This interview originally aired on "In the Moment" on SDPB Radio.
Yesterday was Election Day. Today, we turn to our Dakota Political Junkies for a recap and analysis. Plus, we get an update on statewide election numbers.
Check here for the latest results.
Jon Hunter is publisher emeritus of the Madison Daily Leader. He's 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.
____________________________________________________________
The following transcript was auto-generated and edited for clarity.
Lori Walsh:
Jon Hunter, I understand that you have a really strong record of editorial writing in the Madison Daily Leader except maybe this one time where you made a prediction that did not age as well as you have, sir.
Jon Hunter:
As the writer of almost 6,000 editorials, I was the farthest off this one as I ever have been, so I set new records. I thought the idea of updating gender references would be a landslide victory that everyone would agree in that. And it not only didn't have the landslide, it lost.
Lori Walsh:
The land slid the other way.
Jon Hunter:
Yeah, the land slid out from underneath my feet.
Lori Walsh:
I feel like this is worth talking about, partially because we really didn't talk about it much. This was a bill that came up during the statehouse, and I think it was Erin Tobin and some other female lawmakers who said, "We have a female governor. The state constitution should represent that in our language, so we would like to change it."
Michael Card:
The governor mentioned it in the State of the State Address.
Lori Walsh:
Yep, the governor mentioned it. I'm not sure if there was applause.
Jon Hunter:
She might have done it in the inaugural address even. I mean, it was early. It was well before Tobin and those put it together.
Lori Walsh:
There was this idea that it was a measure to honor and celebrate South Dakota's first female governor by changing the language to say the governor will do this and the governor will do that. South Dakota didn't rebuke Governor Noem necessarily in this, but they definitely didn't want the language changed.
Mike Card, since we can't trust Jon Hunter on this topic, what happened here?
Jon Hunter:
A flash of honesty.
Michael Card:
This is one that I got right, and it was largely based on anecdotal evidence that I heard people talking to me saying, "This is the legislature putting a woke amendment in front of us." I just shook my head and asked people to clarify and said, "Well, it's trying to make all genders look alike. It's like the pronouns." And I'm just shaking my head. As opposed to replacing "he" with the title of the person who has the legal authority and statute in the constitution to make decisions or to perform functions.
Lori Walsh:
In the ballot question, it said it would cost money, too. There was a fiscal note on your ballot.
Michael Card:
That's right.
Lori Walsh:
Why would it cost money to change the constitution.
Jon Hunter:
I didn't even see the fiscal note. It must've been very small.
Michael Card:
It specifically dealt with the reprinting of the state constitution when it didn't need to be reprinted, despite the fact that there were three other amendments that may have passed.
Lori Walsh:
That would've caused the reprinting. All right. So, Jon?
Jon Hunter:
Well, there's a couple things. For one, I think there was perhaps a little of vote no on everything, and I think some people, especially constitutional amendments, and we will see an exception here in a moment with the Medicaid work requirement, but I think there's a certain portion of South Dakota's voters who say, "Don't mess with the constitution. Bring all the initiated measures you want, refer statutes, whatever those things are, but let's not vote on the constitution every time." I think there was some of that, just leave well enough alone.
Lori Walsh:
And then also there is a nuance, though, in the vote no because I did hear voters tell me that someone had knocked on their door and they said, "By the way, you should just vote for me. I'm your candidate. And those ballot questions, just vote no on all of them for simplicity's sake." Possibly some fatigue, possibly some just great communication and advertising from different groups that were just like, "No on this. No on that." It's too extreme. It's too extreme to sort of build a collective no, but then Mike, there's a nuance here. They vote no on the referred law, which is a rebuke to lawmakers, and then they vote yes on Amendment F, which is we want the lawmakers to be able to add work requirements. And again, these are unofficial results. We don't have all the tallies in. Some things may change, but it looks like F is going to get the support to go forward. There, it's like, yes, we want lawmakers to have the option to do this. People didn't just go in and fill in no and walk out the door.
Michael Card:
No, they didn't. I think to a large extent, I saw a lot of cheat sheets in people's hands as they were going into vote. Seven is a lot. It's not the most. In the past five elections, we've had more. We've had 10 and 11 in 2012 and 2016. I think the larger part here was the significant efforts to get people to vote no.
