This interview originally aired on "In the Moment" on SDPB Radio.
The 2025 legislative session is coming to a close in South Dakota. Our Dakota Political Junkies look at the session in the rearview mirror.
Jon Hunter is publisher emeritus of the Madison Daily Leader and a member of the South Dakota Newspaper Hall of Fame. Michael Card, Ph.D., is professor emeritus of political science at the University of South Dakota.
They begin by looking back at the previous election and how a newsworthy primary influenced the 100th legislative session.
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The following transcript was auto-generated and edited for clarity.
Michael Card:
The primary elections resulted in a fairly large number of incumbents being defeated. Also, a fairly large increase in the spending by political action committees. Often legislators with their political action committees supported other legislative candidates.
And so we saw a number of incumbents defeated, 14 or thereabouts, and that brought in a whole new crop of legislators.
We saw some legislators changing chambers. And so we see a fairly large number of brand-new legislators, new legislators who have changed chambers going from the Senate to the House, the House to the Senate. And we see the highest number of women in the legislature in South Dakota's history.
So we saw a lot of bills that probably had been in front of the legislature previously, and that often happens when you have new legislators, especially since term limits. We saw just a large number of those types of bills. But it also was significant to me that a lot of these bills had been defeated before.
In terms of the political science literature, we talk about trustees and delegates. Delegates are those who bring the wishes of their constituents and trustees are those who say, "Well, you elected me for my wisdom and probity, and I'll vote how I think I should as a trustee of your votes."
So we ended up with a lot of new bills that were probably culture war bills. We saw a lot of bills that have been defeated before, get defeated again. I think we'll be talking about those.
But I think at the time of the election that things were different. We also have less money available. And the budget is the primary policy document of the state. And that budget was put forth by a lame duck governor who was heading off to other events, especially as we've seen in reporting by The Dakota Scout, lots of increased travel and not necessarily being around.
And a lot of these bills, these budgetary changes involved legislative changes. So instead of just being in the budget document where most proposals in the budget address end up being, but all of a sudden now there are legislative bills that go to committees of jurisdiction and then go to appropriations. So many of them died.
Lori Walsh:
Yeah. All right, Jon Hunter, you're watching this and seeing what kind of bills? These primaries are decided on a single issue, yet they have to be there for the whole session, essentially.
You don't vote and send somebody to Pierre just to vote on one thing because they're there the whole time. Help us understand that.
Jon Hunter:
Yeah, among those 14 Republican incumbents who lost in the primary last June, a number of them were supporters of Senate Bill 201, which was the landowner bill of rights.
And again, if we want to refresh the idea of that, it was an idea that, "Look, let's put in place protections in case we have a pipeline, distances and safety and bonds and so forth."
Some voters interpreted that as, "Oh, that just means you really want the pipeline. You're setting up rules so that you're a supporter of the pipeline." And so they said, "Okay, we want you out." Of course, not every voter votes just on one issue.
But among those 14, a fair number of them were supporters of 201. So if you think of this, 14, let's just make up some numbers for a second. Let's say we have three parties in South Dakota. You've got 10% Democrats, you've got 45% moderate Republicans and 45% far-right Republicans, just for sake of argument. If you switch 14 moderates to farther right, that's more than a 10% swing. So it would take you from 45, 45 to 55, 35 or some number to that. It's a big swing.
And so when you have that bigger swing combined with the term limits and so forth, and you have 40% of the legislature is new, you have a lot of issues that pop up. Mike indicated before bills that have been defeated before they're brought up, but also brought up that have never been seen before or thought of before. And one observation, Lori, I think, is that I think there were some wilder ideas in every session, but a lot of them would be taken out before they were ever introduced.
You'd be sitting next to a veteran legislator, and that person would say, "No, no, no, that's not a good idea, and here's why, because four years ago..." And it never gets introduced.
It did seem like some of those bills were introduced this year, went to the LRC, got it drafted, introduced, got some co-signers, and surprised most observers. Now, maybe they were defeated quickly in committee, some were withdrawn by the sponsor once they realized how crazy it was themselves.
