Analysis of the South Dakota 2024 election results

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Stu Whitney
| Watch South Dakota News

The Republican frenzy that propelled Donald Trump to the White House with a majority in the US Senate and possibly the US House of Representatives was felt strongly in conservative South Dakota.

Not just in the candidate races, where Republican Party favorites, U.S. Reps. Dusty Johnson and Kristie Fiegen, easily won re-election to Congress and the South Dakota Public Utilities Commission, respectively.

But also on the ballot measures, where progressive priorities like abortion rights, the repeal of the grocery store tax, and legalized recreational marijuana all ended in failure, as did the open primaries and even an attempt to make all-male references in the state constitution. prey to the fuss about pronouns.

The only winning ballot initiatives involved the core conservative principle of work requirements for Medicaid expansion and populist resentment over carbon pipelines, which led to Referred Law 21 going up in flames.

In state legislative races, slowed in some cases by the glacial pace of vote counting in Minnehaha County, South Dakota Republicans increased their supermajority to 32-3 in the Senate and held on to 63-7 in the House of Representatives, creating infighting for leadership among the establishment. and populist factions.

Johnson, who took the stage at the Holiday Inn City Center in Sioux Falls after being praised by U.S. Senator John Thune and Sioux Falls Mayor Paul TenHaken, spoke about fighting back against inflation, illegal immigration, crime and government spending under a Trump administration and possible Republican trifecta.

“I’m here to tell you that this isn’t easy work, but it’s going to be a lot easier to get done after what we saw tonight,” Johnson said to cheers from the loyal partygoers on a night that seemed like an endless one . flow of positive news for the Republican party and soul searching for everyone else.

Here are some other key takeaways from the 2024 elections in South Dakota.

Trump’s landslide was mirrored in South Dakota

Trump finished with 65% of the statewide vote in South Dakota, a slight improvement from his 62% marks in 2016 and 2020.

The general view was that the former president’s resounding triumph nationally paved the way for what happened in South Dakota, from the decline of ballot amendments to Republicans winning convincing legislative victories in vulnerable districts.

Inflation and the rising cost of living during the Biden administration were big factors that led Monte Sandal of New Underwood to vote for Trump over Vice President Kamala Harris. Sandal, 55, owns a restaurant in New Underwood and a hot tub service company in the Black Hills, with a total of about 25 employees.

Sandal said inflation has made it difficult to pay for food products at his restaurant and the chemicals needed to maintain the roughly 600 hot tubs he has under contract.

“These elections will determine whether my prices will increase, because I have incurred a lot of costs in recent years,” he said.

Sandal said Trump’s attitude has given him some peace, but overall he wants a business-oriented president in the White House.

“I don’t know if I’d want to have a beer with that guy,” he said. “But you can’t argue with his policies because he is a businessman and I like a business way of thinking.”

GOP extends SD Senate lead to 32-3

One of the key questions heading into the election was whether South Dakota Democrats could improve their strikingly low representation in Pierre, where Republicans outnumbered the junior party 94-11 over the past two years, including 63-7 in the House of Representatives and 31-4 in the Senate. .

The short answer is no.

Republicans actually gained a seat in the Senate, making the score 32-3, with Tamara Grove defeating Democratic incumbent Shawn Bordeaux in District 26, which includes the Rosebud Indian Reservation and the West River I-90 corridor of Chamberlain, Presho and Murdo includes.

Former gubernatorial candidate Jamie Smith won District 15 in north-central Sioux Falls, filling the seat previously held by fellow Democrat Reynold Nesiba.

But other Democratic Senate hopefuls in Sioux Falls, such as Clay Hoffman (District 12) and Sandra Henry (District 14), fell short. That included Yankton School Board President Sarah Carda, who was seen as a strong candidate against Republican Lauren Nelson in District 18, which includes Yankton and Clay counties.

Nelson, who ran to Hunhoff’s right on a platform of limited government, property rights and Second Amendment protections, rode the Republican wave to a comfortable victory Tuesday night with 57% of the vote.

Leadership battles could divide Republicans

With a few more races underway, it appears the South Dakota House will remain 63-7 in favor of Republicans, with each party gaining and losing a seat.

In District 26A, Republicans prevailed as populist Jana Hunt handily defeated Democrat Carl Peterson to take the seat previously held by term-limited House Minority Leader Oren Lesmeister.

Democrats gained a seat in District 32 (Rapid City), where Nicole Uhre-Balk joined Republican Steve Duffy as the top two vote-getters.

