Dodo Doeden Can’t Explain How He’ll Eliminate Property Tax and Cut Sales Tax

Aberdeen car salesman and Republican gubernatorial candidate Toby Doeden wants South Dakota voters to believe he’s just like Donald Trump: a loudmouth businessman with no political experience who can take over the state and drain the swamp.

Doeden’s extended interview with South Dakota Searchlight‘s Meghan O’Brien shows Doeden is like Trump in the one characteristic that should matter most: on policy, he’s a dumbass.

O’Brien’s headline says “How Governor Candidate Toby Doeden Says He’ll Phase Out Property Taxes”, which is funny because (1) the web address generator for Searchlight‘s content management system, just like mine, drops the apostrophe and suggests a punchy slogan for Doeden—Hell! Phase Out Property Taxes! and (2) O’Brien’s helpful transcript (yes, some of us still prefer to read what a candidate has to say instead of tracking through audio and video, so thank you, Meghan!) shows no sign of Doeden explaining how he would phase out property taxes. He just says he wants to get rid of property taxes, which will magically solve most

I’m going to fix, largely, South Dakota’s affordability issue for most residents, and I’m going to completely fix all of the housing issues when, as governor, I begin the process of completely phasing out all property taxes for South Dakota homeowners [Toby Doeden, interviewed by Meghan O’Brien, “How Governor Candidate Toby Doeden Says He’ll Phase Out Property Taxes,” South Dakota Searchlight, 2026.05.15, from transcript].

Doeden does not go on to explain how that phase-out would work: how many phases? how long to phase down to zero? how to replace over $2 billion in lost revenue for schools, counties, and towns? The obvious choice for a step in that direction this Session was to swap in sales tax, but that’s as unpopular with Doeden as with voters in general:

But how are they paying for it? A 19% sales tax increase. The sales tax went from 4.2% to 4.5% on House Bill 96, and then Senate Bill 96, which gives the counties the option, raises the sales tax another 0.5%. So we’re going to see a 19% sales tax increase starting in 2027 [Doeden, 2026.05.15].

So Doeden not only won’t use sales tax to lower property tax, but he also plans to cut sales tax:

And so, as governor, I’m going there to get real solutions. I’m going to take my 30 years of my
real-world experience building companies, managing very complex financial systems, and we’re
going to actually start getting sales tax cuts, not just shifting the money from one tax to another [Doeden, 2026.05.15].

Holy cow—Doeden thinks he can knock both legs out from under South Dakota’s two-legged taxation stool! Journalist O’Brien reasonably presses Doeden on “How exactly do you plan to do that? Do you have kind of a step by step…?” and Doeden gives a six-paragraph, three-point response, not one line of which says, “Here’s where we get $2.018 billion to replace property tax, and here’s where we get the next $1.1 billion to cut sales tax in half.”

First, Doeden asserts his vague, unsubstantiated belief that he can find “hundreds of millions of dollars in waste, inefficiencies, redundancies” by auditing every state agency. That baseless claim comes right from Trump’s playbook. Remember how Trump sent Elon Musk and his chainsaw into government offices to eliminate waste and fraud? Even after the DOGE massacre, the federal government spent $301 billion more in FY 2025 than it did in FY2024, and Trump’s own budget proposal shows higher deficits this year and next. Like Trump, Doeden may ride promises to root out waste to win votes from gub’mint-hatin’ right-wingers, but he won’t ride those promises to budget savings big enough to revolutionize South Dakota’s tax system.

Second, after saying “I’m going to do the opposite” of the Republican leadership that he says has raised taxes, Doeden promises to seek “external revenue sources” by imposing two new taxes: a “visitor consumption tax” and trust tax:

External revenue comes from non-South Dakota residents. We’re talking about targeted visitor consumption tax. We’re talking about for the first time in our state’s history, charging all the rich billionaires from around the world that are parking their money here in legacy trusts, charging them a small fee like every other state does. So I am going to bring in some new revenue that’s not going to come from the taxpayers. It’s called external revenue [Doeden, 2026.05.15].

Toby: if you impose a tax, it comes from taxpayers.

