For a state in which one party dominates, there are certainly political power spats in South Dakota.
Just over a month ago, we posted Scenes from South Dakota Republicans' Itchy and Scratchy Show, now on a campaign website.
Yesterday, we read in Joe Sneve's piece at the Argus Leader, Gov. Kristi Noem, Senate leader team up to keep Republican 'wack-a-doodles' out of state Capitol:
Gov. Kristi Noem is taking a more active role in this year's primary election season, including trading barbs with incumbent lawmakers not in lock-step with her wing of the South Dakota GOP.
And that has some of her fellow Republicans accusing her and her allies of trying to rid the Legislature of its most conservative members. . . .
And though she won't say specifically which other aspiring state lawmakers she's putting her political weight behind, it's known that Noem is working in tandem with a high-ranking senator who's investing thousands in campaign funds to unseat far-right members of the party seeking re-election.
Well then. But there's more today.
At the Argus Leader, Jonathan Ellis reports in In a first as an elected official, Thune faces challenge from within Republican Party:
Since first winning office more than 25 years ago, there’s one opponent John Thune has never faced: A primary opponent.
That changed this year. Thune is being challenged for the first time since he won South Dakota’s congressional seat in 1996. . . .
After winning his first election to the Senate in 2004, Thune emerged as the de facto leader of the Republican Party in South Dakota.
At the time, he was the only Republican holding federal office in the Dakotas, and his presence brought stability to a fractious party that had witnessed years of infighting. Since then, the Republican Party has smothered political offices up and down the ballot, with Democrats losing their last statewide office when Tim Johnson retired from the Senate in 2015.
But the party has entered a new phase. Republicans have a historic number of primaries this year as conservative factions seek to unseat Republicans they deem more establishment, and vice versa.
Michael Card, a political science professor at the University of South Dakota, said in an email that the Republican Party appears to be in a civil war, especially among legislative races pitting Gov. Kristi Noem and Senate President Pro Tempore Lee Schoenbeck against ideological opponents in the party.
But Card notes that the GOP in this state has had other heated primaries, including the 2002 and 2018 governor's race.
"There do seem to be more primaries this year," he said. "I suspect that the 1980s through most recently followed one of Reagan's maxims ('never speak ill of a fellow Republican') except for incumbents," Card said.
We're still relatively new to South Dakota and we learn slowly. Perhaps some day we'll understand why the Democratic Party, which once dominated federal offices in the Rushmore State, languishes so.
Cartoon: South Dakota Republican politics.
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