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Janette McIntyre Bolts GOP, Plans CP Run for District 34 Senate

Janette McIntyre knows how to change her mind. In 2012, she admitted she had been wrong to back Governor Dennis Daugaard’s terrible, horrible, no-good education reform plan and joined me in pushing to refer and kill that year’s House Bill 1234. Now Daugaard and the GOP mainstreamers have pushed McIntyre to change her lifelong voter registration from Republican to Constitution Party:

Janette McIntyre
Janette McIntyre

Those who truly represent the people and not the tax and spend mentality are becoming fewer and fewer. Those who want to tax voters into oblivion have a way of justifying it with a “Government knows best” arrogant attitude. The people are being ignored.

In my personal case, the party didn’t just leave me it worked against me. The Governor and others supported with donations and endorsements candidates not recognized as conservative and were successful in defeating many of them. That has been my experience not once but twice. I’m usually a much quicker learner than that.

It is because of my experience over the last 20 years that today I will join the Constitution Party. As a lifelong Republican I don’t believe that they are the party that best represents my philosophy of less government intrusion and less taxes. My main issues of Right to Life and the 2nd Amendment are supported 100% by the Constitution Party, the only 3rd party that does [link added; Janette McIntyre, “Leaving the Republican Party,” The Right Side, 2018.06.21].

When she says the party “worked against” her, McIntyre refers to this year’s District 34 House primary, in which McIntyre lost to incumbent Rep. Michael Diedrich and newcomer Jess Olson, each of whom received $1,000 blessings from Governor Daugaard. McIntyre intends to get back on the campaign horse and run for District 34 Senate against incumbent Republican Jeff Partridge and Democrat Zach Van Wyk. McIntyre would thus become the second or third (depending on how Rick Gortmaker fares in the now three-way battle for the gubernatorial nomination) CP candidate for Legislature.

McIntyre battled Partridge in the 2016 GOP District 34 Senate primary and fell short by 246 votes, 7.6 percentage points. But Partridge won the 2016 general election against Democratic challenger Jay Shultz 7,292 to 3,889, a 30.4 percentage-point gap. If similar dynamics held this year, McIntyre would have to get around 4,000 Partridge voters to abandon the alluring R and take a chance on the Constitution Party. (And of course, I’ll be reminding the Democrat in the race that, in that scenario, he needs to bring in 200 more voters than his predecessor to pull off an upset over the split Rapid City conservative electorate.)

McIntyre’s blog-friend Gordon Howie is certainly promoting conservative angst in response to what he views as the creeping Leftism espoused by the mainstream GOP at its convention last weekend. Perhaps McIntyre can get Howie and other far-right campaigners to put their voter registration cards where their mouths are and help the Constitution Party field an even larger raucous caucus of conservative Legislative candidates.

9 Comments

  1. Rorschach

    Sen. Stace Nelson should be next. His views are more closely aligned with the Constitution Party than with the present Republican Party. But we all know that the big bull elephant prefers the safety of a big herd – even a herd where he’s a back-bencher.

  2. Porter Lansing

    The Constitution Party? What a great idea. A political party dedicated to revising and reinterpreting the Constitution, the living breathing document (designed as such) when it was written. There’s quite a backlog of things needed after 220 years. Our founding fathers and mothers would be quite disappointed that the inheritors of our Constitution have not tried hard enough to adapt the document to developments they couldn’t have anticipated.
    ~ Here’re some ideas to get ‘ya goin’, Janette. Sound radical? The founders were all about being radical.
    ~ Restoring the war powers balance. (Would the founders approve of years long wars without explicit legislative approval?)
    ~ Creating a more representative Senate (California and South Dakota get the same number of US Senators? Cali has 70 times the population. 17% of USA population elects a majority of the Senate.)
    ~ Instituting Judiciary Term Limits (Founders would have limited judicial authority, especially the insularity of lifetime tenure upon witnessing the overwhelming power of the Supreme Court.)
    ~ There’s a few to begin with, Howie, Janette and company. Because truthfully, claiming the Constitution is perfect is just being lazy. Saying and voting NO on everything new is just being lazy. Using no brain power to develop new ideas to help the people is just being really lazy. Refusing to raise the money to invest in South Dakota is just being burdensome and lazy.
    ~ If you want “set in stone” go read the base of our Statue of Liberty and apply that to our current immigrant issue.
    Good luck and stop being lazy. (Janette … training clowns and comedians for Carnival can wait.)

  3. grudznick

    1.2.3.4 was one of the best ideas in the last three score years. It would have paid good teachers more money. Instead, now the slackards get the same raises the good ones get, and the Seven Indisputable Levels of Teacher (SILT) goes unrewarded according to their abilities. The SILT, of course, still exists today. We can only hope the next Governor brings back 1.2.3.4.

  4. If Governor Sutton tries to revive HB 1234, I will rally my caucus to impeach him.

    If we somehow are stuck with a Governor Noem, she’ll find the bill number too complicated.

    If Libertarian Kurt Evans wins, the Libertarians will simply abolish the Department of Education (and I might not try to stop them).

    If the CP nominee wins, they’ll be too busy burning down Pierre to implement any bills.

  5. Debbo

    Thats funny Cory, and probably accurate. 😊

  6. Lori

    Hilarious Cory. I’ll pass you an extra torch, lol.

  7. mike from iowa

    Master, you have some unusual, to say the least, friends. I’m not sure your Mother would approve of some of them.

    From the O Jays Back Stabbers-

    All you fellows who have someone
    And you really care, yeah, yeah
    Then it’s all of you fellows
    Who better beware, yeah yeah
    Somebody’s out to get your lady
    A few of your buddies they sure look shady
    Blades are long, clenched tight in their fist
    Aimin’ straight at your back
    And I don’t think they’ll miss

    You’re exceedingly passionate about politics. Watch yer back.

  8. Thanks for the warning, Mike, but one main thesis of this blog since the very beginning is that the fears my neighbors have of speaking up are fantastically exaggerated.

  9. grudznick

    Mr. Rorschach, that young Mr. Nelson fellow may fancy himself a big bull elephant but he has already shown that he has to tape on a pair of appropriately sized gonads to make himself feel better. I’m just sayin…

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