All eyes are now on Pierre, where the Republican Party’s battle for leadership positions will have a major impact on the legislature’s policymaking apparatus in 2025 and 2026.

Could a wave among populist candidates on the Republican right, animated by the carbon pipeline issue, lead to changes in the caucus’ leadership, compromising the ability of the party’s pro-business establishment to make and control policy? is in danger?

At this point it is too close to involve the Senate and the leaning establishment in the House of Representatives, but the influx of new members makes it difficult to estimate that.

Voting is scheduled for Friday evening, so the suspense won’t last long.

Money and organization fuel the anti-abortion victory

There was a clear difference in mood between election night rallies for the anti-abortion Life Defense Fund and the progressive petition group Dakotans for Health, which supported Amendment H to enshrine abortion rights in the South Dakota Constitution.

At the Best Western Ramkota in Sioux Falls, Republican state lawmaker Jon Hansen and longtime anti-abortion advocate Leslee Unruh proudly waved their “No on G” banner as results showed the amendment barely got 40% of the vote across the state. got state.

Hansen raised a glass of wine in the hotel hallway as Unruh spoke to News Watch about the momentum of the anti-abortion movement, reflected in out-of-state donations, organizing at the local level and polling in the run-up to the election.

“I feel like there are too many people who are triggered by this conversation,” said Unruh, who noted her decades of work at the Alpha Center, a pregnancy center in Sioux Falls. “My hotline will be busy with women who are hurting because they feel hostility from both sides, and we can’t do that. We have to meet people where they are at.”

Although the campaign ran radio commercials admitting that South Dakota’s restrictive abortion law “may need to be changed” in the Legislature, Unruh did not offer any specific changes she would support.

Across town, at the ICON Lounge downtown, Dakotans for Health founder Rick Weiland huddled with family and friends around 11 p.m., long after most of the attendees had left after seeing the handwriting on the wall for Amendment G had seen and also initiated Measure 28, the group’s ill-fated grocery store. measure to withdraw the tax.

Abortion rights measures in other states were immune to the Trumpian wave, with successful efforts in states the former president won such as Arizona, Missouri, Nevada and Montana.

That suggests there was more at play than just ideology and atmosphere in South Dakota, where voters rejected a near-total abortion ban in 2006 and 2008 in statewide ballot measures.

The fact that Planned Parenthood and the American Civil Liberties Union refused to support Amendment G early in the process complicated efforts to raise money nationally and build an effective coalition of political and legal stakeholders.

Dakotans for Health and its volunteers found themselves on an island, outnumbered by a 4-to-1 margin when anti-abortion factions launched a robust and effective ad campaign calling the measure “too extreme.”

“We had no money to push back when they were pushing hard,” Weiland told News Watch as a few stragglers watched the election coverage on a big screen. “You can do a lot of damage with $3 million if you keep spreading messages of disinformation to scare people. It’s almost as if their campaign has made lying fashionable or something.”

Unruh and Hansen would not promise whether a planned lawsuit in Minnehaha County challenging Dakotans for Health’s petition efforts would proceed in late January. One of the requests in the lawsuit was to ban Dakotans for Health “and those who worked with it or for it” from being involved in petition or ballot campaigns for a period of four years.

“There is a lot wrong with the way these ballot initiatives are being implemented,” Unruh said. “My name is on the lawsuit and I personally would like to see it go forward, but there are other people involved so we’ll just have to see.”

Minnehaha’s stagnant vote count is causing anger

As midnight approached Tuesday at the Minnehaha County Administration Building in Sioux Falls, Leah Anderson felt the heat.

County employees and election volunteers huddled around machine tables and deep stacks of ballots on the third floor as the rest of the state waited for voting results from the state’s largest county, which still had a 0% precinct reported.

“We have two machines processing absentee ballots, two machines processing ballots on Election Day,” said Anderson, Minnehaha County’s Republican auditor. “As you can see, some of the stacks of ballots are in the thousands. So it is a slow process.”

Around noon Wednesday, the Secretary of State’s website showed that Minnehaha was still reporting only 15 of 81 counties (19%), while every other county in the state reported 100%.

Under South Dakota law, absentee ballots can be processed before the polls close on Election Day, but they cannot be counted until the polls close.

According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, South Dakota is one of only fourteen states that do not allow counting to begin before polls close, and one of only seven states that do not allow processing before Election Day.

This story was produced by South Dakota News Watch, an independent, nonprofit news organization. Read more in-depth stories at sdnewswatch.org and sign up for an email every few days to receive stories as they are published. Contact Stu Whitney at [email protected].