Political science professors say decline of South Dakota Democrats mirrors changes underway across country
Part 2 of a 3-part look at the South Dakota Democratic Party
In April, former U.S. Attorney Randy Seiler, who was the SDDP chair, had a heart attack while jogging. Seiler, who worked to rebuild the party, had not sought re-election and was about to be replaced by Jennifer Slaight-Hansen, died a few days later.
By mid-summer, the South Dakota Democratic Party was at war with itself. In a time when it struggles to compete in elections, it was just the kind of bad publicity it did not need, party officials admit.
Northern State University political science professor Jon D. Schaff said South Dakota is in the midst of the same “big sort” that the nation has gone through.
“As the parties have become increasingly ideologically homogeneous it became harder and harder for Democrats in the state to moderate enough to appeal to the general rightward tilt of the state,” Schaff said. “While the state may not be as conservative as some of the political representation suggests, it’s still foundationally a conservative state. It’s become harder for state Democrats to differentiate themselves from a national party that is far more to the left of the average South Dakotan than the Republican Party is to the right.
“Here in South Dakota, the national Democratic Party is too liberal for South Dakota and an increasingly ideologically homogeneous Democratic Party finds it hard to produce truly moderate candidates,” Schaff said. “It should be said that this is all in addition to the pathologies of the Democrats in the state. They don’t do themselves any favors.”
When McGovern was elected to Congress in 1956, three years after taking the SDDP reins, he relied on the support of farmers angry about Agriculture Secretary Ezra Taft Benson. That was a time when many farmers would support Democrats, in large part because of ongoing appreciation for policies created by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who carried South Dakota in 1932 and 1936 as the Great Depression ravaged the farm economy.
The Democratic candidate has only placed South Dakota in his corner four times, when Democrat-Populist candidate William Jennings Bryan ran in 1896, FDR’s pair of victories, and Lyndon Baines Johnson in 1964.
The state even rejected native sons Humphrey in 1968 and McGovern in 1972, supporting Richard Nixon both times.
South Dakota State University political science professor David Wiltse said the days of farmers voting for a Democrat seem to have passed.
“I’ve no data on this, but my sense is that farmers don’t see themselves as beneficiaries of Democratic policies the way they once did. But I don’t want to overstate this too much since they aren’t as large of a constituency as they once were,” Wiltse said. “The identities that drive politics now are social policy, particularly religion. The parties weren’t as divided by that a generation or two ago. South Dakota has always been conservative, it’s just that there aren’t places in the Democratic Party for conservatives (or more likely, Republicans willing to split their tickets), just as there aren’t places for liberals anymore in the Republican Party.
“For good reason: It’s just not going to be too consequential in the end. For all intents and purposes, we live in a single party state,” Wiltse said. “What the opposition does, doesn’t do, or whatever organizational issues they have will not change too many things in the grand scheme. I’ve lived in single-party states of the Democratic variety, and it was largely the same dynamic. Opposition parties like this suffer from organizational deficiencies simply because there are not a lot of incentives for people to get engaged in party building when you rarely — or more appropriately these days — never win statewide elections and have inconsequential delegations in the Legislature.”
Cory Allen Heidelberger, a liberal blogger with a large readership in South Dakota, has long been a critic of the state Democratic Party because of its inability to win races.
Heidelberger said the party can’t succeed with a rebranding or even a name change. Republicans will twist the terms liberal or progressive to mean socialist, in his view.
“It’s more than marketing. The only people who believe that are people who are selling messaging,” he said. “That’s consultant talk and it’s bullshit.”
Heidelberger said the success of progressive ballot measures in the state, including a pair of victories on abortion rights, show South Dakotans aren’t as conservative as many believe. He thinks a vote on abortion that is headed to the 2024 ballot will prove that point again.
“Maybe it’s a matter of messengers,” Heidelberger said. “Our message is great, we just need more people who are willing to say it. There’s a plain Democratic message out there, and it’s, ‘We’re different than Republicans and here’s how that difference helps South Dakota.”
That includes reminding farmers they rely on social policies and all South Dakotans are beneficiaries of federal tax dollars that fund their highways, schools and hospitals.
“Let’s be honest how this state survives — socialism,” he said.
Heidelberger, who moved to Nebraska two years ago but still studies and writes daily about South Dakota politics and government on his blog, Dakota Free Press, ran for the state Senate in 2018, and lost to Republican incumbent Al Novstrup 58.5 percent to 41.5 percent. He worked with Slaight-Hansen and admired her willingness to roll up her sleeves and do whatever needed to be done for Brown County Democrats, including at the county fair.
“She made sure we had a booth — she made sure we had a good-looking booth,” Heidelberger said.
He said she seemed reasonable, competent and hard-working when he was around her from 2015-21. But he said if South Dakota Democrats are determined to remove her from office, she might as well accept the inevitable.
Slaight-Hansen (seen with Dan Ahlers above in a Tom Lawrence photo) said the entire summer felt surreal.
“It is a nightmare,” Slaight-Hansen said. “To a certain extent, I told someone yesterday I feel like I’m living in an Onion article.”
Slaight-Hansen said she took office “with a cloud hanging over our heads” because of past problems, including anticipated fines from the Federal Election Commission and declining revenue.
