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Tapio Testing Waters for House Run

screen cap from SDPB, 2017.03.07

Neal Tapio for Congress? Ha ha!

The rookie Senator from District 5 told WNAX Tuesday that he is “testing the waters” for a run for U.S. House. He got Pat Powers’s rumor mill all excited about an announcement that didn’t happen at last night’s Codington County GOP Lincoln Day Dinner.

Tapio may be South Dakota’s biggest Trump wannabe. He made a few thousand bucks consulting the Trump campaign last year. He was named Trump’s campaign leader in South Dakota, but since Trump didn’t do any campaigning in South Dakota, Tapio went and fiddled around in Colorado, where Trump lost. Tapio tried to bring Trump’s unmanned smallness to the Legislature, overexerting himself on a paranoid yet toothless resolution against Islam and refugees that his own party rejected.

After the Inauguration, Tapio said people protesting the Trump Administration “have a different mentality from the people of South Dakota” and likened anti-Trump forces to anarchists. I’d love to see Tapio bring some of his anarchy to the GOP primary against GOP stalwarts Shantel Krebs and Dusty Johnson and see just how different South Dakota Republicans’ mentality is from him and Donald Trump after 16.5 months of Trump’s predictable attacks on rural America.

Against GOP mainstays Shantel Krebs and Dusty Johnson, Democrats may reasonably hesitate to enter the House race (although we already have one, Chris Martian, fourteen months out from primary). Against a Newspeaking Trumpist like Tapio who wants to kill Medicaid, anti-Trump activists may fall al over each other racing to the courthouse to get petitions and make 2018 a real referendum on Il Duce.

5 Comments

  1. o 2017-04-20 10:39

    Not for nothing, Candidate Trump won the SD primary with 67% of the vote. 61.5%of the population voted for Trump. There is no real “main-stream” media outcry against the President. I am not so sure that the people of SD see Trump as the poison pill.

  2. Vance Feyereisen 2017-04-20 14:39

    When the Bush carp hit the fan it was difficult to find a person in SD that would admit to voting for him. The same thing will happen to Trumpy.

  3. o 2017-04-20 15:34

    Vance, you may be right, but Bush II won SD by 22% and 21% respectively. I would be willing to bet that most of those who voted for Bush could not even now – after the carp hit the fan – even name the Democrats who ran against him in each election, much less make a persuasive plea that they voted (or wished they had voted) for either of those Democratic candidates.

    Given what we know and have experienced from Trump, does anyone believe SD would shift its support to Secretary Clinton if there were a re-do today? Could there really be a 12%+ swing of buyer’s remorse in this state?

  4. Cory Allen Heidelberger Post author | 2017-04-20 18:05

    O, you’re right: Trump won easily last year, as did Bush II both times. I won’t suggest that Hillary Clinton would win a redo here. But Bush didn’t provide big coattails, did he? Will Trump?

  5. Vance Feyereisen 2017-04-22 13:07

    Where is Spicer when you need him. I need to clarify.

    In my previous post I did not mean to imply that Bush voters would, if given the opportunity, vote for the Dems candidate.
    I was merely pointing out that repubs were not very proud of their vote. If such a large vote swing were possible we would not have the congressional delegation we do.

Comments are closed.