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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.

Allison Renville (standing), John Kennedy Claussen, Ann Tornberg, and Tom Cool, candidates for SDDP chair, Aberdeen, SD, 2019.03.20.
Allison Renville (standing), John Kennedy Claussen, Ann Tornberg, and Tom Cool, candidates for SDDP chair, Aberdeen, SD, 2019.03.20.

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.

7 Comments

  1. John 2019-03-23 09:57

    Cory, can you explain the voting process for the chair election?

    Might be a good article also about the process and being transparent.

    How many people vote and from where? I assume winner needs a majority if no one wins on first ballot is lowest eliminated and revote or how does it work?

    Thank you in advance

  2. 96Tears 2019-03-23 11:11

    Here is all you need to know about Ann Tornberg’s tenure as state party chair, and Cory laid it out succinctly: “… 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?”

    Tornberg seems to go through the motions, and maybe, intellectually, she is aware of what must be done. But she is no leader. Not even a tiny bit.

    Time for a change. JKC, of the four mentioned above, is the best of the lot. Top pick of the six, Paula Hawks.

  3. Laurisa 2019-03-23 13:31

    I’m really hoping that Renville doesn’t come out on top, mainly for two reasons. First, her ignorant, uninformed, wrong-headed and completely uncalled-for smear on Billie Sutton. This is Democratic circular firing squad tactics at its disgusting worst, and at a time when the party desperately needs to be united as one against the most dangerous pols and their policies that we’ve had to face. For that, alone, she should be defeated.
    But a second reason is that she makes the mistake that is, unfortunately, all too common with Dems; she puts primary emphasis on presidential election times, and the very top of tickets, instead of recognizing the critical importance of local, stare and congressional elections and the necessity of building strong grass roots can from the bottom up. It doesn’t matter how many “eager” outside experts and activists you bring in during presidential elections if you don’t have the strong statewide grass roots to begin with.

  4. Cory Allen Heidelberger Post author | 2019-03-23 23:02

    John, sorry to leave you hanging. I was on the road when you commented and then on the job circulating my petition in Oacoma for six solid hours.

    The Central Committee adopted an election procedure today in which all six candidates appeared on the first ballot. If one candidate had received a majority on that ballot, that candidate would have been declared chair. The Central Committee decided, before that outcome, that in that instance, they would put the top two vote-getters in a run-off, giving them ten minutes to caucus/whip/what have you before the second vote.

    If the Central Committee had not adopted that procedure, we would have defaulted to Robert’s Rules, which do not require any candidate to drop out and do not provide for any winnowing run-off procedure. Under pure Robert’s Rules, all nominees may stay in the running for as long as they want, through as many rounds of voting as it may take to convince a majority to settle on one candidate.

    There’s nothing wrong with adopting a different voting procedure from the default Robert’s Rules procedure.

    Note that the State of South Dakota allows individuals to take office with a mere plurality of votes, as long as at least one candidate gets more than 35%. (I don’t like that law and would support a required top-two run-off to guarantee that every elected official takes office on a majority vote.)

    Also important: the election of SDDP state officers is weighted: “Each county shall cast the number of votes equal to the county’s proportionate vote for the Democratic candidate for governor in the last gubernatorial election” [SDDP Constitution, Article 6 Section 4]. That means we don’t just count heads: votes from each county are multiplied by a factor of their turnout for Sutton in 2018. Thus, the vote from Minnehaha County is worth 150 times that of the vote from Hyde County, the smallest-weighted county at today’s meeting.

    See my spreadsheet for the county-by-county Sutton 2018 totals and the resulting weights.

  5. Debbo 2019-03-23 23:48

    Cory’s last paragraph of the post is perhaps most critical for SD Democrats. Very well said, Cory.

  6. Cory Allen Heidelberger Post author | 2019-03-24 09:32

    Thanks, Debbo! That’s the key: we have to look beyond the heat of the moment, the thrill of internal politics and parliamentary procedure, and any one personality and look to our core mission: giving every person a stake in governing.

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