Political Smokeout

Lawrence elected SDGOP chair

Adman Craig Lawrence, Gov. Dennis Daugaard’s pick to lead the South Dakota Republican Party, was elected this morning to be the party’s next chair.

Lawrence was elected by the state GOP’s central committee, overcoming a challenge from activist Daniel Willard. He replaces outgoing chair Tim Rave, a state senator from Baltic.

The co-founder of advertising and marketing firm Lawrence & Schiller, Lawrence has long been involved in Republican politics, though never before in a leadership position like this one.

Also elected to the GOP leadership team Saturday were vice-chair Kim Vanneman, secretary Sara Frankenstein and treasurer Justin Bell.

Vanneman is a former Republican legislator from Tripp County. Frankenstein, a Rapid City attorney, recently representing the Pennington County Republican Party and Rep. Brian Gosch in a lawsuit over Gosch’s ballot eligibility. Bell is a Pierre attorney.

All four leaders elected Saturday are new to their posts. In addition to Rave, the former party leadership team was vice chair Kristi Wagner, secretary Matt Konenkamp and treasurer Brett Koenecke.

Daugaard picks Craig Lawrence for GOP chair

Lawrence & Schiller founder Craig Lawrence has declared he’s running, with Gov. Dennis Daugaard’s support, to be the chairman of the South Dakota Republican Party.

Lawrence, who reportedly sold his interest in his advertising firm last year, sent out a news release this morning announcing his candidacy.

In February, the party’s central committee will vote to choose a chair.

Traditionally, the pick of the state’s Republican governor has won the job. The only other announced candidate for party chair is activist Daniel Willard.

Daugaard touted Lawrence as someone “who has not been widely known as a Party insider” in his announcement.

Lawrence & Schiller has received several key advertising contracts from the state under both the Mike Rounds and Daugaard administrations, drawing occasional fire from Democratic critics.

Lawrence worked on Daugaard’s 2010 election campaign, as well as prior GOP campaigns including those of Bill Janklow, Jim Abdnor and Larry Pressler. He’s also been active in volunteer projects such as the Campus Crusade for Christ.

In his announcement, Lawrence promised to work with current party executive director Tony Post if elected.

SDGOP not standing with Minnehaha County GOP

Here’s something you don’t see every day: a state party throwing its county affiliate under the bus.

I just got this email from Tony Post, executive director of the South Dakota Republican Party, responding to the decision of the Minnehaha County Republican Party to boycott legislative coffees sponsored by the Sioux Falls Area Chamber of Commerce and set up their own, competing forums:

The South Dakota Republican Party is happy to partner with the Sioux Falls Chamber if the local party is not. A couple of rogue elements in the Minnehaha group certainly does not not speak for the party at large. 

In fact, this latest episode from Lora Hubbel speaks volumes. The chamber provides a forum for accountability and disparate views, which the SDGOP certainly supports. 

We are working with the Sioux Falls legislators and Chamber and will look forward to the regularly scheduled program. 

The vote at the Minnehaha County Republican Party central committee to set up their own legislative forum was reportedly unanimous among the people there, though not all voting members were present.

This keeps getting more interesting.

A legislative landslide, by the numbers

(Note: The original version of this post contained incorrect numbers that decreased the number of Democratic votes, due to a spreadsheet formatting error. The post has been updated to reflect the correct numbers.)

Across South Dakota, Republican state Senate candidates received a total of 233,530 votes. Democrats, and Democratic-leaning independents, got a total of 117,776 votes.

If this were a two-person race, the Republican would have received 66.6 percent of the vote, to 33.5 for the Democrat.

That’s almost as high as Chris Nelson got in his landslide victory over Nick Nemec.

But you might say that’s not fair, since there were 11 Senate seats with only Republican candidates, and only two Senate seats where Democrats ran unopposed. (You might also say that’s the Democrats’ fault for not running candidates, but let’s set that aside for now.)

If you look only at races with candidates in both parties, the Republicans lose 86,000 votes, and the Democrats lose the 12,000 votes Jason Frerichs and Jim Bradford racked up between them.

