Editor's note: anarcho-capitalist and South Dakota's favorite former teevee anchorman continues to handicap the Earth haters running in the SDGOP gubernatorial primary.
Deepening the acrimonious divide in South Dakota's grassroots gubernatorial scrum, try this on for size.Rumblings abound that a 2025 legislative session already cooling as evidence of a leadership sellout of the conservative base is about to be eclipsed by a policy betrayal that will stagger the imagination.If reports are true, conservative legislative leadership has been tasked with the "good cop" sales pitch role on the very same mega-priced prison project that the House of Representatives already rejected not once, but twice on reconsideration. The new price tag, apparently the fiscally conservative version, is a paltry $600-million, to be peddled and pushed upon rank and file attendees of the upcoming legislative special session by the very same people ostensibly committed to fiscal responsibility, lower property taxes and all things sensible and good.The "new," "cheaper," and "better," version of the penitentiary white elephant is said to be contained in a bill vehicle sponsored by Representative Scott Odenbach, whose apparent transformation into henchman for RINOs and moderates began with the inexplicable HB1020, a "School Choice" bill that would have given the Department of Education full curriculum control over homeschool and private school families. A Trojan Horse by any other name would foul the paddock similarly.On social media, House Speaker and conservative gubernatorial hopeful Jon Hansen is distancing himself from the exorbitant "from scratch" prison project proposed to be located near Mitchell, calling instead for expanding inmate capcity at existing prison locations in Sioux Falls, Yankton and Springfield.If a soon-to-be-released polling snapshot of the governor's race proves true, Hansen's preemptive adherence to populist opposition to the prison boondoggle, (which seems to have replaced the derided and deposed CO2 pipeline as the establishment's big boy toy spending of smoldering pocket money) could be too little, too late, for Hansen's already faltering, possibly premature and heretofore underfunded gubernatorial tilt.And all of this predictably adds kerosene to an already blazing brushfire of division between Team Hansen and Team Doeden in what if allowed to persist, can only be a fantasy scenario for RINOs Rhoden and Dusty Johnson, looking to proffer again the "divide the base, run the turd" formula for establishment monopolized power. The grassroots divide is political ambrosia for South Dakota's establishment GOP, clinging to an apartheid power structure despite the ascendace of Donald Trump and MAGA as the dominant brand in the Republican scrum.Hinted internal polling purports to show collapsing election fortunes for Governor Larry Rhoden, a stagnant Hansen-Lems number and surging support for Aberdeen businessman and rumored Trump pick, Toby Doeden, who hopes to make it a two-man race between himself and tiny RINO, Dusty Johnson, long before the June 2026 GOP primary.Healing the grassroots divide after smoke clears the election battlefield will determine whether 2025's conservative Pierre majority is a repeatable phenomenon, or be relegated to history via a Trump-DeSantis style entrenchment of animosities, bad blood and apportioned righteous indignation of the jilted camp.
SDGOP chair is calling for violence within his own party. "There is a saying about the four boxes of government: the soapbox, the ballot box, the jury box, and the ammo box. Let’s keep our debate within the first two boxes — and America, and South Dakota, will be just fine."
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