THE GREAT AMERICAN POLITICAL ROADTRIP: SOUTH DAKOTA

The 2020 presidenital election in South Dakota

South Dakota political trends

South Dakota is another small flyover state dismissed by national political pundits as hopelessly Republican, but that wasn’t always the case, even as recently as 25 years ago.

Sure, no Democrat has been elected governor of the Mount Rushmore State since the 1970s. However, Democrats controlled the State Senate as recently as 1994, held the lone US House seat as recently as 2010 and both U.S. Senate seats as recently as 2004. One of those Senators was Tom Daschle, then the Democratic Senate Leader. Sen. George McGovern, the anti-Vietnam War senator and 1972 Democratic presidential nominee, who lost a landslide to Richard Nixon, represented South Dakota.

Like its northern brother, South Dakota has a populist streak made it a solidly Democratic state during the early FDR years. However, the Roosevelt Administration’s policies toward farmers during the Dust Bowl era shifted politics in the state and made it a Republican bastion. Democrats were only able to remain competitive because of South Dakota’s large Native American population and, later, economic populism that favored the agricultural industry. One prominent South Dakota Democrat elected during the post-Dust Bowl era was McGovern. McGovern lost his home state - and 49 other states - when he ran for president, but he only lost the state by nine points, far less than the nationwide thumping he got.