Dems Postpone Election for Chair Until March 23

Strike that January election! The Democratic Party’s State Central Committee must’ve mustered a quorum Saturday and decided to postpone election of new officers until March 23:

…the State Central Committee voted this weekend to to move the 2019 SDDP Officer Elections to Saturday, March 23. The time and location are the same — we will meet at the Arrowwood Resort & Conference Center, located at 1500 Shoreline Drive in Oacoma, South Dakota, and the meeting will begin at 1:00 p.m. CT in the Hale-Oacoma room.

Again, if you intend to run, please contact Sam Parkinson at sam@sddp.org for information on the election and campaigning process [South Dakota Democratic Party, e-mail, 2018.12.10].

I’m cool with this two-month delay for multiple reasons:

1. Aspiring chairs get another two months to contact county party leaders and build the support they’ll need to effectively challenge current chair Ann Tornberg’s bid for election to a second four-year term.
2. Party activists (not to mention interested legislators) won’t have to skip crackerbarrels on January 26 to trundle off to Oacoma for an intra-party affair. Instead, they’ll get ten days to recover from the final full day of the Legislative Session (March 13) before heading to the party election. (One fracas at a time, please!)
3. Session will give our new Democratic legislators a chance to show meet Dems from around the state, talk about the direction the party needs to go, and perhaps identify some good choices for party officers from among the money defenders of democracy who will come to Pierre to testify against the truckloads of crapola the Noem/McCaulley Administration will dump on us this Session.
4. Two months gives really eager chair candidates more time to recruit supportive Democrats to fill vacancies in 139 of the available 396 voting county party positions (and hey, if you can get people sign up to be Democratic officials in places like Sully, Potter, and Jones counties, you deserve a leg up in the chair election!).
5. It may still snow on March 23, but at least everyone will have two and a half more hours of daylight to drive in.

Remember: the vote for party chair and other statewide party offices isn’t a straight head count; it’s weighted by the votes Billie Sutton got in each county last month. According to my spreadsheet, not all votes are created equal. Just among our bigger burgs…

• …one vote from Sioux Falls counts 5.83 times as much as one vote from Brookings.
• …one vote from Rapid City counts 6.35 times as much as one vote from Pine Ridge.
• …one vote from Aberdeen counts 5.00 times as much as one vote from Flandreau.

You have two extra months to do your math, rally your troops, and storm the Oacoma to take over the party on March 23. Let’s rumble!