And Toby: how will you administer a “visitor consumption tax” to ensure that no South Dakotans pay it? You can’t do that by product or service: South Dakotans buy motel rooms and dinners at Minerva’s and Wall Drug bumper stickers and gas at Al’s Oasis. Are you going to have every retailer and restaurateur card every buyer and tack an extra 2% on every out-of-stater’s bill? Try that, and you’ll probably get sued for violating Americans’ basic right to travel. Even if you can defend your purely non-resident tax in court, how will you then draw more eager-to-be-taxed visitors to make up for the tourists who will be repelled by your discrimination against them at the cash register?

And practically speaking, how do you justify using volatile tourism revenues to replace regular revenue streams when tax experts say that’s the wrong use of tourism taxes?

Taxes on tourists should diversify, not replace, revenue streams. These taxes should not be used to replace existing revenue streams like local property tax or state income taxes. Revenue diversity helps states and local governments stabilize revenues, which protects public services in times of economic stress. These revenues can be dedicated to specific projects but may be more efficiently allocated to a general fund to allow fiscal flexibility. Travel is often the first optional expense cut by families, individuals, or businesses during times of economic stress, meaning revenues coming from travel will be more volatile than most other consumption taxes [Rita Jefferson, “Travelers’ Checks: How to Tax Tourists in States and Localities,” Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, 2026.03.30].

Doeden’s mention of a trust tax does thrill my progressive ears (even though he rages twice elsewhere to O’Brien about progressive policies), especially since I’ve calculated that a meager 0.1% service charge on trusts could cover half of our property tax bills. But that proposal is a lead balloon among his Republican primary electorate. And seriously—when’s the last time some rich blowhard running for office actually raised taxes on his rich compatriots? A trust tax is just hot air from Doeden, not anything he or his party will ever deliver.

Tuckered out by even this half-assed policy wonkery, Doeden stumbles to his third point on growing our way out any need for more taxes:

… I was told that somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000 new businesses left leftist liberal states in the past decade and settled in more conservative areas around the country, mostly the Midwest. Hardly any of them are coming here. Why?

We have no state income tax. We have an amazing, beautiful state. We have low traffic compared to a lot of our neighboring states. Why aren’t they coming here? Well, I’ll tell you why, because we’ve had career politicians serving as governor that are only operating out of their own self-interest. As soon as they get elected, Meghan, they start raising more money. They plan their reelection, and then eventually they want to run for a higher office, and we’ve seen that very clearly in the last decade.

So once the economy starts growing, and it will, once I start collecting external revenue, which we will, and once I cut all of the fat and pork out of our state budget, you are going to see very quickly, within a matter of a couple of years, a significant amount of annual budget surpluses [Doeden, 2026.05.15].

Here Doeden is just waving thoughtless slogans, not plowing any new, detailed, or coherent policy ground. Every low-tax/no-tax Republican since Bill Janklow has prescribed economic growth as the vaccine against higher taxes. Doeden in one breath agrees with me that that prescription hasn’t worked; how in the next breath can claim that his special brand of economic development will produce any different result?

Doeden pretends that “career politicians” have hamstrung South Dakota’s economy relative to other states, but that argument can’t be right. “Career politicians”—also known sometimes as “people who have worked in public service all their lives”, which I consider both admirable and advantageous for making good policy—are not unique to South Dakota. Even in the aspersive sense Doeden casts on “career politicians”, every state has selfish bastards in office focused on raising money for their next campaigns.

(And don’t get me started on the rich irony of a Trump supporter expressing disdain toward selfish jerks operating in constant campaign mode.)

Doeden also fails to notice that the “career politicians” who have governed South Dakota to this point have already produced significant budget surpluses. They’ve done it every year. Doeden hasn’t given any specific numbers that show his vague tax policies can come close to avoiding serious budget shortfalls for the state and local governments.

Doeden is just talking in the circles one expects of the Trumpists who treat public policy as a barroom bull session and not real work. He provides no hard numbers on the “fat and pork” he’ll cut from state and local governments. He doesn’t explain how much money he’ll get from his taxes on visitors and trusts or why those new taxes won’t stifle those economic activities. He doesn’t provide a mechanism for funding local governments (with property taxes gone, does the state take over directly funding schools, county roads, and city parks?). He just runs his mouth, spewing half-baked notions that end up contradicting each other.

Doeden is certainly a loudmouth like Trump. But as with Trump, nothing useful or practical comes burbling out with that noise, especially not when Doeden pretends that he can make your property tax and sales tax go away.