Republicans Nominate Another Rotten Candidate to Run Elections

For all the noise Republicans make about maintaining the historical and well-documented integrity of our elections, their picks for Secretary of State suggest they aren’t really interested in having a state election chief who can do the job. The party that used to give us election stalwarts like Alice Kundert, Joyce Hazeltine, and Chris Nelson has given us clunkers in four of their last five nominees for Secretary of State: the incompetent Jason Gant (thankfully pushed out by the last really gung-ho election boss, Shantel Krebs), the flavorless party flunky Steve Barnett, the conspiracy-addled pension-seeking Monae Johnson, and now Trump-squawking Heather Baxter.

Just three weeks ago, rookie Representative Baxter’s neighbors in District 34 said they’d had enough of Baxter in state government, throwing her out of the House in favor of Republican mainstreamers Rep. Mike Derby and former Legislator (the woman Baxter unseated in 2024) Becky Drury. Baxter was one of the whackdoodle Freedom Caucus members whom Republican primary voters pretty much purged from the Legislative ranks. So it looked like 2026 Republicans were recovering their wits and ending their kowtowing to the nutbars. But no one good rose from the Republican ranks to say, “Sure, I’d like to run elections fairly and accurately,” so Republicans at the state party convention Saturday were stuck with two under-qualified picks for this really important office. Republicans nominated Baxter over one-term incumbent Johnson with 59% of their delegate vote.

For the third time in the last four elections, Republicans dumped their incumbent one-term Secretary of State. This time they picked a newbie crank who thinks the top qualifications for running elections include being Christian, opposing abortion, and loving guns and who peddles baseless conspiracy theories about election machines, Serbia, and China. Baxter also wants us to count all ballots by hand, which Democratic SOS candidate Terrence Davis understands is a recipe for slower, costlier, and less accurate vote tallies.

SDGOP delegates largely rejected nutbars and nominated arguably reasonable candidates for the other five statewide offices on the convention agenda Saturday. Given Baxter’s endorsement of loudmouth dodo Toby Doeden, I’m surprised Doeden’s gubernatorial runoff opponent, Governor Larry Rhoden, didn’t work harder at convention to whip votes away from Baxter. But maybe Republicans statewide will deliver the Freedom Caucus one more crushing blow come November and quietly vote for the Democrat for Secretary of State instead of one more underqualified Republican conspiracy theorist.