This interview originally aired on "In the Moment" on SDPB Radio.
For about a year, Gov. Kristi Noem's office has been without a chief of staff.
That's still the case as of this week.
Darin Seeley, the Bureau of Human Resources and Administration Commissioner, was named the new chief of operations in her office. He'll fill a role similar to chief of staff but won't receive the title.
Jonathan Ellis is our Dakota Political Junkie today. He dives into his publication's coverage of this story and other political news.
Ellis is co-founder of The Dakota Scout.
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The following transcript was auto-generated.
Lori Walsh:
Let's talk a little bit about the history of this position. Because Governor Noem has famously cycled through several chiefs of staff and now is saying, "I don't really need this position," but yet we are going to call this a chief of operations position.
What's going on here? What do you think we need to set this up?
Jonathan Ellis:
Is this maybe the ultimate latitude promotion that you've ever seen? It sounds like the function or the functionality is the same as the chief of staff, which is coordinating between the governor's office and other departments. So functionally, it sounds very much like what they would do.
Why the title? I don't know. Perhaps she wants to be in a position to say that she's not losing another chief of staff in the event that Darin Seeley were to leave. I don't know. I'm not exactly positive. Our questions went unanswered about the motivation there.
Lori Walsh:
So he's also the Bureau of Human Resources and Administration Commissioner, which was a combination of two positions.
And in her book, her most recent book, she talked about shrinking the leadership of state government and said she was going to continue to make it smaller. She combined Department of Ag and Natural Resources. This combining of roles is important to her. This seems like a lot of roles for Darin Seeley though. There's a lot going on here.
Are there thoughts about the effectiveness of this? Think back to previous chiefs of staff. I was reading the history about this when the last chief of staff, Mark Miller, left and what this person really does and how it's worked in the past. This is a change from what we've seen previously. Not a radical change, but an adjustment.
Jonathan Ellis:
I think if you're wearing the hat of the administrator over human resources, I mean, that's a pretty big job by itself. The state is a huge employer. You've got administrative issues.
Lori Walsh:
Unless they're replacing him. Do you know that? Is he still doing all of this?
Jonathan Ellis:
He's still doing all of this.
Lori Walsh:
So it's additional duties. Additional duties as assigned.
Jonathan Ellis:
As assigned, right, called a latitude promotion.
Lori Walsh:
We've all done that. Any feedback you're hearing from other people about this?
Jonathan Ellis:
I have not heard any, but then I haven't been out there. It seems like it's an obscure issue for a lot of people. It's a political issue. It's a political issue in the sense that politicians always have it, whether Democrat or Republican.
Kamala Harris has this issue. John McCain had this issue that they are criticized and ridiculed a little bit in the world of politics when they can't keep staff.
And so, she's the butt of those jokes again, that she's not a good person to work for. That's what some people would say. And when you have constant turnover like that in that position in particular, but other politicians have had the same issue. It's just something we in the political world take note of.
Lori Walsh:
We're paying attention. How about the pipeline for leadership? When I look back at Governor Rounds, then Governor Rounds' chiefs of staff, you see Neil Fulton in there. For Governor Daugaard, Dusty Johnson, Tony Venhuizen. These are South Dakotans who go on to do other roles in South Dakota, often in government. Or Neil Fulton, Dean of the Law School. I think one of Rounds' chiefs of staff went to POET.
Jonathan Ellis:
I didn't remember Tony being a Rounds' chief of staff.
Lori Walsh:
I'm sorry, what did I say? No, he's Daugaard's chief of staff.
Jonathan Ellis:
Daugaard, yes, he was.
Lori Walsh:
And for Governor Noem. I misspoke there.
Jonathan Ellis:
We had, Mark Johnston, I think, was one.
Lori Walsh:
Here's the list.
Jonathan Ellis:
Leave it to Tony to come up.
Lori Walsh:
Tony Venhuizen, hi. Thank you for your blog that helped put some of this into context.
But I guess my question broadly speaking is, when we see a governor who has many people who are from out of state, and then when they leave, whether it's in her communications department or in her assistant area, they leave. They go back out of state. What happens in the future for the pipeline of state government if you're not bringing those people in and they're not shifting to other leadership roles in the state?
Jonathan Ellis:
Well, I think there's still a lot of talent in South Dakota and South Dakota politics. One of the reasons why I think she shifted after the first couple years of looking out of state was perhaps the influence of Corey Lewandowski, who she met shortly into her first term. And she's always been sort of "a fighter." And she wants staff that's going to "be fighters."
