This interview originally aired on "In the Moment" on SDPB Radio.
Less than 8% of registered voters turned out at Sioux Falls' recent citywide elections. Our Dakota Political Junkies take a look at why more people vote in national elections and the political messaging that gets them to the polls.
Plus, we briefly talk about Gov. Kristi Noem's book and her dog.
Jon Hunter is publisher emeritus of the Madison Daily Leader. He was inducted into the South Dakota Newspaper Hall of Fame in 2022.
Mike Card, Ph.D., is a political scientist and professor emeritus at the University of South Dakota.
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The following transcript was auto-generated.
Cara Hetland:
As I'm sure you're already well aware, it's an election year. Six months, six months out. So we're going to look at what voters say they care about going into an election. And our Dakota Political Junkies are here to parse through the polls and the data with us.
And yes, we are going to talk briefly about a dog. Just briefly.
Jon Hunter:
Fair enough.
Cara Hetland:
Jon Hunter, publisher emeritus of the Madison Daily Leader. He was inducted into the South Dakota Newspaper Hall of Fame in 2022. Thanks for being with us.
Jon Hunter:
Thanks, Cara.
Cara Hetland:
And Mike Card, political scientist and professor emeritus at the University of South Dakota. Thanks for being here.
Mike Card:
I'm glad to be here.
Cara Hetland:
Joining us here in the SDPB's Kirby Family Studio in Sioux Falls. Here we go. Let's start with what has been on every meme joke, late-night television and local news, national news: Governor Noem, her book and her dog.
Mike Card:
Well, over time, we've sort of speculated that this is a self-inflicted wound. Pet lovers of both political parties seem to be quite upset. And yet at the same time, we recognize that in the world of the farm economy, sometimes you have to put an animal down if it's destroying the livestock.
But this doesn't appear to be that situation at all. This appears to be someone who was upset with the dog for either how it made her look or for destroying someone else's property. And she put the dog down and then put a goat down and tried to justify it with sometimes on the farm, we have to do this and we had to take care of some of my daughter's horses. But this isn't that. This is euthanizing a dog for no particular reason.
Cara Hetland:
And making it public.
Mike Card:
And making it public.
Cara Hetland:
You usually don't talk about these things.
Mike Card:
No, I think I've had to put animals down who were suffering. A cat who had cancer, a dog who couldn't walk anymore because of the arthritis in his hips. And you cry. This is part of your life. We outlive some of these animals that are pets.
Cara Hetland:
Family.
Mike Card:
They are. Yeah. You arrange your life around their needs as well as our partner's needs.
Cara Hetland:
True. True. So as I read the excerpt, I read a lot of the coverage. I keep asking myself, "What was the point she's trying to make?"
Jon Hunter:
Well, first of all, that's why you write books and to try to appeal to whoever you're trying to appeal to, and Governor Noem is trying to appeal to Donald Trump. So she wanted to say she's tough. And they would maybe even, "I'd go to war. I'd send soldiers to Mexico or National Guard soldiers, but if I were in the vice president situation or a heartbeat away from the presidential situation, I'm tough. I can make tough decisions. I can do hard things and so forth."
It turns out to probably backfire. This wasn't the hard decision. The harder decision would be to train or to take the time to find a better home or something like that. So I do think it backfires. But again, I think trying to demonstrate that you can be tough was the goal of this. Why do you write these things? And I just think it was the wrong anecdote or whatever. And it may end up torpedoing the thing in the end.
Cara Hetland:
It could do more harm than good. You think so?
Jon Hunter:
I don't know much good. There probably is a small slice of our population that kind of cheers the killing of a pet, but I don't think they were going to vote against her. And again, she's not really concerned about a general election or anything else. She's concerned about getting this next step, which is to try to be the nominee. And yes, I do think there is enough criticism of it that it would cost reputation rather than gain.
Mike Card:
And because it was a pet. It may not have been a close pet, but it was a pet.
Cara Hetland:
It was a pet. Okay. So let's transition to just messaging in general. And what is it that voters want to hear and what is it really going to take to get voters to the polls? So we have a slight example in Sioux Falls and Mike Card, I'll let you talk a little bit about this, with a city election.
Mike Card:
Less than 8% of the eligible voting population showed up to vote. There were five races. Two of those were dealing with one nominee, one person who filed petitions and they were unopposed. The other three races, including the one that went to a runoff election, were contested elections. It's a sign of our democracy that we're not as democratic as we would like to think we are.
And I think that's because we really don't know what candidates have to say. We don't listen. We may vote early. I think I'm stealing some of Jon's thunder here, but I'll let him go further into that. We end up looking for clues as to who to vote for. We look at party identification, we look at the color of the yard signs, but what we aren't looking at is what are they going to do when they're in office?
And we don't go to cracker barrels. We have a very small population in District 17 and in Vermillion. We're going to have three cracker barrels, but they're all in May. But that's when we could schedule the candidates for the county commission, the school board, we have grouped together our elections so that we don't have to have multiple elections. But even then we may get, well, somewhere between 15 and 45 people to show up for these cracker barrels.
In Vermillion, we've televised them so that they're over local access cable and they're on the Facebook page of the local Vermillion area Chamber of Commerce and Development Company. But people still don't know. We look for these heuristics as opposed to what they actually have to say about the issues that voters might be concerned about.
Jon Hunter:
There are, in many cases, these local elections. If there is not a contentious issue or if people seem to think that things are going okay, you'll have lower turnout. That's just the reality. So if you have a controversial issue that comes with this, let's say a school board somewhere in rural South Dakota wants to build a new school or something that'd be a big bond issue and so forth, you would get higher turnout.
