Noem’s Ohio Chum Got Contract Despite Low Rankings from GOED Review Team

Last updated on 2024-01-15

Patrick Lalley is really sinking his teeth into the story of how an Ohio political ad firm with connections to Corey Lewandowski landed a five-million-dollar deal to plagiarize Kristi Noem’s vanity bad-plumber ads. In his article last week about the selection process, Lalley reports that Ohio’s Go West Media, the corporate paper tiger Strategic Media Placement honcho Ben Yoho filed in South Dakota just a few days after sitting at Noem’s inauguration next to Lewandowski, did not appear to make a great impression with the Governor’s Office of Economic Development:

…of the seven proposals that were submitted, five were selected for interviews by former GOED Marketing Director Nate Welch.

A team of seven staff reviewed the proposals and sat in on the interviews. In addition to Welch, the team included:

• Travis Dovre, finance director
• Ann Gesick-Johnson, business analytics director
• Ashley McCloud, graphic designer
• Sarah Ebeling, communications coordinator
• McCade Ivarsen, marketing coordinator
• Josh Bixler, videographer

…A summary of the presentations was given verbally to Steve Westra, who was GOED commissioner at the time, by Dovre, the finance director.

“Westra signed off on the final decision based on the feedback that he received from the GOED team,” Schilken wrote.

However, an informal tabulation of individual members’ ranking of the companies does exist, according to a person familiar with the negotiations. In that process, the team was asked for their top two favorites.

Sioux Falls Live obtained a copy of that non-binding ranking, showing that Go West wasn’t the first choice of any of the team members and was the second choice of only two.

The team was also asked which firm they would not choose. Two members put Go West in that category [Patrick Lalley, “Governor’s Office Offers Lawmakers Private viewing of Freedom Works Here Proposals,” Sioux Falls Live, 2023.12.04].

Nobody’s first choice, only two out of seven judges’ second choice, and two other judges’ last choice. Having pored over lots of high school speech ballots, I know it’s hard, if not impossible, for a speaker to come up with rankings like that and still win the final round. Under the simple method of adding up ranks and taking the lowest number as the winner, any other contender who got three first-place votes would have mathematically beaten Go West. Even if the seven judges maximally spread out their first place picks, three of the other four bidders would have gotten two first-place votes. The only way those lucky three could have lost to Go West is if they received the lowest possible remaining rankings from the other five judges—and remember, two of the judges already ranked Go West last, so the worst they could do to the other contestants who got two firsts from other judges would be to give them fours and threes. And if we sandbag the two-first contestants, then the remaining twos and threes cluster on the fifth contestant who got one first, and that contestant comes out ahead of the no-first, two-fifth Go West.

You’d think Dovre the numbers guy would have talked numbers with Westra. But Dovre and Westra are closer to Noem, and Noem will tell any number-cruncher who tries to get in the way of her agenda with simple math to kiss her abacus.