Four SDDP Chair Candidates Spoke in Aberdeen Wednesday

I take a moment before hitting the road this morning to summarize the rest of my 2,800 words of notes from Wednesday’s forum for candidates for South Dakota Democratic Party chair here in Aberdeen. Four of the six declared candidates attended.

I write with some hesitance, because I know in this case my interested audience consists of maybe a hundred voting members of the SDDP Central Committee, out of whom maybe only a third have not yet made up their minds. I’ll see all of them in person in a few hours, and if I really have an opinion on who’d be the best chair, I can give that opinion to them in person (while they sign the People Power Petition!).

And my opinion on the chair election really boils down to this simple line: any chair who is willing to invest Party resources in the People Power Petition is a good enough chair for me. All four of the chair candidates who came to Aberdeen Wednesday signed the petition Wednesday, so that’s a good start!

I don’t see this election as a make-or-break election. Who wins in Oacoma today will not matter if the grassroots don’t stand up and take action. We are not electing a leader to bring us out of the desert. We are electing a chair to represent us and carry out the efforts that grassroots Democrats are willing to do. If local party chairs don’t take the reins and launch their own initiatives, if rank-and-file Democrats don’t speak up, rise up, and giddy-up, Barack Obama himself couldn’t move to Sioux Falls and save this party. Electing more Democrats and checking the wave of ignorant corporate fascism pouring from the current Republican Administration does not hinge on any one person. The good of the party and the good of the state depend on every person doing and doing good.

That said, what did those chair candidates say?

Incumbent chair Ann Tornberg said that everybody wanting change should look at all the change she’s made during her four years chairing the Party. Under her watch, Tornberg said the SDDP has added a West River office (and when the money’s available, she told an Aberdeen crowd of maybe fifteen people that included maybe three voting members that she wants to open an Aberdeen office), increased staffing from two to five, is adding a sixth staffer April 1 to focus on tribal organizing, deployed 38 part-time staff to run the coordinated campaign in 2018, raised over $800K for the 2018 campaign, budgeted $661K for this year, and helped Billie Sutton come within three percentage points of Kristi Noem among voters who just two years prior chose Donald Trump by 30 points over Hillary Clinton.

Tom Cool emphasized the need for grassroots action. Cool noted that he has thirty years in grassroots organizing as the executive director of the South Dakota Council of College Admissions. He has spent those many years recruiting volunteers and organizing workshops and conferences. Cool said voter registration drives may not produce results, since young people are largely registering independent. Cool said he wants to forge stronger alliances with progressive groups like LEAD, which he credited with great success in electing candidates in districts some thought were unwinnable. Cool also wants to have more regional meetings with local party leaders instead of just big statewide meetings to allow more planning and idea-sharing.

On connecting with other groups, Tornberg noted that the SDDP has brought in an Indivisible 605 organizer to work on the SDDP finance committee and has put Brooke Abdallah from South Dakota Forward to work for the party.

Allison Renville focused on including more of the folks who aren’t represented well in government or party leadership in South Dakota. She emphasized her national organizing connections, touting work for the Obama and Sanders campaigns and Facebook pages with tens of thousands of followers. (At one point, she said Tornberg has only been involved for four years as chair, while Renville has been involved longer in campaigns.) Renville says she has connections outside the state who are eager to come via Presidential campaigns to help us take back our government. Renville took credit for organizing Bernie Sanders’s 2018 rally in Sioux Falls and getting 4,700 people to the event on 48 hours notice, outdoing the crowd who came to see Bill Clinton by a factor of 10.

Later in the forum, John Kennedy Claussen noted that the Sanders rally may have drawn ten times the crowd that the Clinton rally did, but Hillary Clinton still beat Sanders 51% to 49% in the primary. (If activists all cheer at a rally but don’t show up to vote, did they really make any noise?)

Renville said the Democratic Party must embrace independents and other non-aligned voters and maybe open our process even further, not just allowing independents to vote in our primaries (on the rare occasions we offer them) but also endorsing and supporting candidates who don’t run with the Democratic label but who support our values and policies.

John Kennedy Claussen spoke of his early involvement in Democratic politics during the Kneip/McGovern/Daschle era. He noted that after running for Legislature in the 1990s, he backed away from political involvement to raise his kids and do business. Now that his kids are both grown up and successful (daughter works for Sanford, son works for the City of Sioux Falls), Claussen is eager to re-engage with politics in a big way. He offered a straightforward four-point plan of registering voters (50,000 new Democrats on the rolls in five years), targeting races, getting out the vote, and hosting a boot camp to recruit the next generation of young Democratic activists. Citing Truman, Claussen added that the public won’t buy any effort to brand ourselves as Republican-Lite. Claussen didn’t give Truman’s full quote, but I will:

I’ve seen it happen time after time. When the Democratic candidate allows himself to be put on the defensive and starts apologizing for the New Deal and the fair Deal, and says he really doesn’t believe in them, he is sure to lose. The people don’t want a phony Democrat. If it’s a choice between a genuine Republican, and a Republican in Democratic clothing, the people will choose the genuine article, every time; that is, they will take a Republican before they will a phony Democrat, and I don’t want any phony Democratic candidates in this campaign.

But when a Democratic candidate goes out and explains what the New Deal and fair Deal really are–when he stands up like a man and puts the issues before the people–then Democrats can win, even in places where they have never won before. It has been proven time and again [President Harry S. Truman, Address at the National Convention Banquet of the Americans for Democratic Action, Washington, D.C., 1952.05.17].

Every chair candidate said reasonable things about how to run a party and improve our chances of winning elections. Here in Aberdeen, only Renville showed a propensity for exaggeration that could distract from the party’s efforts to rebuild. (I was going to say damage… but when we hold no statewide offices and only 16 out of 105 seats in the Legislature and can’t beat a cipher like Jason Ravnsborg, is there any damage to be done?)

I look forward to observing this afternoon’s vote. I urge every voting member of the SDDP Central Committee to vote their conscience and, more importantly, to vote with the awareness that no party chair will single-handedly bring the Democratic Party to success in South Dakota. Chairs don’t make the party; we the people do, with our grassroots actions to fight for the common good of South Dakota.

We make our own fate… and by we, I don’t just mean the tiny audience of undecided voters reading these notes on Tornberg, Cool, Renville, and Claussen. I mean the 158,880 registered Democrats and the other 391,286 registered South Dakota voters who need to work together every day to make our fate better.