The wingnuts may be coalescing behind Toby Doeden in the Republican gubernatorial runoff.
Bob Mercer notes that former House Speaker and radical right-winger Steve Haugaard officially nominated Lance Russell for Attorney General at last Saturday’s SDGOP convention. Former Governor and epitome of Main Street mainstreamism Dennis Daugaard officially backed Austin Hoffman for A.G. Mercer doesn’t mention who moved John Fitzgerald’s nomination in that race.
One would think that the support of a former Governor would outweigh that of a former Speaker, but the convention delegates picked Russell over Hoffman on their second ballot. Without a Democratic challenger, a few hundred Republican activists thus chose South Dakota’s next top cop.
And that top cop yesterday endorsed Toby Doeden for Governor. Russell explicitly dissed Governor Larry Rhoden, saying that during his ten years with Rhoden in the Legislature, Rhoden “voted too many times to weaken our criminal justice system.” (Doeden, meanwhile, has done nothing with our criminal justice system but talk, while Rhoden passed the big new prison bill last year, but hey, these are South Dakotans, for whom actions matter less than bluster.)
Haugaard endorsed Doeden before the primary, abandoning his old anti-abortion chum and fellow Speaker Jon Hansen. With Hansen so dismissed and Haugaard and imminent A.G. Russell backing the loudmouth from Aberdeen, the wingnuts may well coalesce around Doeden to stick it in the eye of Rhoden and his mainstreamers. And if Doeden prevails in the runoff, those mainstreamers will have to make a hard choice: accept an unproven loudmouth as their next Governor or stick it right back in the eye of the wingnuts by quietly voting for Democrat Dan Ahlers in November and proving to the wingnuts how bad their brand is for the electoral fate of the Republican Party.