This interview originally aired on "In the Moment" on SDPB Radio.
Our Dakota Political Junkies join us today with their analysis on campaigns of the past and future.
Seth Tupper is editor-in-chief of South Dakota Searchlight, and Jonathan Ellis is co-founder of The Dakota Scout.
They dissect the Harris presidential campaign from 2024 and look ahead at the 2026 South Dakota race for the governor's seat.
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The following transcript was auto-generated and edited by an SDPB producer for clarity.
Seth Tupper:
At South Dakota Searchlight, we're part of a national nonprofit called States Newsroom and States Newsroom is 39 state outlets, including South Dakota Searchlight.
The editors get together every year with our D.C. Bureau folks that we have and our HQ staff. And so there's about 50 people, and usually they've met in D.C. They decided this year to have it more like in a regional airport hub that would be more centrally located for everybody to fly to. And they chose Minneapolis.
And since we're a state-focused nonprofit state news, they decided to see if we could get the top state officials from Minnesota to come and do a live Q&A with us as journalists. And so we got Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota and the Attorney General Keith Ellison, and they sat in for a live Q&A in front of us. And then the State Newsroom outlet in Minnesota, the Minnesota Reformer, did some stories on those appearances.
Lori Walsh:
So how much was it about unpacking the election and how much was what's happening now in Minnesota?
Seth Tupper:
The Walz appearance was almost totally unpacking the election, and you and everybody else has probably seen that he's been on something of a tour lately. I think he was in South Carolina, and he's clearly signaling and thinking about running for president next time. That was an interesting appearance because I had never had met Tim Walz or covered him personally or anything, just seen him on TV, whatever, like everybody else.
In person, I guess I would describe it as just him being in a really awkward place right now where he is so clearly interested in running for president again, yet so clearly also carries the baggage of being on a losing ticket from last time.
It's just, you almost feel the unease when you're in the room with him of him trying to balance these two things and not quite really knowing how to try to explain away the last election and put that behind him, and not fully being able to do that and not really being able to then move forward. And so it was just sort of an uneasy thing to be in his presence. You could kind of feel the difficult position he's in because of that.
Lori Walsh:
Yeah. Do you think that's because of what people have said to him, or do you think that's because he's trying to figure out how to position himself for a future run? Does he go around and everybody's like, "Hey, you screwed this up. You let us down. You failed at this. If it weren't for you..."?
Seth Tupper:
Well, I think it's just because they lost. He had to make a calculated decision whether to accept the invitation to be on the ticket or not. He accepted it, they lost, and he might not be able to come back from that nationally. You think back to Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine. Where's Tim Kaine these days on the national scene?
Lori Walsh:
Doing Saturday Night Live appearances about nobody knowing who he is.
Seth Tupper:
Is he?
Lori Walsh:
Yeah, that was the sketch.
Seth Tupper:
Okay. I even missed that one.
Lori Walsh:
Like, "My name is Tim Kaine. I ran for vice president," and everybody's like, "Who is this man?" No idea. Yeah.
Seth Tupper:
Well, there you go.
Lori Walsh:
So he's having fun with his image, I guess.
Seth Tupper:
And so Governor Walz is really trying to keep that from happening, but the pull down on him of being on a losing ticket I think is going to be very, very hard to fight against.
Lori Walsh:
What does he say went wrong? Where did he fail? Because he says, "Hey, we did not deliver, I want to own this, want to own the fact that we made mistakes."
What does he say those mistakes were?
Seth Tupper:
Well, to me, he doesn't seem to really have a coherent speech figured out for that yet. He did talk a lot about communication failures. He has been kind of trotting this narrative out there that maybe he was too tightly controlled and everything during the campaign, but you sit there listening to that and you think, "Well, I mean, yeah, you were the vice presidential candidate. You weren't the presidential candidate, of course you were controlled to some extent. You should be."
My main takeaway from it was really there just wasn't on mistake. I mean, if people are looking for him having identified this one thing that can totally explain why they lost and why he could be more successful in the future, no, he doesn't seem to have that figured out yet.
