Drinking Liberally Update

In Politics: South Dakota: The South Dakota Democratic Party (SDDP) sent out a fundraising appeal touting a 2500 increase in Democratic voter registration before last November’s general election. The one positive aspect of this PR spin is that SDDP’s leadership agrees that voter registration numbers are a good measure of the health of the Democratic Party here. Their self-congratulations led me to update the spreadsheet detailing the SD Secretary of State’s statewide voter registration statistics. Neither the long term nor the short term trends are as positive as the SDDP wants you to believe. (In their defense they are just trying to get you to give them your money and are in their salesman mode.)

Here are the facts as presented in the spreadsheet above: Since its height in 2008, Democratic Party voter registration has declined from 39% to 23% of South Dakota’s electorate. (From 204,413 to 145,420) Meanwhile, Republican Party voter registration has increased from 46% to 51% of registered voters. (From 241,101 to 321,598) And, as to the claim the SDDP made that it is turning things around ( ie. the 2500 new voter claim), the opposite is true. Since last November’s election, Democratic voter registration declined by 784 voters while Republican registration increased by 3175 registrants. A little more honesty and a little less PR spin might help the SDDP confront the fact that, despite the multitude of undemocratic and despotic acts of Donald Trump in the last 4 months, people are still not buying what the SDDP is selling.

But then maybe that is the whole point. Perhaps the SDDP’s leadership is not into winning so much as to maintaining its control of their smaller and smaller organization and its ideological purity.

I need a drink.

Oh! And by the way, for whom would you vote in the US Senate election next year, if your choices were, Republican Mike Rounds, Independent Brian Bengs or Democrat Julian Beaudion? Inquiring minds would like to know.