The linguists tell me that the word extreme does things to people's minds that just absolutely turns them off. Too extreme is exactly the phrase you would use if you want to defeat something. Constitutional amendments over the state's history are barely above 50%, and we consider we only had initiated amendments since 1974. Initiated measures don't do all that well. They're underwater in terms of less than 50%. The ones that work are if you consider voting no on a referred measure. That's about 60% success rate if you consider voting no a success. If we think of an initiated measure as there ought to be a law, a referred law is there ought not to be a law.
Lori Walsh:
Back to the drawing board.
Michael Card:
That's right.
Lori Walsh:
Go try again. The other thing that we really learned about the ballot question was just how much we saw it change through polling through Mason-Dixon and News Watch and the Chiesman Center for Democracy at USD. So we saw the evolution of the polls and then that huge push of money at the end. Boy, I watched the football game on Sunday night. I watched the Vikings game on broadcast television, and every ad was political. Then I have a friend from Wisconsin who was like, "Don't even tell me about it. You cannot imagine what it's like to live in a swing state." I'm like, "But this is awful."
Anyway, so all the money was rolling in and it was a lot of no on abortion. It was a lot of, "We might need to change the law, but this is too extreme." Marijuana, that was the other one. I was surprised that ad said Donald Trump wants you to vote for marijuana, which I thought was a bit of a stretch. I couldn't quite tell where they were getting their footage from on that end, but marijuana failed too. Recreational marijuana, abortion, do they come back, Jon, or are these the death knell?
Democrats did not do well. It's not like we saw a bunch of more progressive issues make it and then Democrats failed. Everything failed. Republicans showed up very strongly yesterday to say what it means to be Republican. Are those issues dead?
Jon Hunter:
Well, I think there will be. If I can predict that. My track record is not good.
Lori Walsh:
We can forgive you with the constitutional linguistic obscure.
Jon Hunter:
I really do believe in the fatigue thing, and I think we might see fewer initiatives coming up, or maybe referrals will stay popular, but not constitutional amendments and so on. So I just think the success rate of those is not good. Now, things like abortion I think will go on forever. Taxes possibly could. I think it's worth talking a little bit about the sales tax.
Lori Walsh:
For sure.
Jon Hunter:
And that could take a different form, but with that 70/30 wipeout, and now granted it was not clearly defined. There were some things about anything consumed, which would be medicine or alcohol or whatever.
Michael Card:
Gasoline was my favorite that they were talking about for human consumption.
Jon Hunter:
Well.
Lori Walsh:
Because you use it up.
Jon Hunter:
Right, right, right.
Lori Walsh:
Because it's something that people buy that's used up and then they go buy it again. That's why it was a consumable, potentially. I think that was a bit of a stretch.
Jon Hunter:
Right.
Lori Walsh:
I think it was unlikely that they were going to stop.
Jon Hunter:
Right, but there was a long time when I think that vote would've been closer and I think, fairly, people were worried that there would be another tax or there would be sharp budget cuts. And we need to make progress on teacher pay. This would slow that even further.
Long answer to a short question, Lori, is that I think some of these may come back, but I think fewer of them in the next election.
Michael Card:
I think for me, on these measures, certainly G, H, 28 and the Referred Law 21, what struck me was how well-organized the campaigns were, and mostly on the no side, and they were well-funded. If we look at G, clearly the major proponent of Amendment G left out the National Abortion Rights League and Planned Parenthood. They sat on the sidelines. The money came in very, very late from Illinois. Again, we tend not to like out-of-state money in ballot issues. We love it on candidate campaigns. We're not hypocritical at all here in South Dakota, but that really made things difficult is if you don't craft your proposed legislation, in this case, proposed constitutional amendment with all of the stakeholders who are likely to support you. In politics, we call it a ground game, which is as an organization, you're not going to get very far. And they didn't get very far.
And the same thing with the drafting of the IM28 on the grocery tax, which was human consumption, he didn't follow the LRC's recommendation. Their initial cost estimate was based on groceries because they said, "Well, if what you really want is taxes on groceries, which is well-defined in our statute largely because of the streamlined sales tax project." So if you ignore that and you talk about human consumption, one opposition was, "Well, this is an income tax." Sioux Falls Mayor, Paul TenHaken, was the chair of that committee. Then we're worried about what all are we taxing? Now the cost estimate for human consumption, even though we can't define it, goes up to $630 million. Well, then we see, as you said, state employees are worried, teachers are worried. Students were worried about tuition going up, all on something that could have been fixed by the legislature that they had eight months ago. But it took it out of the realm of do we not want a tax on groceries versus you just need to vote no on this. This is so terrible.
