Bengs brings independent campaign to town

BROOKINGS — Brian Bengs has a pretty clear message as he criss-crosses the state running an independent campaign for the U.S. Senate: The amount of money in our politics has resulted in a broken system.

It’s certainly not a new thought — but he’s hoping it’s one South Dakotans are ready to hear. And maybe they’ll listen a little more closely to someone without an R or D next to their name.

“I will say, from my personal experience, running as an independent, where people will talk to you and keep talking to you when you say ‘I’m an independent,’ that is what is missing in American politics. As an independent, you get to talk about ideas, and people will talk about them with you, as opposed to going, ‘You’re one of them’ or ‘You’re one of them,’ which is the problem we have and why our system is broken,” Bengs said.

Bengs spoke to a group of supporters at the Elks Lodge in Downtown Brookings on Friday. He’s running against incumbent Republican Sen. Mike Rounds, who has essentially stayed out of the race entirely.

He previously ran as a Democrat against Republican Sen. John Thune in 2022, but that process only soured him more on partisan politics. So this time, he’s running without the benefit of any party infrastructure.
But that also frees him up to say some of the things other candidates can’t or won’t.

“The two-party system, you know, for all their fighting, they can agree that they do not want to have any competition, and that is the system they’ve designed and worked,” Bengs told The Beacon. “And when I talk about that, I point to the fact that I had to get more signatures to go about than a Republican and Democratic candidate put together.”

The Rounds campaign, for their part, refused to debate Bengs. Instead, Bengs sat down Sept. 14 to field questions from South Dakota Public Broadcasting while an empty chair represented the current Senator from South Dakota.

“Mike Rounds is not campaigning. Mike Rounds is apparently thinking that he’s entitled to the seat because his plan, near as I can figure at this point, is to hide, not talk about issues, not talk to people, and just run attack ads, trying to label me things that objectively I am not, and call me names like socialist for advocating policies that were advocated by a Republican president in the early 20th century,” Bengs said.

Bengs, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel, was enthused by recent internal polling that showed him solidly in the race. Julian Beaudion, the Democratic nominee for the Senate seat, dropped out of the race in early August, leaving the independent with a rare race against just one other candidate.

Bengs said in his travels across the state, he’s trying to focus on beginning by asking people if they think their government is functioning in the way it was intended. The top response, he notes, is simply laughter.

“And basically, to a person, everybody agrees with that, and I genuinely believe that is the single biggest problem with the United States government today, is that big money controls our government through our elected officials. So that one is a common conversation, and then of course across the country, obviously South Dakota, affordability. The fact that you can’t afford necessarily to fill up your gas tank and buy all the groceries that you need at the same time because both of them are getting more expensive, and there’s no end in sight to how much more expensive they’re going to be,” he said.

He also noted beef markets — and President Trump’s plan to try to fill the market with imported South American beef — as the worst of all worlds for South Dakotans.

“There are two big things that need to happen, andMike Rounds and I agree on one, but he supported removing it before. In 2015, Mike Rounds voted to kill off the mandatory country of origin labeling, and he has since come around to say we should have MCOL now,” Bengs said. “But how many terms in the Senate, and it took you this long?

“The other big thing for cattle producers and for consumers is what I’m talking about across the board — big money in politics again, corporate monopolies. Four companies that control what is it? Somewhere between 80 and 85 percent of the United States meat market. Four companies. In 1902, Teddy Roosevelt had the Department of Justice bust up what was then the Big Six for controlling 50% of the meat market.”

Bengs also highlighted his position on health insurance, pointing to establishing a public option — the original plan from the Affordable Care Act in 2008.

“America pays easily the most for healthcare than any other country in the world. The fact that medical debt is the leading cause of bankruptcy. This is the only country in the world with that problem, so clearly, we are either stupid, or our system of government, Congress, is not capable of delivering,” Bengs said.

“So a public option, this is the competition. There are things that the government can do better at scale and cheaper at scale than a private company can. And the government is not In the business of making a profit when it provides these services. It’s in the business of providing a service like the postal service.”

And Bengs doesn’t hide how much his platform sounds like a Republican, albeit from a while back.

“When I start talking about myself as a Teddy Roosevelt Republican, I am saying literally the same things. Because it’s the same issues that were addressed over a century ago, but then we’ve just kind of let fall by the wayside these issues until they become problems again.”

Bengs knows from experience he has a tough race to defeat an entrenched incumbent, but he said the experience of running has improved his outlook about the state of the nation.

“Running as an independent, where people will talk to you and keep talking to you when you say, ‘I’m an independent,’ that is what is missing in American politics. As an independent, you get to talk about ideas, and people will talk about them with you, as opposed to going,

“You’re one of them” or “You’re one of them,” which is the problem we have and why our system is broken.”