But even subtracting this, Republican senate candidates in contested races received 146,857 votes, to 94,368 for the Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents.

That’s a 60.9 percent to 39.1 percent victory for our amalgamated Republicans, or a worse performance for the consolidated Democrats than Matt Varilek had statewide.

But there’s a lot of really conservative districts across the state, even discounting the ones so red the Democrats didn’t run anyone.

What if we look at just the very closest races in the state — the 10 races where the winner’s margin of error was the smallest.

In those races, Democratic candidates earned 45,697 votes, to 48,484 for the Republicans. That’s a 51.4 percent win for the Republicans, compared to 48.5 percent for the Democrats.

Of the 10 closest races, Democrats won four.

Here’s those close races:

At the GOP party

I’m at the Ramkota in northwest Sioux Falls, where the South Dakota Republican Party is hosting its Election Night celebration. The room is about one-third-full with Republican faithful and elected officials. Gov. Dennis Daugaard’s chief of staff Dusty Johnson is MCing, and a band is playing.

But most of the bigwigs aren’t in the room. The GOP has a war room upstairs where they’re monitoring election returns. Once things become clearer, those people will come downstairs and join the party.

There are three four TVs in the room. One is on Fox News, one is on KDLT, one is on KSFY and one on KELO. Though I think some of them are changing a bit.

The South Dakota House, still divided

You know, for a guy many Republicans see as a dishonest, slime-peddling puppetmaster, Ben Nesselhuf sure gets his hands on a lot of internal GOP documents.

This morning, the South Dakota Democratic Party released a letter Rep. Lance Russell has apparently been circulating to fellow Republican legislators and candidates.

In the letter, Russell — who was banned from the House GOP caucus last year, along with Rep. Stace Nelson — claims he’s been excluded from emails sent among Republican legislators, including one to set the date of the post-election leadership vote.

Perhaps more interestingly, Russell, in the letter, makes explicit what had been an open secret around Pierre: some of the rules used by the majority party to keep control of the debate in the Legislature. (I’m trying to use clinical, non-loaded language to describe these organizational tactics; I intend no judgment over whether these tactics are good or not good.)

Specifically, Russell says the House GOP:

• calls only on designated members to speak during key debates, including the budget bill. (This is the most obvious of the tactics he talks about; there’s an obvious pageantry to the budget debates, which is not unwelcome for many observers since it helps get the last day of the session done at a reasonable hour.)
• holds pre-committee meetings to decide how to vote on certain bills. This will come as no surprise to anyone who’s watched a party-line committee vote in Pierre.
• apparently behaves pettily and refers to members as “he who shall not be named” in meetings. Dumbledore would not approve.

Russell details these tactics as part of a call for their abolition.

Read his letter below:

Lance Russell letter

The new Democratic machine

My story in this morning’s paper took a look at two overlapping phenomena: the alleged negativity of the postcard campaign (particularly, some say, by Democrats), and the new approach to legislative campaigns by the Democratic Party.

The former is getting most of the attention in the reaction I’ve seen — people debating whether Democrats have REALLY been more negative than Republicans (I’d argue the answer is yes, at least so far, though that could change this weekend) and whether this is a good thing and whether it will benefit them at the ballot box.

But I think the latter is much more interesting.

This is, for South Dakota, a campaign revolution. Instead of 80 different legislative campaigns around the state, the Democrats are essentially running one campaign office for all 80 races. They’re designing everybody’s mail and sending it out. This lets them push a coordinated message statewide, increase the design quality of candidate literature (though candidates can still operate on their own), and lets candidates focus their time on going door to door.

Will they stick with it? Well, it’s a lot of work for the party (“Holy crap yes, yes, a thousand times yes,” said Ben Nesselhuf, when I asked him if this were true) and will be for any future party leadership. We’ll see if it pays dividends for the party on Election Day. If the Dems have a good night at the legislative ballot, we’ll probably see this continue.

Will Republicans adopt it? Tim Rave didn’t sound very enthusiastic, but if it proves successful, I’d bet you’ll see Republican campaign efforts get more centralized. Political consultants usually pounce on new innovations.