Lori Walsh:
Let's take that as a bridge to the national election because the economy and the fear over what you would not be able to afford were impactful. Or I heard a lot of people in business in the previous week saying everything in business is just on hold. People are just waiting to figure out what happens with the election. I kept saying, "Well, what do they think will happen when Donald Trump is elected? What is the policy?" The answers were pretty vague. It was just a feeling that if he went back to the White House, even if they didn't like him at all, even if they had disassociated themselves from him as a person, they had a strong feeling that the economy was going to be better. People are worried about their pocketbooks. It's always the economy in some ways, right? Is the economy stupid?
Michael Card:
James Carville's curse on us.
Lori Walsh:
Well, what stands out to you in this with that idea. Certainly some people admire Donald Trump, but I heard a lot of people say they had concerns about his character. I don't think I'm going out on a limb to say a lot of people who voted for him were not sure they like him. However, they want him in the White House. What's going on?
Michael Card:
As it was relayed on Morning Edition this morning, they want a strong man. They want someone who will change things, even if it means breaking them to get that change. People's perspective of the economy is largely based on their pocketbook. Wages have not gone up as fast as inflation has gone down, so many people are buying things that cost 19, 20% more than they did in 2019. That's rational thinking. I don't like this. I don't have the money to pay for these groceries. Some were saying it costs $4 for a dozen eggs. Well, where are you buying those eggs at?
Lori Walsh:
I totally get the egg argument if you are a bakery. If you have to buy a whole lot of eggs, I'm all ears. But for a regular family of four, you got a big egg budget. But eggs to that point, you can remember the price of eggs. You can measure other things by it even.
Michael Card:
Gasoline is another one because it's advertised everywhere.
Jon Hunter:
Gallon of milk. Loaf of bread.
Michael Card:
All of these staple items, they have gone up in price and some of that is due to price gouging. Some of that is due to shortages. We've got bird flu all over the place, but most of us don't pay attention to the news and to realize that there is bird flu, there are shortages, that we've killed off millions of chickens for fear of transferring that to the human beings and all I see is what affects my pocketbook. That's rational thinking. It is.
Lori Walsh:
Is it based on evidence?
Michael Card:
Well, it isn't based on all the evidence, it's based on what easily comes in is things we already believe. Boy, I think prices are going up. I'm going to see everything with that. It's like watching a sports game. I can easily see the fouls that the other team makes, but I have a hard time seeing that fouls that my team makes and that's because stuff comes in easily that fits with what we already believe, and we may not even see evidence that would contradict what we believe.
Jon Hunter:
Well, people may not listen to the news, but they listen to "In the Moment" on South Dakota Public Broadcasting.
Lori Walsh:
They do, yeah. They're listening to you right now help them sort through all of this.
Jon, the former President Donald Trump and now president-elect is getting stronger in his support. The felonies, the convictions, the controversies, his behavior on the campaign trail is not deterring people from liking him. In fact, more people are solidifying around him in America. What does this say about America and the direction that we're going?
Jon Hunter:
I can't say definitively, but I have some thoughts. And part of it is I heard as much now as ever. And you hear it a little bit every election where people say, "Gee, I wish we had different candidates to choose from. I don't like either one." There was I think maybe a lot of that this election, I'm voting for the one that can do the most or whatever.
Lori Walsh:
Right, lesser of two evils.
Jon Hunter:
Lesser of two evils. Thank you. But the idea of a candidate attracting votes, rather than repelling votes is still a bit of a mystery. That's just not what our long history has been. We used to be inspired by candidates and you'd want someone to lead you. A lot of people would say, "Well, I don't like Trump, but I really don't like Biden," at first. And then when Harris came in and said, "Well, I don't like her either."
The interesting thing for president, people vote on a really broad range of reasons, and not all of them are economy or something. I mean, they're tall or short, or old or young or whatever. They didn't like Kamala's laugh, right? Why would you vote against someone because of the way they laugh?
Lori Walsh:
It's just a very standard anti-female candidate thing. I mean, let's just call that what that is. If you are picking at a woman's laugh or her ambition or her hair, you can pretty much just say that's something specific to female candidates. We've seen it with Kristi Noem. We've seen it with Kamala Harris. It's a nonpartisan criticism of female candidates.
