strategist, but one of the things that I have heard is about the elections every two years. There is maybe some voter fatigue where it's like, I just vote for you? And so a lot of is also just the kind of, I don't know if attention span is the right word here, but these elections keep reoccurring every two years, which is not a very long amount of time.
I think also it is part of this kind of like, oh man, is there another election already coming up? So that's something that I've heard from lawmakers who are, I don't know if exhausted is the right word.
Lori Walsh:
Some fatigue, yeah.
Lee Strubinger:
But they have to campaign every two years. And that's a lot of work. You got to raise a lot of money to do that. There's a lot of money spent in this election, so there might even be candidate fatigue a little bit there.
I don't know what more you do other than put your face on a billboard and put signs in yards and go talk to people. And then there's also personal circumstances as well that might make it tough to get out there and knock on doors. But yeah, I think that's kind of everything. But if you go back to what Representative Odenbach said, this is really a reflection of the grassroots is what he said. And so I think that's something that we can certainly think about.
Lori Walsh:
Which is easy to say when you win and the turnout's really low, right? Oh, that's the grassroots. But there's more growing. Jon.
Lee Strubinger:
Well, they were galvanized.
Lori Walsh:
They were galvanized, yes. All right, Jon, big takeaways here.
Jon Hunter:
I just kind of thought of this as I was listening to Mike talk about the leadership changes. I think we have unusual circumstances in the next two years where you have a disengaged governor, I'm not trying to be offensive, she's focused on other things right now, lame ducks will not run again in two years that normally we have a very strong governor setting the agenda. If you think of Janklow or Daugaard or any of those, they are setting the agendas as to where the legislative session is going to go.
I don't see that happening in the 2025 session is that the governor would be saying, she'll still give a State of the State address and a budget address and so on, but I think some of that will shift to the Legislature now. Some of these new leaders are going to be setting the agenda and getting their things in place rather than the governor's office.
Lori Walsh:
Yeah. What about the governor, Mike Card? Because we didn't talk about her getting behind people and Odenbach getting behind people. Erin Tobin comes to mind. She goes with the governor to the southern border and puts photos of that out there and Erin Tobin's out. So attaching yourself to Governor Kristi Noem is not a shoo-in by any stretch of the meaning of things.
Mike Card:
Well, when we go back to the governor's grocery bill and they voted it down in front of her and none of those individuals have really faced any serious consequences for that. Whereas I just remember back, if you'd voted against a Bill Janklow bill, you better have a real good reason for it.
Jon Hunter:
Agreed. And really that State of the State address really was the tone that's like, this is what you guys are going to work on. And he would do it very politely. He'd say, for your consideration, I'd like you to do this. But that's the starting point. I don't see that starting point.
Lori Walsh:
You know whose name I saw on the list, and I hadn't looked that deeply until this morning, that's running as a Democrat? Ray Ring. Lee Strubinger, do you remember?
Lee Strubinger:
I remember Ray Ring.
Lori Walsh:
Yes. Yes. Food tax, grocery tax, economist. Mike Card, he's been around for a while and I think he was the first person I ever heard. Billy Sutton and Ray Ring were saying, get rid of the food tax. The topic is still property tax. I saw a lot of Republican lawmakers answering questions and saying that people wanted to know about property tax, especially if they were campaigning a little bit earlier when the property taxes were due. People were upset about that.
Mike Card:
Well, it's a unique feature of the property tax that we get a bill every year telling us what we owe. Whereas with the grocery tax, we get nickels and dimes per dollar and so we don't notice it as much. And the other part is the property taxes have increased largely because the value of the property has increased. We're trying to expand the new construction, which is exempt from the property tax limitations, as fast as we can because we have a housing shortage and the interest rates are high. So it's just a real challenge. And with property taxes, it really hits home.
Jon Hunter:
And we have to pay the taxes right before the primary and right before the general election,
Lori Walsh:
We are going to be hearing about taxes and pipelines in the future. Oh my. And turnout, I'm sure this is not the last time we'll talk about that. And again, as Lee said, the big turnover and the changes in leadership are kind of baked into our system and that is why our voices around the table here are so insightful. For me at least. Jon Hunter, thank you so much for being here. We appreciate your time.
Jon Hunter:
Thanks Lori.
Lori Walsh:
Dr. Michael Card in Vermillion. Thanks for stopping by.
Mike Card:
I'm pleased to be here.
Lori Walsh:
Lee Strubinger, thanks for your reporting. I look forward to the next story.
Lee Strubinger:
You bet. Thanks for having me.