And a person may have been elected or defeated based on the pipeline, but there are 500 bills that they had to vote on or introduce. It could be in a completely unrelated area, and I think it was.
So I think this session had more bills that were introduced that I don't think would've been introduced in years past.
Michael Card:
I want to throw one thing on that, and that is you also had new leadership in both chambers that reflected that split to some degree or another. And what happened was they chose the speaker of the house and the president pro tempore of the Senate decides who's on what committee and who the committee chairs are. And so we saw a lot more bills get out of committee that I thought would've been killed in committee, some of which were tabled, which the significance of tabling versus sending the bill to a day that doesn't exist — move to send to the 41st day — tabling is non-debatable. Sending to the 41st day is debatable.
And so a lot of bills came out of committee and they came out on close votes.
Lori Walsh:
Yeah. And those leadership votes were close votes, too.
Jon Hunter:
Agreed.
Lori Walsh:
Yeah. We saw the impact of all of that in a year when there was a whole lot to be decided and not a lot of money to decide it with. Some things that stand out, I think will always be the Huron School District defunding legislation that was defeated.
Jon Hunter:
Withdrawn, I believe.
Lori Walsh:
Withdrawn, okay. But that's an example to your point.
Jon, remind people who weren't paying attention to that what happened is one of those things that you would think that maybe would not have been brought forth.
Jon Hunter:
Right. Right. It was just a one-sentence bill that just said, "The state shall not send any state aid to education to the Huron School District," which it just seems there was no explanation.
Now, it was withdrawn by the sponsor, I believe. I'm confident it did not go to a committee vote or even get presented. But I think those would not have been introduced in years past. And in some senses, you wonder about the reputation of the sponsor if they introduce those kinds of things and withdraw it right away. You're not being very thoughtful here. These are laws of South Dakota that you're introducing. This is not like I'm throwing this out at some local club.
Lori Walsh:
We're going to hear from Lieutenant Governor Venhuizen here later on in the hour, but he talked about the importance of citizen engagement this year. So I want to talk with you before we hear him say, "Yeah, that really worked."
Certainly with SDPB, we saw the just outpouring of support from SDPB listeners when Governor Kristi Noem said, "These budget cuts should go through." People asking for that funding to be fully restored, that funding has been fully restored largely because of that engagement and support.
But Jon, you have some ideas about what kind of engagement with your legislators works and what kind doesn't, because as Lieutenant Governor Venhuizen will point out, we have a state legislature where people get on the bus and show up in Pierre and stand in the rotunda and are heard.
Jon Hunter:
I'm very proud of South Dakota's process in that by and large, our legislators are accessible to us. Given the part-time nature of the job, they have to live in the community that they represent. But they're people that we know and see and so forth.
And then yes, buses out to Pierre, it's Sioux Falls Day, it's Madison Day, it's higher education day, it's SDPB day, whatever those things are.
And we go out and we talk to our legislators, newspaper day. And you have lunch or you have donuts or something like this. So I love the process. The fact that we can do this.
Now, given that, there are different effectiveness levels of different types of lobbying. Now, remember there's professional lobbyists, and they have to have a badge and they represent certain organizations and so forth. But most of what you're talking about, the citizen engagement or Lieutenant Governor Venhuizen will talk about is really those of us who don't hold a badge and just know our legislators and invite them to coffee before, during the session and just say, "Let's talk about this."
So I've always thought the most effective is going to be person-to-person, cracker barrel, or it's going to be in the campaign when they're on the parade route and they're shaking hands or whatever. The person-to-person, face-to-face, I think is the most effective.
The second one is going to be a phone call. It's going to be a personal phone call. It's my voice, your voice. We know each other, we can go back and forth, we can do that. I think that's almost as effective.
Then it might be an email. And that's certainly very popular. Imagine how many emails a legislator gets.
But if he gets a form letter that, "Dear Legislator," it's going to be less effective than a, "Dear Fred," or whatever my friend's name is.
In fact, a lot of these relationships, it's more effective if you know the person in advance. If you're introducing yourself for the first time right when your issue hits, you'll be less effective than if you've known this person a long time.
Lori Walsh:
Right, yeah.