Jon Hunter:
I mean, I can't explain it very well. I didn't think Donald Trump would get more votes this time than he did last time. I didn't think he would've converted people. You talk about the economy, we did run up huge deficits again in the last four years. I don't know if people pay attention to that. Much of that was COVID started, or at least COVID was the catalyst, but then I think there was this whole infrastructure thing and so forth. I don't know if there's some thought that that's spun out of control.
Lori Walsh:
Inflation Reduction Act, yeah.
Michael Card:
We have to go back further because the 2017 Targeted Jobs Tax Act was $2 trillion all by itself. There was another trillion in COVID aid under Donald Trump, so there's $3 trillion there, and then we have $4 trillion under Biden. And the Wall Street Journal and the Economist and the Tax Foundation, all incredibly, sarcasm, liberal organizations. They're not liberal organizations, have predicted that Donald Trump will add another $7.5 trillion in deficits if the things he promised during the last days of the campaign, which is one way to get people to vote for you is let's eliminate taxes on tips, let's eliminate taxes on Social Security. Let's have lots of giveaway programs.
Michael Card:
$7.5 more trillion.
Lori Walsh:
Eliminate taxes on overtime.
Jon Hunter:
Tell rich people, "I know you're already rich, but we're going to cut your taxes more." You can promise that.
Lori Walsh:
I think he said he was going to cut taxes on people's overtime, so they should get to take that home. Harris said all kinds of things that, "I'm going to make it so Americans only have to work one job." I was like, "How you do that?"
Jon Hunter:
How are you going to do that now?
Lori Walsh:
There were a whole lot of promises. What I'm trying to figure out, Mike, is this idea of are people nostalgic for pre-pandemic Trump economy, what they remember about that, or are we saying he didn't get enough time to dismantle and reconstruct the nation that we want, so we need to send him back? Are we trying to go back or are we trying to go forward economically?
Michael Card:
Well, that an interesting thought because in essence, that former president, now President-elect Trump has suggested that it really was the case that he wasn't able to do what he wanted to do.
Lori Walsh:
Shucks, that darn pandemic got in the way.
Michael Card:
Well, it was the pandemic. I'm putting words in his mouth, but I think there's lots of evidence he would say that what happened is people held him back. People he appointed to jobs.
Lori Walsh:
John Kelly, H.R. McMaster, Jim McManus, who all came out and said he shouldn't be president. They're not going to go back with him.
Michael Card:
No.
Lori Walsh:
So we're going to find out what happens next.
Michael Card:
Well, we may end up with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. heading some degree of infectious disease.
Lori Walsh:
All right. So John Thune, we know, is turning for Republicans. What do we know historically speaking about when the president is in a party and so is Congress? Will we see more progress in a certain direction or less because it's a a pipe dream that everybody's going to get along?
Michael Card:
Well, I think we know in the Senate part, that's where confirmation of appointed officials go through treaties and things of that nature. The Senate is going to be in control of the Republican Party and it will be a John, whether it's John Thune or John Cornyn, is likely to be the majority leader. We don't know which one yet. The issue there is he will get his appointments made, the judicial appointments, the appointments to the federal judiciary, whether it be a Supreme Court opening, whether it be Cabinet secretaries, undersecretaries, the 3,000 appointed positions not subject to civil service protections. There's the effort to remove civil service protections to make more employment at will. But generally, the Senate goes along unless it's an extreme case if they're in the same party.
Lori Walsh:
Jon Hunter, I just also want to bring Kristi Noem in here, Governor Kristi Noem of South Dakota who was in Florida, not in Sioux Falls. John Thune was in Sioux Falls speaking to Republicans there. They were applauding him in ways that they hadn't just a couple years ago, right? Remember? And so there's an interesting flip. What happens to her next? What do you want to add to Mike's thoughts here?
Jon Hunter:
Well, just one quick deal on Congress. If you have a split Congress where the Republicans control the Senate and the Democrats control the House, there tends to be less legislation that makes it all the way to the president's desk. But Trump in particular has taken executive actions farther than others, and I think this does shift more power to the administration from the Congress, which was odd that Congress is almost abdicating some of its responsibilities and they don't get anything done, so the administration takes action anyway. So in my view, that's a misbalance of power. I think that Congress is leaving some of its responsibilities.
