The Secretary of State’s Office released Thursday its 2026 Quarter 1 Business and Economic Data Analysis Summary. This economic report, prepared by Dakota Wesleyan University in Mitchell, is a strange document, since (1) the Secretary of State has no constitutional or statutory responsibility to analyze or publish economic data and (2) in its breakdown city-level data, the report largely ignores Sioux Falls, Rapid City, and Aberdeen, the three largest cities in the state.
The SOS/DWU economic report focuses on Mitchell and the two cities nearest its size, Jim River Valley neighbors Huron and Mitchell. The report leaves much of the state’s population and economic base underrepresented:
| City | Population (2025 est) | Population rank | SOS/DWU mentions |
| Mitchell | 15,756 | 7 | 85 |
| Yankton | 15,816 | 6 | 59 |
| Huron | 14,607 | 8 | 37 |
| Spearfish | 14,154 | 9 | 14 |
| Rapid City | 80,589 | 2 | 11 |
| Sioux Falls | 213,748 | 1 | 9 |
| Pierre | 13,848 | 11 | 8 |
| Brookings | 25,355 | 4 | 6 |
| Mount Vernon | 461 | 125 | 6 |
| Parkston | 1,540 | 41 | 5 |
| Aberdeen | 27,961 | 3 | 4 |
| Watertown | 23,736 | 5 | 3 |
| Vermillion | 11,720 | 12 | 2 |
| Wagner | 1,422 | 42 | 2 |
| Warner | 449 | 126 | 2 |
Wagner and Warner make the list only by dint of one page comparing corn cash bids at Mitchell/Wagner CHS against Warner Agtegra. The only other really small towns mentioned are Mitchell suburbs Parkston and Mount Vernon, which are discussed in population and K-12 enrollment states that ignore Sioux Falls and Rapid City completely. The report thus provides a poor sampling of the most rural areas of South Dakota, but the four small towns noted in the report get more mentions combined than the two largest university towns in South Dakota, Brookings and Vermillion.
The SOS/DWU economic report provides some statewide data comparing South Dakota’s GDP and GDP per capita, unemployment, land prices, and acres of farmland with those figures for neighboring states. Strangely, the report looks at different sets of neighbors for those comparisons:
- GDP: Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska, North Dakota
- unemployment: Iowa, Nebraska, North Dakota, Wyoming
- farmland prices and acres: Iowa, Nebraska, North Dakota
The SOS/DWU report compares our statewide figures to national averages on unemployment, poverty, and housing prices but provides no such national context for GDP per capita, land prices, or any of the locally sliced data on population, commuting times, household income, gender wage gap, or crop prices.
The only data specific to the Secretary of State’s functions comes on one page out of the 57-page publication showing quarterly entity filings since 2019 and trademarks since 2023. This page shows growth in LLC filings since 2019, but neither the SOS nor DWU dig into those filings to provide any geographical breakdown of where businesses might be sprouting more prolifically.
One would think that an economic report issued by the state would come from an office whose duties focus on economic activity, like the Department of Labor and Regulation, the Department of Revenue, or the Governor’s Office of Economic Development. The scattershot, incomplete nature of the SOS/DWU economic report shows that the Secretary should stay in her lane and leave real economic reporting to other agencies.