Jon Hunter:
And then you can see it going down. If you get social media rants or something like that, I say it's not only ineffective it might be anti-effective.
Michael Card:
Counterproductive.
Lori Walsh:
Counterproductive.
Jon Hunter:
Counterproductive. That's a better word. You've got better words.
Lori Walsh:
It was his, I just repeated what he said, yes.
Michael Card:
Like John Belushi, 10 years of college wasted.
Lori Walsh:
I remember when I first bought a house, and that was the first time I realized that some of these people come to your door and knock and want to talk to you. And it used to freak me out, and I did not want to talk to anybody because who is this person at my door?
It took me a couple of years, to where I was like, wait a minute, this person is coming to your door, you should talk to them, where we got to the point where we're like, "Here, sit down. We do want to get to know you. We do have some thoughts for you."
I will say they don't come to my door nearly as much as they used to back in the early days. So campaigning is a little bit different than it was 20 years ago when we bought a house.
Jon Hunter:
Think of all those parades, at least I've seen small-time parades. And they walk around. Frankly, they want to shake hands and talk as well. They don't want to just throw candy for a mile and then leave.
Lori Walsh:
Yeah. It's awkward.
Jon Hunter:
Yeah. So yeah, there's a process for effectiveness. And in the case of this session, this year's citizen engagement, I just thought people chose to make their voice heard in whatever form. And it was crystal clear. And the state library and all its tentacles that go out to local libraries, I think hit a real sensitive chord for a lot of people, and they contacted their legislators in whatever form.
Lori Walsh:
From the funding to how librarians are treated. People had something to say about that.
I want to expand on that with you, Mike Card, because in South Dakota we have this initiative and referendum process, and the war on that process continues.
Tell us a little bit about what you've been following about how we handle this in the state.
Michael Card:
Well, South Dakota was the first state in the nation to have both the initiative and the referendum. The initiative is there ought to be a law. The referendum is there ought not to be a law.
And they require 5% of the signatures of the people who voted for governor in the state in order to have those issues be put in front of the voters to have them either be a law or to repeal a law that the legislature has passed.
What I have noticed over the years is starting with the abortion votes in 2006, there seems to be more and more limits on initiative activity. Some of these are cast forward as being to make sure that we have actual registered voters, that we have South Dakotans, but almost all of the activities put on add cost to those.
So it's very difficult, although not impossible, as we saw with referred law 21, to have a group of committed people say there, in this case, ought not to be a law, because that raises people's emotions is, "We got to get rid of this thing."
It's easier for that than it is to get an initiative passed. So you end up having to hire people to spread petitions around to get signatures. And then we see all sorts of procedural issues being brought up over the years.
And since 2018, Ballotpedia, an organization that is pretty nonpartisan as it goes, they just describe, and they have found that there were 10 bills that have passed in South Dakota that added to the cost, either in terms of making signature gathering more difficult, making individuals report who they are, have name and address so that people are less likely to actually want to pass around to petition on and on. The significant part of that is it's more than twice the number of bills that have been introduced and passed than other states who have the initiative or referendum.
So we saw, even this year, there were certainly six that have passed by my count, I may have missed one or two, that would make signature gathering more difficult, added constraints. And in South Dakota, we have had more from 2018 to 2024 than the next five states put together.
And this year, we blew through that. And for the most part, people don't pay attention to initiatives and referendums until they get on the ballot. But a lot of these are cast as ways of making our elections more secure, but they add to the cost, which then we complain about the cost. We don't want things that are in the constitution that should be statute, and yet we see our legislature doing the same thing. And some of them are rather benign.
Is the proposed amendment to create a trust fund for the unclaimed property legislation? Well, that really should be in statute by that same set of reasoning, but yet many legislators will complain that we put things in the constitution that really should be statutory. This has been going on since before statehood, in the 1883 convention, 1885 convention, 1889 convention.
Jon Hunter:
You weren't at any of those conventions, were you?
Michael Card:
No, but I've read the debates. And so our last territorial governor, first governor of South Dakota, wanted more stuff in the constitution. And he pounded his fist on the table, "We shouldn't be dealing with these bills," over and over and over again. "Put it in there once and then we won't have to do the repeal."
