Last month South Dakota’s Chiesman Center for Democracy launched a last-minute campaign to encourage voters to sign initiative petitions. Sioux Falls grant consultant Michael Wyland got worried that the Chiesman Center for Democracy was fronting for some unnamed national group, but his concerns appeared to spring from a too-hasty reading of the campaign’s URL. Wyland learned that the campaign was designed by Media One, whose chief, Jon Fiksdal, is a longtime supporter of ballot questions and for-hire coordinator of petition drives.
Wyland elaborates on his concerns about campaign finance transparency in the Media One/Chiesman promotion in a LinkedIn post. Wyland stretches enormously to cling to criticism of the campaign, suggesting that the existence of URLs and slogans similar to the Chiesman Center’s “Join the Conversation” suggest that some nefarious out-of-state influence is at work. Wyland makes his stretch clear with his own words, in this single-most important passage in his essay:
It’s likely that he South Dakota version of Join the Conversation is precisely what Media One and Chiesman say it is. Unfortunately, looking at publicly available Internet-based information leads to a far different conclusion than does a simple conversation with the two people most intimately involved with the effort. If Chiesman had publicly acknowledged and thanked Media One for its providing the web site and video, and if Media One had participated openly in the promotion effort for the campaign the firm created and financed, questions would have been far fewer and suspicions would have been all but eliminated [Michael Wyland, “Murky Accountability When SD Politics, Advertising, and Nonprofits Meet,” LinkedIn, 2017.11.22].
Wyland admits the Chiesman/Media One campaign is most likely precisely what they say it is. There is no basis for a “far different conclusion” other than the wishful thinking of Wyland, who appears not to want to admit that he went on a wild Google-goose chase, and the South Dakota Republican Party spin blog, which has a keen stake in undermining public faith in direct democracy.
In trying to rouse suspicion of outside influence in ballot measure campaigns on zero concrete evidence, Wyland breezes past the evidence he does have of outside influence, the SDGOP/Koch Brothers campaign to undermine initiative and referendum:
The state’s Republican Party and some other critics are encouraging voters to refuse to sign any petitions being circulated. The “Don’t Sign on the Line” initiative was defended by SD GOP Chairman Dan Lederman. “The initiative and referendum process was established in South Dakota to allow a government that’s more responsive to its citizens,” Lederman said. “Not for whatever D.C. or California special interest group who could write the biggest check and send in armies for a slick, street-corner sell.” The conservative/libertarian Americans for Prosperity-South Dakota (AFP-SD) has its own “Stop, Think, and Ask Before You Sign any Petitions” campaign [Wyland, 2017.11.22].
Americans for Prosperity is the Koch Brothers’ propaganda arm in South Dakota. They poured big money into South Dakota in a losing fight against Initiated Measure 22 in 2016. They worked in tandem with the SDGOP this fall to make people think petitions are evil. Yet at no point does Wyland raise concerns that the Koch Brothers won’t be filing any campaign finance reports telling us who donated to their anti-democracy campaign (and they won’t, and under state law, they don’t have to, and neither does the Chiesman Center).
Wyland is a good corruption watchdog. He has written and spoken intelligently about the GEAR UP scandal, providing useful, unbiased insights without going overboard on conspiracy theories. Yet in casting suspicion on the Chiesman Center’s effort to promote citizen participation in democracy while letting pass the Koch Brothers’ effort to keep South Dakotans from meddling with their big-money dominance, Wyland seems to be flogging a rock that he mistook for a horse.
What’s the purpose of people encouraging people not to participate fully in democracy? Think about that and you come to the likely conclusion that the only reason could be that they want to promote an authoritarian and corrupt system of government. Just as the Republican Party wants only the “right” people to vote, and thus develops measures to exclude as many minorities, students, and poor folks as possible, they also don’t want anyone to mess with their monopoly on writing the laws and rules that you and I, but not they, live under. If you and I write the laws, maybe they can’t be as corrupt as they want to be or engage in dumping New Jersey’s nuclear waste in your backyard, while they skim a little money off the top. Just think about why they don’t want you to vote or participate. Then do the opposite of what they want.
Cory:
Thanks for your post. I appreciate your comments. I didn’t intend to give the Koch brothers and AFP a pass, but I can see where that impression comes from.
Personally, I thought it was more interesting and more provocative that the GOP was campaigning against signing petitions. After all, interest groups do as they do, but political parties taking a position against participative democracy was more remarkable.