In South Dakota, the political world is much gentler than it is at a national level. And I think that looking out of state has suited her temperament, frankly.
Lori Walsh:
All right. Amelia Joy, who was in her press department, has left and moved on to a DC job. Maggie Seidel, does she still live in South Dakota?
Jonathan Ellis:
She does.
Lori Walsh:
When she first left, she stayed, even though she wasn't originally from South Dakota.
Jonathan Ellis:
She's still in South Dakota.
Lori Walsh:
So does the departure of Amelia Joy say anything to you?
Jonathan Ellis:
No.
Lori Walsh:
Press secretary, she's going to America First Policy Institute.
Jonathan Ellis:
No, I think that that's a natural to move on to Washington. She's young. She's probably ambitious and wants to move up in that world. And it's pretty obvious now that A, Kristi, didn't run for president, and I think that B, her hopes of making the vice president selection are pretty dim at this point.
And so for somebody who's ambitious, they would probably want to move back and be involved in more national politics.
Lori Walsh:
I think that's one of the questions. Does Amelia Joy leave after the book release and the press tour that went so wrong? This is her press secretary who has now decided to move to other things. Coincidence?
Always was going to happen because these kind of jobs cycle in and out? Or was there an impact of that press tour that made Amelia Joy want to say, "I'm going somewhere else?"
Jonathan Ellis:
I don't have any firsthand knowledge of that. Her role as a press secretary, the press did not really have a lot of interaction with her. Ian Fury, who's been around now for a while, is the primary spokesperson, spokesman for the governor.
Lori Walsh:
And now what about this former chief of staff engaging in federal lobbying on behalf of the governor to $120,000.00 contract? Tell me a little bit about what you know there. You wrote about this in The Dakota Scout.
Jonathan Ellis:
Well, that's kind of an opposite situation, that this was her long-time chief of staff. She had virtually no turnover in that office when she was in Congress. Jordan Stoick, she hired him. He's a South Dakota kid, South Dakota man, I guess he's older now, who was very seasoned already in the DC political world. He'd worked for a couple of Congress people. He'd worked for a senator.
And so in 2010, she's obviously new, incoming, an incoming freshman. And so Jordan is hired with his experience, and he ends up being the chief of staff and really guided the office until he left in 2017 when it was evident that Kristi Noem had said she was going to run for governor. So of course he wanted to stay in Washington.
So he went and was briefly at Treasury. He was very easy to work with in my dealings with him over the years, enjoyed working with him. He was very responsive. And then he left, went to Treasury, and then went and worked for the Manufacturers Association for a while as a lobbyist. He was the vice president of their government operation there. And he was there, I want to say, for about four or five years before leaving.
And now, he started his own firm, and one of his first clients is the state of South Dakota and Governor Kristi Noem. It's unusual. It's not unheard of, but it is unusual for the governor's office to hire a DC lobbyist.
Rounds, when he was governor, had done it briefly near the end of his second term, had hired the Bahrani Group. Again, a group out of South Dakota, no South Dakota ties. And Governor Daugaard eliminated that. Of course, he inherits a government that has a very tight budget. And so that was an expense he eliminated and they didn't have one again.
So fast-forward, more recently last year, I want to say, they hired briefly, probably of a specific issue, one firm just for one quarter. And then more recently they signed the contract in April with Jordan Stoick's firm.
Lori Walsh:
When a new governor comes in, does this all just change? About how often through your years of covering state government, is this par for the course? New people come in, they reorganize, the org chart looks different, they bring in new people, the new governor comes in, it all changes again, or is state government largely plotting and consistent?
Jonathan Ellis:
In my experience, she's made more changes than I think the previous two governors that I was around for, and even to some extent that Governor Janklow. So again, Tony might be able to correct me on that, but I feel like there's been definitely more change, the consolidation on those four departments and again, new people that have been brought in.
Lori Walsh:
It's hard to make it bigger. Make government bigger when the last governor has made a pretty big statement about her intentions to make it smaller. Sort of like raising taxes after you cut taxes, right?
Jonathan Ellis:
Yeah.
Lori Walsh:
It can be hard to sell that.
Jonathan Ellis:
Hard to do that, for sure.
Lori Walsh:
It'd be interesting to see in the future. We haven't talked, you and I, since the primary and a lot of incumbents were out the door. Any residual effect from the primary that you are still thinking about, especially in regards to the potential of voters having a say on open primaries in November?