So for me, it's rather exciting because we've had the initiative and referendum in the United States longer than we didn't have the initiative and referendum in our country.
So to say that we're a republic is, well, yeah, we're a democratic republic.
We both elect our representatives, which makes us democratic, and we have direct democracy, and go to a township meeting. We certainly have even more direct forms of democracy in some places.
I get a little heated about this one, and partly because these are all passing through the legislature. Well, often what we get in initiated measure is when the legislature hasn't acted. And my favorite line out of the constitutional debates is, "It's the gun behind the door."
Now, that wasn't actually in the debate. It was actually in the Madison Leader at the time, an editorial that said, "We need this because we need the gun behind the door, either if the legislature doesn't act as we want them to, as the people want them to, or because there ought not to be this law."
Lori Walsh:
You said the gun behind the door, and I cannot help but go back to guns on college campuses because that was something else, perhaps, Jon, that fits into what we were saying about, "Is this the bill that we would gain traction in any given session?" Not necessarily, but it gained traction in this particular session.
Jon Hunter:
I think so. And I haven't analyzed the votes to see where that came from, and if it was from legislators who were elected because of pipeline defeats. But yeah, to have college students bring guns to class seems like something that wouldn't have passed the, "Is this a good idea," test.
Now, there are some people who might say, "Freedom, freedom, freedom." So we should be able to do anything we want. And this appears to be a pro-gun state in just about every measure that you can come up with.
Lori Walsh:
Do you think that so many of these lawmakers run on the Second Amendment, but we're really running out of, in the state, ways to make the Second Amendment any stronger than it already is. And so they're looking, in some ways, to be able to say, "I'm the person who was even more supportive of the Second Amendment than we had been before." And so they have to find places. And there aren't too many places where you can't carry a concealed weapon at this point. Why not look to college campuses? Does it have something to do with that? Like, "I said I would come here because I'm pro-gun. I better do something."
Jon Hunter:
I do think you're right. Your theory I think is solid in that what can we do further? We've already allowed people to bring guns into the state capitol into the legislative session, which they used to have metal detectors at the doors where I had to take out my keys or something. But they took those away and legislators can have guns at their desk if they choose to, if they have that.
So yeah, I think what else can be done if you're running on that issue, I want to introduce a bill to do that. Now, whether it's a good idea or not is not for this moment in debate, but will this require additional training on behalf of faculty and staff at campuses?
Lori Walsh:
Right, what is the cost?
Jon Hunter:
Right, so do you need extra security officers or resource officers? There may be unintended consequences that come out of these really principled bills. I'm all for the Second Amendment, but there are some other issues to come up with when those things are passed.
Lori Walsh:
I would like to say that in the military, we did not get to carry our weapons around with us, nor did we get to take them back to our barracks. You turn them into an armorer, and then you had to check them out again. Of course, it's been a number of years, maybe that's changed.
Jon Hunter:
Three years, right?
Lori Walsh:
But I just remember I was not allowed to just carry it around wherever I wanted, whenever I wanted.
All right, but you said freedom. And before we let you go, you were noticing just how often freedom is a word that is used to invoke a feeling and invoke a rallying cry, but yet it might be a rallying cry for less freedom in some ways, in some pieces of legislation, which is fine.
Jon Hunter:
Yeah. Thanks for bringing that up. I think in America, freedom, we align with that. We have freedoms. Now, interestingly, the Bill of Rights, I think, only mentions two freedoms, freedom of the press and freedom of speech. There are some other things that the Bill of Rights implies freedom, like religion and other such things. They don't use that particular word, but they imply the openness or the freedom of that.
So Governor Noem, in her term, started using a lot. It was really a campaign and a marketing term for her, accelerated by the pandemic and said, "Freedom, freedom, freedom," using a capital F in that in most press releases.
And it's now continued by Governor Rhoden, he also uses that term as well. And I think there are a lot of Republican lawmakers who use it quickly and easily, and again, in your point, Lori, to invoke a particular feeling from a voter and so forth. But on the other hand, not all of the legislation that we see is necessarily geared toward freedom.
