Runoff heads state to uncertain future

A week has passed since the SD primary was held with most of the attention focused on the Republican primary to determine the Republican nominee for the Office of Governor of South Dakota. The fact that no candidate reached the 35% threshold to win the nomination outright was not a surprise but the order in which the four candidates finished surprised voters across the state.

Official tallies revealed Aberdeen businessman Toby Doeden earning 31% of Republican votes cast and Governor Rhoden earned 25% to qualify for a runoff election in late July. Not qualifying for the runoff were US Representative Dusty Johnson (23%) and SD House Speaker Jon Hansen (21%). Late polling leading up to election day did reveal Doeden was gaining support and Johnson was losing momentum. But still, only the most optimistic Doeden supporter or the most learned election forecaster anticipated the result. I do not qualify under either of those labels.

Multiple postmortems have been advanced to explain the implosion of the Johnson campaign and the late surge of the Doeden campaign. My post-election analysis might not be any more accurate than my pre-election expectation, but I venture the following. The campaign of all four candidates was a mass media campaign featuring TV, radio, social media and mass mailing ads as opposed to a grass roots campaign where foot soldiers and phone volunteers canvass the voters to identify supporters and make every effort to get your known supporters to the polls before or on election day. Because it was a mass media campaign, the candidates who found the right messaging moved on to the runoff while others faltered.

Johnson and Rhoden as statewide office holding incumbents enjoyed an initial advantage in the mass media campaign A with high name recognition among likely Republican voters. Polling in late 2025 and early 2026 revealed the advantage Johnson in particular enjoyed.

Doeden and Hansen lacked statewide recognition and had to buy recognition through mass media. Doeden initially loaned his campaign $2 million and later $2 million more to achieve the desired result while Hansen lacked the resources to do the same. Doeden’s self-financing of his campaign may have won him support from voters who reasoned that he would not be indebted to outside contributors. Johnson enjoyed a $6 million campaign fund moved over from his US House campaign fund and Rhoden was successful as the incumbent Governor in raising sufficient funds to mount his campaign. As the campaign progressed, Johnson’s ads became more negative in attacking Rhoden and Hansen for their support of increased sales taxes. Rhoden responded with an attack on Johnson’s Washington DC viewpoint of South Dakota while at the same time emphasizing his steadiness and success as governor. Doeden continued to introduce himself as a successful businessman and an outsider who will fight for homeowners sick of high property taxes. The failure of Johnson to aggressively challenge the practicality of Doeden’s $1.8 billion property tax repeal with no certain replacement of the lost revenue was an error in his campaign. Hansen was unable to participate in the high-volume mass media campaign until late in the going. An attack ad against Johnson late in the campaign revealing his failure to be fully supportive of President Trump on three separate occasions left its mark as Trump continues to enjoy strong support among SD Republican voters.

Multiple campaign studies have concluded that negative campaign ads are ordinarily successful until they are not. There is a point in mass media campaigns where the voters become weary of negativity and repetitiveness.

Mike Rounds’ success in the 2002 SD Republican primary for the party’s nomination for governor is frequently cited as a case of too much negativity as he defeated then Attorney General Barnett and former Lt Governor Kirby who engaged in a negative slugfest that struck voters as being beyond the pale.

Failings and successes in the mass media campaign offer some explanation of the primary election result but there is more. US Representative Johnson may have been the victim of the public’s strong disapproval of the current Congress with approval ratings falling between 10% and 24% depending on the poll.

Ordinarily, voters rate their House member higher than the institution, but the very low institution rating appears to be impacting individual member support as well. The state mandated combining of local partisan and nonpartisan races with the state primary election resulted in a comparatively high 43% Republican primary voter turnout statewide. The combined election may have influenced the result of both local elections and state elections as more and different voters participated than normal.

Whoever wins the July 28 Republican primary runoff will face Democrat Dan Ahlers in the November 3 General Election. As we know elections can offer surprises, I will not offer an outcome projection this early in the campaign.

All indications are it will be a good year nationally for Democrats and there is unrest in rural America, but it is unknown if those trends will impact our otherwise solid Red state.

The winner of the SD governor’s race will be greeted by a Republican legislature for certain as Democrats have left enough House and Senate seats uncontested to guarantee a Republican controlled body.

It is also certain that the SD Republican lawmakers in 2027 will have a different orientation as 12 Republican incumbents opposed to state supported economic development lost their primary races.

Pipelines and data centers may well enjoy a new lease on life in Pierre in 2027