Lori Walsh:
Jonathan Ellis, anything about that that's useful as we watch people unpack an election after it's over? In general, are there things that you think are useful in election postmortems?
Jonathan Ellis:
Seth alluded to one. One part of this was he had to make the calculated risk of whether to be accept the VP slot. And really I think that he tied himself to that anchor because, I mean, this is my opinion, and I know maybe piss some people off here, but Kamala Harris was a terrible candidate and he tied himself to that.
And so he's got to get beyond what was a very poorly run campaign, which he probably really had very little say in running. It wasn't his campaign necessarily, but he's associated with it.
Lori Walsh:
Why was she a terrible candidate? Give me two reasons why you think Vice President Harris was a terrible candidate.
Jonathan Ellis:
Yeah, she had very poor communication skills. Seth talked about how Walz is working on this speech. Her speeches were terrible. She just could not communicate.
I think that the campaign erred very early when it associated itself with a lot of celebrities and elites that regular people can't relate to those people. So that was a very early error. If you remember this, the campaign they brought in movie stars, singers and TV stars like Oprah, and regular people won't believe in that. So that was a big campaign fail from right out at the gate, in my opinion.
Lori Walsh:
Donald Trump is not known as a smooth communicator.
Jonathan Ellis:
True.
Lori Walsh:
So saying she's a terrible communicator in a campaign against someone who 's not what we would traditionally consider an effective communicator. Obviously, he communicates his message and he holds the spotlight very well.
But I guess that's what I'm wondering, like why is she a bad communicator when her opponent communicates in the way that he does?
Jonathan Ellis:
I think that actually he ran a more disciplined campaign in the sense that he did stick to the issues that won the day, immigration and things of that nature. In that sense, of course, you can pick apart his speeches and say he says these stupid outlandish things.
Lori Walsh:
I didn't say that.
Jonathan Ellis:
He does, at times.
Lori Walsh:
To be clear, I did not say he was stupid.
Jonathan Ellis:
He does. But we could go back and dissect some of her speeches and sometimes it goes into she just was a poor communicator.
Lori Walsh:
So let's talk about candidates for governor now, here in South Dakota because we're seeing early announcements and communication strategies which will continue to follow these candidates.
Jonathan Ellis, you want to start with Jon Hansen, Speaker Hansen, and how he came out of the gate making his announcement and what we're seeing early on from him.
Jonathan Ellis:
He's been known in the conservative, social conservative, universe for quite a while now. I think he's probably in his 10th year in the legislature, been very prominent on abortion issues for a long time. The pipeline stuff, very early against pipeline, or at least eminent domain. And so he has a lot of street cred in that community and he came out very early and at his announcement at the Military Heritage Alliance here in Sioux Falls, it was very well attended and a lot of the rank and file conservative activists were there.
Now you've got Toby Doeden getting into the race and he's sort of drinking from the same reservoir there. A lot of people who are in politics will know who Toby Doeden is just because he's wealthy and he's financed some campaigns. But he doesn't have the broader name recognition maybe that Jon Hansen does.
And so Toby, you've seen now as he announced, he has since been on TV. He's got to try to win people over with his message and people who don't know who he is. It's very early for TV ads for governor, but that's kind of the reality that he's got to face. He's got to introduce himself to voters who don't know who he is.
Lori Walsh:
Yeah. Seth, do people know who Jon Hansen is? West River?
Seth Tupper:
No.
Lori Walsh:
I mean political people do, people who are fundraising, the political class if you will know who Jon Hansen is. But that's been my question mark. Doesn't he also have a challenge with name recognition going into this?
Seth Tupper:
Sure, and of course this is difficult to gauge and I think as journalists, I'm always trying to keep myself aware of this and my reporters, and we are talking about a Republican primary here.