I did a quick text search, and among the bills introduced this session, 137 of them contained the word prohibit. I also searched for ban. Interestingly, that word ban was not in there at all, zero. But prohibit, prohibit is certainly the opposite of freedom, probably. So now, you'd have to look at all 137 bills to see what the context was, and maybe it's prohibiting someone from preventing my freedom.
Lori Walsh:
Right, prohibit government from doing something that infringes upon your freedom.
Jon Hunter:
Exactly. But it is interesting, the word freedom in America, and particularly in South Dakota and particularly at this time, is clearly try to signal for an emotion of something out of voters.
Lori Walsh:
Yeah. And when is a term overused in political science? When does it start to lose its impact, do you think? Or maybe just in the public eye, where people are like, "Oh, yeah, freedom. You said it again, but now it doesn't have the same punch that it used to."
Michael Card:
Well, we know that there are times when we fail to notice the word. And if we don't notice the word, it's made it into the vernacular and into our behavior and into our mindsets.
And I don't know, I'm not familiar enough with that literature. As it may be apparent, I didn't take a speech class. But we know at some point, words and phrases become part of our vernacular and acceptable.
Lori Walsh:
Or they become weaponized by the other side. Think of the interview that Kristi Noem did as Department of Homeland Security Secretary, where she was like, "You can't trust the government." And Dana Bash said, "You are the government now." And there was just that moment where we all knew how she feels about that and what she said about that over the years. But the national audience was like, "Wait a minute, what?" And it made a lot of headlines outside of the state that Dana Bash interviewing her had said, "But wait a minute, that's you now. Are you really telling us you came here to do nothing?" And then everyone got a lesson on former Governor Kristi Noem's politics and how she explains those things to the national audience.
Michael Card:
We've been criticizing the legislature a little bit, and I want to point out there were some successes. And here we are on Wednesday thinking about we got a couple of days left. I'm not a very risk-taker, but I'm willing to bet the farm we're going to have a balanced budget.
Jon Hunter:
Good work.
Lori Walsh:
I love how proud they are of that every year too. "We balanced the budget." Yes, you did.
Michael Card:
Yeah.
Lori Walsh:
You had to.
Michael Card:
Well, you had to. Well, and there is a provision in the Constitution that says that if you don't think you're going to balance the budget, there's a two mil property tax that shall be imposed. Article 11, section one.
Lori Walsh:
I don't think I knew that.
Michael Card:
Oh, that's an ugly one. So that's why we've had balanced budgets.
Lori Walsh:
The sword of Damocles is hanging.
Jon Hunter:
Balanced budget doesn't mean revenues equal expenses.
Michael Card:
No, it does not. And a budget is forward-looking, not after the fact.
Lori Walsh:
Right, yeah.
Jon Hunter:
But nevertheless, take pride in it.
Lori Walsh:
In Minnesota, we're seeing governor—
Michael Card:
Yeah, Tim Walz.
Lori Walsh:
Tim Walz talks about the graph is just going down where they're having some struggle. So yes, a balanced budget, yay.
Michael Card:
I think there were some bills that authorized cooperation, certainly in the assessment of property that's relating to the property tax bills. We're going to spend $4 million to increase the equipment at technical colleges that provide lots of the occupations in South Dakota. And I just wanted to point out a couple of these because I find myself occasionally criticizing. And you try to look forward to life with a positive attitude, and I just wanted to make sure that there were some good things that happened.
Lori Walsh:
Yeah. Analysis isn't always criticism, but sometimes it needs to be said. As Art Cullen said on this show, sometimes the obvious demands comment. So sometimes you have to point out the obvious, Jon.
Jon Hunter:
I think Governor Rhoden's prison reset is a success of this session. Now, they were battling and not getting it done. And he's establishing parameters for the prison going forward, which is, "Here are the people who are going to be on it. Here's their schedule. We're going to have a special session to talk about this later. Here's what they're going to focus on." I thought that was a real success that came out. It wasn't a bill that was passed, but it was a successful outcome.
Lori Walsh:
So a leadership success.
Jon Hunter:
Absolutely.