Jonathan Ellis:
Joe Kirby, who was on our podcast shortly after the election, was very forthright in the fact that he's got a lot of new friends among moderate Republicans given the turnout, given what happened. And I do know that there have been some donations made by some fairly prominent Republicans that I think will show up in campaign finance reports later this year when that reporting takes place. South Dakota, unlike a lot of places, doesn't have as many reporting requirements. So we have to wait around. But I've heard some names that I think some people will be surprised by. So I think at the end of the day, I think it helped that effort. Will it be enough? Yeah, we'll see. But definitely, it was a positive for those who won it.
Lori Walsh:
Help some of the newcomers to this show, who are listening now, understand what we're talking about here. So the incumbents who lost during South Dakota primary were not all moderates, but significant number of moderates got ousted by people who had positioned themselves to the political right of those moderates and they won.
And so this effort to move into an open primary then is an effort by whom to do what, because you're letting the Democrats and all the independents come in and vote on your primary, which some Republicans would traditionally argue against. Where's the push coming from?
Jonathan Ellis:
Well, the argument is that the practical effect of this would be that more than likely the more extreme candidates are not going to win in the general election, that more moderates will. And there will be a lot of races in which there are going to be two Republicans on the general election ballot. And there'll be typically a more moderate one, and that appeals to probably a broader share of the voting population than somebody who's running in a primary election. The voter turnout is pretty self-selective in the Republican Party there. And by that I mean that more conservative Republicans tend to vote in the primary. And so the effect will be that I think more moderate type candidates will end up winning in general elections.
Lori Walsh:
What are you hearing from Democrats? Do they want the open primaries, too? Because the argument would be that if a more conservative, and that's a very broad term, candidate beat a more moderate Republican candidate, again, very broad terms, that that might give the Democrat an opportunity to position themselves as a moderate compared to who came out of the primary from the GOP. I know we're splitting serious hairs today, but largely speaking, what is the Democratic Party saying about open primaries in South Dakota? Are they liking it, too?
Jonathan Ellis:
Yeah, I think that they're on board with it now. There's some reluctance, and again, not all of them, but I think that aren't going to be on board with it. They were reluctant in 2016 to remove party labels from races, but I think that they're on board with this one. I think that they recognize that there are some situations in which they will benefit. I mean, there are going to be many situations where there's not a Democrat on the general election ballot in some of these races, but I think that there is a recognition that there are some opportunities probably for them as well.
Lori Walsh:
For listeners who don't know, you just came out of the Sioux Falls City Council with a win for The Dakota Scout as a newspaper being the official newspaper of record for the city of Sioux Falls. We talked about the legislation during the legislative session that cleared the path for that. So talk about now, what that means for you going forward and for people who want access to those public and legal notices?
Jonathan Ellis:
We don't start until July, the first week of July. That's when it becomes official. But actually, our next couple print editions, they will be in our print editions as we work with the city on the workflow issues of getting the legal notices. So we are going to start that.
The way we've designed this, our designer, the way she's done this, I think you will see just a tremendous increase in the visibility of these, in our print product. We will change our printing schedule a little bit. We print normally on Wednesdays. Now, we will be printing on Thursdays to accommodate the city's schedule. So just a slight difference there. And the papers are still free in locations throughout the town, so there'll be no payment access. They're free on our website. So there's no barrier there in order for people to access those.
Lori Walsh:
So what are people going to find? These are public notices that include what?
Jonathan Ellis:
Well, they'll include bids. Governments are required to put out bids for services and things of that nature. And so, there'll be bid notices, there'll be meeting minutes, so you can look through what happened at this city council meeting. So you don't necessarily have to attend it, but you can get a rundown. The city really has done traditionally a good job of keeping more detailed minutes so you can get an idea of what happened at a meeting. So those kind of legal things that people, I think, who want to be informed, they'll have access to them for free.
Lori Walsh:
What does it mean to you personally?
Jonathan Ellis:
More work.
Lori Walsh:
You fought for it. You fought for this work.
Jonathan Ellis:
Yeah. We'll see. Like I said, we're in the process of the workflow issues and figuring that out, but I think it's obviously going to be a benefit for us. We will certainly look to also get the legals for other entities. In fact, I think Baltic named us their paper last night.
Frankly, we're hiring. It will be a revenue source and allow us to expand and that's what we want. I haven't taken a vacation in a couple years. At some point, I would like to maybe go hiking in Colorado again.
Lori Walsh:
Jonathan Ellis with The Dakota Scout. Thanks so much. We'll see you next time.
Jonathan Ellis:
Thanks, Lori.