Now, talking about Governor Noem, I think there probably is a spot for her somewhere in the federal government. Don't know where that is. I don't think it's probably a Cabinet level position, but she has been loyal to him through all the felony convictions and so forth. So Trump tends to reward his loyalists and punish his detractors, and so I think there probably is a spot if she chooses, and I think she probably would like that, would like a position in Washington, so I think it might be available.
Lori Walsh:
We need a farm bill. We need a balanced budget. There's some pretty big things. There was a bipartisan immigration reform package that was tanked. So there are questions about immigration reform.
Michael Card:
By President Trump.
Lori Walsh:
By President Trump on the campaign trail, by the former president on the campaign trail. Harris tried to use that to get votes ineffectively. People didn't buy that for whatever reason, nationwide at least. Does this Congress come back ready to work and ready to go? I guess I'm expressing skepticism that even if you have your entire party together, that you're going to be able to move big omnibus packages forward, in a way. How clear is the road ahead, really? This is still the American government. It's still a democracy that's designed to chug along at a slower pace.
Michael Card:
We don't know how the House is going to turn out yet. There's still a number of races yet to be decided. All revenue packages proposals have to originate in the House of Representatives, meaning they have to get out. The speaker controls the agenda in the House. They may not come out as desired unless they are part of an omnibus package where, okay, I'll take this, but I have to give you that to get there, and that increases spending generally.
Jon Hunter:
I think the next best question coming up in the next four years is will the checks and balances work in Congress and in the courts? Will those three branches of government work as they're designed, or will they be overcome in this wave? It's a concern of many Americans, I think. I'd heard people who'd vote for either candidate and said, "I just hope there's a split that it's not all Republican or all Democrat." In fact, I heard it more than once. It was not just an anecdotal thing.
Lori Walsh:
So we still have a sense, even though we're a nation divided and a nation polarized, that we are pluralistic in the sense that we are going to work together.
I mean, there are millions of people who voted for Kamala Harris. I think Alexander Heffner called us an electorate smoothie. So even though this is a really red state, he always pushes back against the idea that it's a red state because there are so many people who voted for Sheryl Johnson. They're still here. They're in that smoothie, and we all have to work together to meet the needs of people in rural South Dakota and people in the most urban downtown area that we have produced.
Jon Hunter:
Well, you're right, and I've said this on this show before, is that we take 52-48 victories for someone as if it were a landslide, and it's not. These are a lot of narrow victories. I think, in fact, the whole Electoral College thing is weird. I was trying to explain it to someone yesterday where he said, "Well, if you win Georgia 51 to 49, you get all their votes. You don't get some allocated percentage." I mean, the all or nothing nature of our democracy where if you win 51%, then you have control of something does ignore the 49% who voted for the other. In the best situation, you'd have a chance to listen to both and incorporate ideas and come together.
Michael Card:
We certainly have two competing philosophies in our country.
For me, I think of it as a New Deal philosophy. We are here to help everyone and that helping everyone means providing opportunities.
The other philosophy is the purpose of government is to make the market operate efficiently and effectively, and it may hurt individuals. That, I think, is what's called neoliberalism to us pointy-headed academic types. It's liberal philosophy, meaning freedom for the individual and the individual is what takes place in the marketplace.
While we don't know how those are going to shake out, part of what we're seeing in the battle for the legislature that we heard Lee talk about earlier, whether it's the Freedom Caucus, which is always interesting because the list was always put up in the Senate lobby and then torn down moments later, so we don't really know who's in it, but we know that there's going to be challenges in the legislature in terms of organizing based on the Freedom Caucus and what I would label as stalwart Republicans, traditional Eisenhower, Reagan. But those two philosophies are operating, but the Freedom Caucus seems to be blending the two. And we see that with the Josh Hawleys at the national level. We see it with the Ted Cruzes. We see this sort of movement. Well, we do have a role for government and it's involved, which is not traditional in the past 40 years Republican thinking. Instead, we're seeing a blending and it, much like a glass covered coffin, remains to be seen what'll happen.
Lori Walsh:
All right. We're going to leave it there for now.
Jon Hunter:
The pointy-head thing is sticking with me somehow.
Lori Walsh:
There's so much sticking with me. I wish we had another hour.