So obviously these are engaged, people are going to vote in that are engaged in Republican politics and stuff, but there'll also be quite a few who aren't. This is going to be an election year that's going to have a lot of big races. So we bring a lot of people out. So I think that as journalists, people who are embedded in this every day, we do tend, I do too, we tend overestimate how much people are known outside of the bubble that we operate in as journalists and people who are inside of this all the time.
So I certainly don't think Jon Hansen or Toby Doeden have name recognition with the general populace, with the general electorate, even maybe with a lot of Republicans, within certain circles.
Lori Walsh:
I'm not sure Governor Rhoden does.
Seth Tupper:
You're right, you're right, absolutely.
Lori Walsh:
After I interviewed Governor Rhoden, I was telling people I interviewed the governor and they didn't know his name and they asked me again and again, "Who is he? Who is he? Who is he?" And I was really surprised by that at the time. I was like, "How do you not know who Larry Rhoden is?" But to your point, Seth, a lot of people are not living the lives that the three of us are living.
Seth Tupper:
Right. How many people still think Kristi Noem is the governor of South Dakota? You might be shocked by that.
Lori Walsh:
She's not going to be on the ballot everybody, so there's going to be someone else.
Seth Tupper:
But I'll tell you, you bring up Rhoden and the one great advantage that he has, obviously with Noem leaving and him being installed from lieutenant governor to governor is, if you see what he's been doing ever since he took office, he's been traveling the state, on the state's dime as he's allowed to do as governor, doing official business, of course, but also it's partially campaigning. And he's been to towns all across the state, great and small. He's met hundreds, thousands of people probably since he took office. And so he's been basically campaigning from day one and building that name recognition slowly and quietly, but doing it. And as Jonathan mentioned, how does Toby Doeden do that? Well, he's going to have spend a lot of money to do that.
Lori Walsh:
He's got a big bus, right? He's got the money, yeah.
Seth Tupper:
And if you're going to spend a lot of money this early, a year out from the primary, wow, I hope you have a lot of money, because you're going to be in there for a while.
Lori Walsh:
So Ellis, what's the strategy here? Because I mean some of big names who people have predicted will enter this race have not yet entered the race, cue Representative Dusty Johnson, who everybody says he's going to enter. But we don't know when, we don't know if, so do you get out there? I mean, is that part of the strategy? You get out there early, get out there really fast, build up name recognition, establish yourself before he ever comes and announces or he might not.
Jonathan Ellis:
Well, I don't know that Dusty Johnson needs to worry about it.
Lori Walsh:
No, I'm talking about the other people. I don't think Dusty Johnson needs to worry about it.
Does Toby Doeden need to worry about when Dusty Johnson enters the race? Does Jon Hansen have to worry about that?
Jonathan Ellis:
No, I think they have to worry about each other because they know that there will be a Dusty Johnson-esque, if not Dusty Johnson himself, Dusty Johnson-esque candidate that they'll have to face.
I mean, remember, this is a fight for much more than people don't know who Larry Rhoden is. Your Republican primary voters do. They're much more engaged. And this is the universe you're worrying about. You're not worrying about the people who don't know who Larry Rhoden is. That's a different world. That's a general election world, if they vote at all for that matter. So this is where Seth says, yeah, the voters out West River probably don't know who he is, but the ones who are politically active know who Jon Hansen is, and some of them will know who Toby Doeden is just because he's been financing campaigns through his political action committee. So he needs to get out early.
Dusty Johnson, I mean, no, he doesn't.
Lori Walsh:
Why do they run against Rhoden at all?
Jonathan Ellis:
Why are they running against Rhoden?
Lori Walsh:
Right. There's not a ton of daylight between all of these candidates policy-wise. There are a lot of, I guess, in the Venn diagram, there's lots of places that they're similar. Why challenge the incumbent who's popular, known, has the advantage of being the incumbent? Why spend a bunch of money? I mean, you would be happy with how the state is being run in a lot of ways, why do people throw their hat in the ring at this point?
Jonathan Ellis:
Well, I think there are people who think it could be run more conservatively, if you ask the Jon Hansen and Toby Doeden world.