So I think in Sioux Falls, at least to a small degree, it's like, yeah, things seem to be kind of okay. I am just not as interested. If things were going south or poorly, I think you'd see higher turnout. But, I totally agree with Mike where you said you'd love to be able to see these either debate or cracker barrel or some sort of discussion about what your vision is.
Frankly, I find it interesting. If I'm going to a Sioux Falls resident and someone says, "Hey, I have this vision of developing North Phillips Avenue," or something like that, whatever these things are, I think that's part of the more interesting parts of this. Or "I am in favor of building a new baseball stadium," or "I want to pave the roads, take out the potholes," or "I want to lower taxes." I think that's interesting.
So I don't know if there were those kind of opportunities in Sioux Falls. I am not a citizen of Sioux Falls. But were there debates, were there discussions, were there interviews or there's a lot of public discourse about this election?
Cara Hetland:
I didn't see it. And I looked to educate myself as a voter, and here I am, a member of the media. I didn't see it. And so is this on us, media in general? Is this on us to do a better job? Or, have we been so beaten down by candidates not willing to talk that we just choose to cover the results? I don't know.
Jon Hunter:
I don't know either. And there might be circumstances where candidates maybe wouldn't want their preferences out there and I just want to be elected.
Again, to think about this, pretend there was a close race and it was less than 8%. You could win a city council race in a two-person race with 4% of the vote, right? 4% of the eligible people voted for you. 96% either didn't vote or voted against you, and you could still be a winner.
Cara Hetland:
96%.
Jon Hunter:
Right? Did I do the math right?
Cara Hetland:
You did. You did. And that's scary.
Mike Card:
Well, we have a city of 200,000 or more people, and we basically had a thousand people go to vote.
Jon Hunter:
It'd be interesting to know what the demographics were. I'm sure someone has speculated what that is. Are they old, young, Republicans, Democrats, urban core, outer core? I don't know.
Cara Hetland:
It's worth a study. And you then, should the city pair it with a primary election and not have its own? I don't know. There's a whole lot of, are voters fatigued in general and don't want to own the responsibility of ruining a good thing, which is life right now?
Mike Card:
Well, we do have life right now, but local government is when you determine when your streets are going to get plowed, whether we're going to build a new school, whether we're going to engage in a construction project that may upset traffic for a while, but should make traffic flow easier when it's done. Local government is the thing that is going to influence our lives as we live it. What is happening in Washington may have an effect on us. But the way that they're campaigning for national office, it's all about emotions. They are using what I would say is demagogue's language to draw a distinction between themselves and another candidate as opposed to another candidate's position. They create a following. And with that following, it's just better to keep disparaging their opponents.
Cara Hetland:
And the ripple effect of that messaging comes down all the way to local races, do you think?
Jon Hunter:
Well, I think that's the irony, is that the things that matter most, that Mike is talking about to us, is where we vote a lower percentage than the things that don't matter to us. And again, in South Dakota, South Dakota will vote Republican in November. Frankly, it doesn't matter if I go to the polls this year,
California is going to vote Democrat in November. You think Californians are being left out of the race. It's going to be by a handful of swing states. That's where everyone's going to campaign. That's where all the rallies will be. It's where all the advertisements will be.
So it does seem weird. I just think it's ironic that we can have a lot of influence in these local elections if we chose to, which could result in different positions. But that's where we are. We're observers. I don't know solutions necessarily. Combining elections is a great idea. The highest percentage are always the general election when a president is elected. Those are always the highest percentages. So if you can tag onto that one, you'd be more likely to have good voting.
Mike Card:
On the other hand, the argument against that is that the national issues are going to dominate the local issues. And even though we have an office ballot now where we vote by office, as opposed to having a column of Democrats, a column of Republicans, and there used to be you could put a check mark at the top and you didn't have to mark any of the other offices. Made it easy to count votes. But that shouldn't be the criterion.
And I think people are nervous about saying what they want and asking questions because they don't want to be attacked back. And I think that's a problem is we need to listen to each other. We need to repeat back what we heard from the other person and then ask them if we got it right, if we're worried about it. We see so many people, even within their own families, they're having these real conflicts about issues that really don't have a lot of influence in our lives.
Cara Hetland:
So early voting for the June primary has started in South Dakota, and a lot of legislative races will likely be decided in this primary. Same kind of conversation line here. Do we even know who these candidates are?
Jon Hunter:
Yeah, it is, I think, a function of early voting, which I in general endorse because everyone may not be available on that particular Tuesday between seven and seven or whatever the times are. So I do like that. But I think in South Dakota, we've made that too early. It's between six and seven weeks before the election. And so in Madison, we had no conversations. Frankly, early voting had already started before I knew who the candidates were.
So I had to go to a Secretary of State site or whatever to find out who the candidates were. After early voting, then you maybe get a few yard signs, but certainly no Chamber of Commerce sponsored debates or discussions or Cracker Barrels or any of those. No advertisements in the newspaper or on radio. And so I just think, and there may be circumstances where candidates drop out between 40 days or whatever-
Mike Card:
45.
Jon Hunter:
45. Thank you. And then you will have your vote for a person who isn't in the race anymore. I just think it's too early. I am certainly in favor of it, but let's make it two weeks or three weeks or four weeks or something, not six and a half.
Mike Card:
And if anything, we're sort of getting a situation where we may not like open primaries because you can vote in somebody else's party. But if it gets more people to vote, we may end up with better candidates that are more reflective of the population's wishes. But that means we have to get them to talk.
Jon Hunter:
Well, and that's another irony you bring up, Mike, is that to be nominated for an office by a party you have to be partisan. You have to be that far, and then they're asked to switch to something else when you're appealing to others. So it's a bit of a paradox for candidates. How do you stand on issues when you need to get nominated by one set of group and elected by another?