“My motto was ‘Culture Shift.’ Things needed to change for Democrats in South Dakota to achieve success,” she said. “It was quickly obvious the staff in place wasn’t up for the task. We had taken a chance on Ahlers to manage the day-to-day operations. Things weren’t progressing. Money wasn’t being raised, candidates weren’t announcing, the party remained invisible as we had no voice in the press or on social media.”
Slaight-Hansen said she was told by the party treasurer that unless staffers were laid off, the party might be forced to fire all its employees. After that, she was told she needed to step down.
“The whole thing was a kangaroo court,” she said. “The accusations of hiring and firing staff without approval were a sham. My predecessor hired over 30 people during his tenure. No one batted an eye. The rest of the accusations were simply fear-mongering.”
Slaight-Hansen said party leaders threatened her that if she did not resign, “things will get much, much worse.” It was, in her view, a coup engineered by people who wanted to seize control of the party.
She said she is proud of what she accomplished or tried to get done during her brief tenure as chair.
“I used my personal connections to finally contact the White House regarding judicial vacancies. We were having regular Zoom calls to discuss potential nominees and chart a course of action to assure Democrats hold onto the federal courts in South Dakota,” Slaight-Hansen said. “I was in regular communication with Daschle- and Johnson-era staffers bringing them back into the fold. We needed to learn from what the party had been doing when we actually won races in South Dakota.”
She said she met with national strategists and donors and sought their counsel, attended Democratic National Committee meetings and was appointed to a committee at my first official meeting.
Slaight-Hansen said she is puzzled by the opposition she received from the 11 Democratic legislators, who all signed a letter asking her to resign.
“I don’t have a clue what else the legislators expected from me. The party doesn’t dictate how they vote,” she said. “I only ever spoke to one legislator during my entire tenure. (House Minority Leader Oren) Lesmeister and I had several very productive conversations. We talked about the intern who was hired to work part-time for the caucus and part-time for the party. We talked about the CO2 pipeline and a press release we helped him submit to the media. Since I took over, I’d never spoken with or heard from any of the others.”
Slaight-Hansen said the pushback from young Democratic groups “was strange.” They are completely separate organizations and not branches of the SDDP, she said, and she had minimal contact with them
Slaight-Hansen noted the chair is a volunteer, unpaid position. She covered her own expenses during her time in office.
“If the legislators, or the youth or the voters of the State Central Committee to dictate what the chair does day-to-day, they should change their constitution, write a job description and hire a chair,” she said. “If that had been the situation, I wouldn’t have applied.”
Ahlers, the former legislator and 2020 U.S. Senate candidate whom she named executive director, has said Slaight-Hansen was impossible to work with, demanding, foul-mouthed and unwilling to follow party rules.
Ahlers’ resignation set in motion a series of highly public disputes between the woman elected in February to lead the party and many of its most high-profile members. State Sen. Reynold Nesiba of Sioux Falls sent a letter to members of the State Central Committee on Aug. 8, notifying them enough party officials had signed petitions to force a recall vote.
Slaight-Hansen was accused of violating that constitution by hiring two staffers and two interns, according to the recall effort. She also was planning to create a new staff position without the approval of SDDP officials, according to her critics, and she is accused of not working well with the 11 Democrats in the 105-seat South Dakota Legislature.
Slaight-Hansen said she did indeed hire staff without approval, but said she was not the first chair to do so.
“I’m not denying that that rule was broken,” she said. “But the precedent had been set by the prior administration that were no E Board approvals for the hiring of staff, with the exception of the executive director. The executive director has always gone before the E Board for their approval.”
Slaight-Hansen said Seiler hired dozens of people without seeking approval from party officials. She was merely following that pattern, in her view.
Ahlers said he found the workplace unbearable.
“When I try to advise the chair on these matters, she becomes angry and reminds me that I work for her,” he wrote in an internal memo criticizing her that was leaked to the media. “This party is not about one person. It is about a team.”
Slaight-Hansen said she feels she has been labeled as difficult to work with and too demanding in part because of her gender.
“Yes,” she said. “Absolutely I do believe I am being treated differently than my predecessor because I am a woman.”
Ahlers said she has used “demeaning and foul language” with staff. Ahlers said she favored campaign finance efforts that would have violated federal election law. In a memo to party leaders, Ahlers said “she has asked us to perform tasks regarding fundraising that could result in FEC violations.”
Slaight-Hansen said he was disappointed in what happened. She twice called Ahlers a “wonderful guy” and said she feels no animosity toward him.
“For whatever reason, Dan and I did not develop a good working relationship,” she said.
Slaight-Hansen said she found great resistance from Ahlers on a regular basis, including a refusal to issue a press release that she had worked with Seiler on when she was vice chair.
Slaight-Hansen said she had taken a trip to Europe, and when she returned, she asked Ahlers why the release had not gone out. He told her it was not needed, she said.
He frequently missed meetings or showed up late, Slaight-Hansen said, and made it clear he did not accept her authority. Ahlers told her he reported to a board of directors, and she was just one of them.
“There were several situations when I asked Dan to do specific things and those things were never done,” she said.
Ahlers said he was not involved with the recall.
“My plan is to continue to help the state party in whatever way I can,” he said. “I have agreed to work with the remaining board members through any transition that may occur.”
Tom Lawrence has written for several newspapers and websites in South Dakota and other states and contributed to The New York Times, NPR, The Telegraph, The Daily Beast and other media outlets.
