Representative Peri Pourier’s (R-27/Pine Ridge) announcement of her switch from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party was strangely unspecific to the state of politics in South Dakota. She spoke of “the national political landscape” and “federal policy failures”… though even there, the only specific “federal policy failure” she mentioned was the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, which was in effect and wreaking its alleged failures back when she first ran for Legislature as a Democrat in 2018. It’s just funny that Rep. Pourier wouldn’t cite anything specific that has happened or changed here in South Dakota, in the South Dakota Legislature, in either the South Dakota Democratic Party that she’s abandoning or the South Dakota Republican Party that she’s embracing, or even in her own thinking and understanding that motivated this significant change in political identification.
The only clear signal Rep. Pourier sends on her motivation for switching parties is the word “strategic“. She uses it in her announcement headline, “A Strategic Shift in Party Affiliation…”, and in her closing paragraph, “My decision reflects a strategic recalibration, one that strengthens my ability to advocate for our communities and deliver meaningful results.”
So it’s just political strategy, gaming the system, wearing the jersey of the team that wins. That’s fine. I understand that bills with Democratic sponsors are mostly dead on arrival in Pierre, and I understand keenly from my interactions with great Democratic pragmatists like Bernie Hunhoff, Billie Sutton, and Jamie Smith that philosophical idealism doesn’t win elections. A South Dakota legislator has choose careful words and take careful actions and make careful compromises to get things done. I get strategy. I’m not good at it, but I get it.
And I get strategy enough to understanding that declaring I’m switching to the Governor’s party on the eve of the Governor’s Special Session and then coming to Special Session and crapping all over the Governor’s historic 650-million-dollar prison deal is not strategy, it’s stupid.
Rep. Pourier took the floor during House debate on Senate Bill 2 Tuesday and made a nine-minute speech that lacked any strategy or coherent narrative, Pourier told a long story about her interaction with a poor, injured, “houseless” Lakota woman on the street in Rapid (not a woman in prison, not a woman who said anything about having been in prison, but whom Pourier said “I guarantee you” had been in prison and “probably has relatives in the prison system right now”) to whom she gave a meal and a pair of earrings and never saw again but whom she vaguely asserted represented the issues that her fellow representatives should consider while voting on the prison. Pourier said she couldn’t get over the fact that SB 2 was making the state’s biggest single investment ever in a prison. She spoke glowingly of Janklow’s dispatching of inmates to clean up a tornado disaster on the reservation and said that was better than putting inmates in “lockdown after lockdown after lockdown”. She asked why if the current penitentiary has such inhumane conditions we don’t just shut the prison down and move those prisons out now (though her imminent vote against building a new prison aimed to leave the state without a better more humane facility to move those prisoners for even longer) and why we didn’t deal with prison neglect sooner.
But the most telling statement Pourier made to demonstrate her lack of strategy, on top of her vote against the prison bill, was her statement that her “greatest fear” is that the Legislature would pass this bill and then forget all about rehabilitation, dismissing Governor Rhoden’s promise to convene a task force on rehabilitation.
Representative Pourier’s “strategy” appears to run like this:
- Grab headlines by switching to the Governor’s party on the eve of the Governor’s Special Session.
- Vote against the Governor’s huge prison bill, a deal that may define the Governor’s career and any chance he has of beating Dusty Johnson in the 2026 primary.
- Cast doubt on Governor Rhoden’s credibility on rehabilitation.
If that’s “strategy”, it looks like a strategy to ingratiate herself with the least powerful, least effective, and least logical faction of the Republican Party, the lunatic Hansen/Jensen/Garcia fringe who threw all sorts of distractions in their attempt to break Governor Rhoden’s prison deal. Dissing Governor Rhoden and helping the frequently losing Speaker Jon Hansen does not improve Pourier’s prospects of “delivering meaningful results” for District 27.
Again, I’m clearly a political idealist, not a pragmatic dealmaker and power broker, but if I were going to strategize in this moment and try to get something for my community from the powers that be by switching parties, I’d be throwing in with the real power in the Republican Party—i.e., the Rhoden/Venhuizen Administration. I’d promise the Governor my vote for the prison. I’d promise to go work on my neighbor Senator Red Dawn Foster to flip her from nay to aye to give the Governor more than a razor-thin margin in the Senate. I’d say good things on the House floor about the Governor’s proposed criminal rehab task force and offer to serve on that committee and help Lt. Gov. Venhuizen navigate another tremendously difficult topic and forge another amazingly successful deal. I’d bust my ass to carry water for my new state party leaders so that when the 2026 Session rolls around and I’m bringing a bill to make life better for my constituents, Rhoden and Venhuizen and senior policy advisor Ryan Brunner would notice and remember my valuable and loyal work and raise a friendly finger or two behind the scenes to boost my bill’s chances of passing.
But no other Democrat saw that as a compelling strategy. Every other Democrat in the Legislature except for the questionably Democratic Senator Foster voted for the Rhoden/Venhuizen prison deal. Every other Democrat in the Legislature can leap at the chance to serve on the rehab task force and work to keep that issue on the front burner. Every other Democrat but Foster recognized that they can play this Rhoden-pleasing game without switching parties.
And so did Pourier’s Republican seatmate from District 27, Rep. Liz May from Kyle. Rep. May has all sorts of right-wing crazy in her, but she didn’t see a need to pander to whoever among the District 27 constituents might oppose the Governor’s prison plan. May apparently doesn’t think she has to worry about this vote hurting her chances in the 2026 election with either the majority-Democratic District 27 voters with whom she already plays well enough or with the hardy District 27 Republicans who will show up for a primary…
…and a primary there will be if a term-limited Rep. Pourier decides to run for District 27 Senate as a Republican, as Republicans will see a chance to pick up a Senate seat in Indian Country, and the Republican voters in that district will gladly nominate a long-standing Republican over a Peri-come-lately to the Party, and Rhoden and Venhuizen will find some such long-standing and reliable Republican to run, maybe even Liz May herself, who in her long Legislative career has only served in the House, who this week demonstrated the loyalty to the mainstream GOP’s goals that Pourier unstrategically squandered the opportunity to support when she used her new Republican voice to speak with the radical mugwumps against the Governor’s signature policy priority.
“Strategic recalibration” sounds smart, but Representative Pourier’s moves this week were not.
Watching the SDGOP pounding the crap out of one another is my therapy.