But, Michael, it’s not really that remarkable, because discouraging people from participating in our democracy has been a long-standing practical outcome of everything the Republican Party has done for the past few decades in South Dakota and elsewhere. That they becoming more outspoken and arrogant about insisting on restricting voting rights and public participation might be more remarkable, but, really, I’ve heard a lot of anti-democracy talk by Republicans. Consider the following ideas from some Republicans: return to the days when blacks, Indians, women and property-less white folks couldn’t vote, and have state legislators select US Senators, rather than the people. Making America great again for the robber barrons is the stated intent of many in the Republican Party.
The Democrat Party has an even longer history of discouraging the participation of all who are righteously allowed. For all you finger pointers…I’m just sayin…
grudz don’t be stupid. are you back on the Southern Dems being the devils before republicans took over?
Kochs should never fail to get mentioned as saboteurs hiding their actions from public concerns.
their only concern, just like Trump’s and grdz’s apparently, is polluting the world for more billions of personal income to the vast PREDATION of the vast majority of Americans. pigs, in a word.
Access to Mulvaney appears to be to hire his former congressional chief of staff, Al Simpson, who joined the lobbying firm Mercury in February.
Simpson had seven meetings and a phone call with Mulvaney in a four-month period, between April and August. He appears on Mick Mulvaney’s, the former South Carolina congressman who now runs the White House Office of Management and Budget’s, calendars more frequently than anyone who is not a current government official.
Often, Simpson brought lobbying clients with him, including representatives from building materials giant Cemex; pharma firm AmerisourceBergen; and BlueCross BlueShield of South Carolina. Those three firms paid Mercury $360,000 in the first nine months of the year.
In July, Simpson and Koch Industries lobbyists Brian Henneberry and Raymond Paul met with Mulvaney. https://www.propublica.org/article/whos-dropping-in-on-trump-budget-czar-mick-mulvaney
Thank you, Michael, for your response. I will hypothetically agree that it would be newsworthy if we discovered that the Chiesman Center and Media One really were tools of some outside group trying to manipulate South Dakota’s elections, as surely as we have a keen interest in the Russians’ efforts to undermine Western democracy with their online propaganda campaigns (interesting: we love the direct democracy of initiative and referendum to circumvent the elitist obstructionism of our Legislature; the Russians love the direct propaganda of fake social media pages to circumvent the gatekeeper function of the mass media’s professional journalists). But we just don’t have the evidence of outside influence in the “Join the Conversation” promotion. We do have evidence of Koch Brothers’ influence in the anti-democracy campaign. We may not be surprised by it, as Donald notes, but we should take note of it and fight it.
We can measure the attention-worthiness of the two campaigns by imagining the fullest impacts of each campaign in the most cynical scenarios:
If the Chiesman/Media One campaign achieved its goal, and if it had been a secret plot by outside forces, the worst that would have happened was that lots of South Dakotans would have rushed out to sign petitions. The circulators would all have collected more signatures, and we’d have ten initiatives, including medical marijuana and assisted suicide, on the ballot. If the outside influencers’ real goal was the enactment of any one or all of those measures, those influencers would still face a much longer and costlier advertising (“Vote Yes on Everything”?) and get-out-the-vote campaign.
If the SDGOP/Koch Don’t-Sign campaign had had its fullest impact, it would have reduced the number of petitions submitted from eight to zero. Citizens would have no direct voice on any of these issues in the 2018 election. The way would be clear for the Legislature to put forward its democracy-stifling amendments on the ballot and encourage Yes votes. Citizen activists would be discouraged by the electorate’s rejection of their overtures this year from pursuing reform via initiative in future cycles.
The Chiesman Center/Media One was a very mild, general, and harmless campaign producing at best intermediate results. It’s hard to imagine it would have come from any specific sponsor with a specific agenda tied to just one of the ballot measures; if the secret outside backers were focused on the drug price cap or the assisted-suicide initiative, they would have gotten more bang for their buck by simply hiring more circulators for that specific petition and sending them to canvass untapped neighborhoods (like any town smaller than Sioux Falls or Rapid City).
The SDGOP/Koch campaign was a very direct, aggressive, and harmful effort to undo all efforts to promote direct democracy in South Dakota. It’s hard to imagine worse or more attention-worthy intentions behind the Chiesman campaign.