A north Florida television station reports South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem visiting Valdosta for early voting event Wednesday:
Wednesday, South Dakota Governor, Kristi Noem, will visit Valdosta for an early voting event in support of Senator David Perdue, Senator Kelly Loeffler and Commissioner Bubba McDonald.
Gov. Noem will be at the event to “encourage republicans to vote early for Senators Perdue And Loeffler,” according to the press release. . . .
Back home in South DaCOVID, Forum News Service South Dakota News Director Jeremy Fugelberg reports in Kristi Noem’s big bet: How COVID-19 challenged South Dakota’s governor:
. . . Noem's COVID-19 approach catapulted her into the national argument over pandemic restrictions.
Over the summer months, as COVID-19 simmered in South Dakota, conservative national media outlets held Noem up as an antidote and rebuke to governors who had throttled their economies with lockdowns to save lives.
"You have now stared down the mob and can say that you were victorious in being able to change the narrative," said conservative activist Charlie Kirk, in a May 1 podcast interview with Noem. "What is your advice for young conservatives out there that look to you for inspiration and also as a role model?"
Noem held near-daily news conferences during the pandemic's early days. But she also made plenty of national media appearances, almost exclusively on conservative media outlets and right-wing talk shows, beaming in from a taxpayer-funded TV studio she had built in the basement of the state Capitol in 2019.
Noem made 40 media appearances in the 65 days between the state's first reported COVID-19 case in March and her last regular pandemic news conference in mid-May, according to a list released by her office.
Just over half of her media appearances, 22 in all, were with conservative national media outlets such as Fox News and talk shows hosts like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, according to a Forum News Service analysis. Most of the rest were with local radio hosts, with a sprinkling of other in-state outlets. . . .
Her national exposure only grew over the summer. Noem hosted President Donald Trump at a Fourth of July fireworks extravaganza at the Mount Rushmore National Memorial and she garnered a coveted GOP Convention speaking slot in late August.
"We are not — and will not — be the subjects of an elite class of so-called experts," she told a national TV audience. "We the people are the government."
But by the end of August, after the heavily attended Sturgis Motorcycle Rally and the reopening of schools and universities, South Dakota health officials reported a noticeable uptick in new cases, one that wasn’t slowing down.
A surge was here.
COVID-19 had simmered in South Dakota. Now it boiled.
By late September, the state was nearly leading the nation for newly reported daily cases of the virus per capita, behind only North Dakota.
Noem, meanwhile, crisscrossed the country stumping for Trump's re-election, posing for selfies with fans and fundraising for both him and herself.
The governor was outside South Dakota for at least 12 days visiting eight states in October, according to a Forum New Service analysis of her social media sightings and media reports. Her travels, including events at two Trump resorts in Florida, came amid South Dakota's deadliest month of the pandemic to that point, with 202 reported fatalities.
“We haven’t had a governor who’s spent this much time out of state for business that was clearly not state business,” said Michael Card, political science professor at the University of South Dakota with a focus on the state's politics, in an Oct. 30 interview.
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