Lori Walsh:
We'll have Jon Hansen on later in the show. We did ask him.
And we have not invited Toby Doeden yet, but he'll be next. We like to wait a while after the announcement.
Jonathan Ellis:
Historically, a lieutenant governor who took over from a governor in office have not been strong candidates necessarily. I mean, they haven't gone on to win their nomination and in some cases their nomination and certainly in general, I think probably in at least the two most recent cases that I can think of, Seth, maybe not to put him on the spot, but I don't even think they won their party nominations.
Lori Walsh:
Lots of challenges ahead, Seth.
Seth Tupper:
Well, yeah, and I would add to that I think will answer your question Lori, is that people are viewing this as an open seat. Kristi Noem resigned, and yes, the Lieutenant Governor came in and you could call him an incumbent, sort of, not really, but kind of.
And I think people viewed this from the beginning as an open seat. And I think a lot of people underestimated Governor Rhoden's ability to campaign for this seat.
I think a lot of us, as Jonathan maybe alluded to, we're reflecting back to when Walter Dale Miller took over as governor after the death of Governor Mickelson and Bill Janklow came in and said, "Thanks, Walter Dale, but I'll take it from here." And just sort of pushed him aside, and I think a lot of people were thinking that was Rhoden's fate, and he showed that maybe he's going to be a little bit stronger than that. And so that has maybe made it more difficult for people who thought they were going to have an easier path, but I don't think it caused anybody to say, oh, I'm not going to run now, because open seats don't come along very often, obviously, in South Dakota Republican politics.
Lori Walsh:
I think that's answer. That's an insightful answer. They view it as an open seat, and those just don't come along very often, now's your chance.
Seth Tupper:
So if you're going to take your shot, you take it now.
Lori Walsh:
You take your shot now.
Yeah, interesting. But I agree with you, Seth, that Larry Rhoden has come out very strong, so anybody who was underestimating him probably is regretting underestimating him as a candidate, I would say. He's a strong candidate for governor.
Seth Tupper:
Yeah, I think it's a signal that immediately during the session when he chose Tony VenHuizen to be his lieutenant governor and people thought, oh, whoa, Tony VenHuizen is signing on with Larry Rhoden, and people thought maybe he would be aligned more with Dusty Johnson or somebody like that, bringing back some old Daugaard administration officials to serve in his cabinet, having a very organized, aggressive schedule getting out in the state.
Yeah, I think he was, from the get go, if you were paying attention, he put people on notice that he's probably going to run and he's probably going to run hard.
Jonathan Ellis:
I would say the one unknown on all of this is because of the state's campaign finance reporting requirements, we are not going to know how strong he is in that department, and that's a very critical department.
Lori Walsh:
Fundraising.
Jonathan Ellis:
Fundraising. Whether you like it or not, you need money and you need a lot of money, and so we will have to wait and see. I am impressed with how he's gotten out and under the guise of economic opportunity and toured the state, and I think he has been strong in that department, where we don't know that, again, the unknown is, is that translating to campaign donations?
Lori Walsh:
Yeah. I've noticed how often he comes out and distinguishes himself from Kristi Noem, but yet never distances himself from Kristi Noem, again and again. He credits her for what she did. He connects his name to hers. He is and forever will be her partner in politics, but then he'll make a sort of a wry comment like, well, maybe we communicate a little bit better, or if not better, a little bit differently, chuckle, chuckle. And makes, I'm not her, but yet politically we are very much aligned, and I think that's smart politicking as well.
Jonathan Ellis:
Plus he'll drink a beer, whereas Kristi Noem wouldn't have.
Lori Walsh:
Okay. Not something I knew, nor do I care if either one of drinks a beer.
Jonathan Ellis:
One of the regular guys, one of the regular guys who will sit down and have a beer.
Lori Walsh:
We'll leave it there with the regular guys. I'll step off. Seth Tupper, Jonathan Ellis, thanks so much.
Jonathan Ellis:
I'm going to go get a beer. Thanks.
