Brian Bengs is touting his fundraising success, and properly so: from July through September, Bengs raised over $896,000, more than the independent U.S. Senate raised in the first five quarterly reporting periods of his campaign. Bengs’s total haul as of September 30 was $1,678,331.53, 3.4 times more money than Bengs raised in his first bid for Senate, as a Democrat, in 2022 against Republican Senator John Thune.
In the last quarter, Bengs raised more than twice the amount raised by the evidently coasting Republican Senator Marion Michael Rounds. Bengs’s $896K quarter is bigger than any quarter of fundraising Rounds has enjoyed in this election cycle. But Rounds entered this cycle with $1.87 million in the bank, has raised and spent three times more than Bengs has, and on September 30 had 12 times as much cash on hand, $1.748 million compared to Bengs’s $146 thousand.
Bengs is the first non-Republican to raise over a million dollars for a U.S. Senate or U.S. House campaign since 2014, when well-connected Democrat Rick Weiland raised $2,448,105 in his unsuccessful effort to prevent Rounds from ascending to the Senate. Those looking for hope for Bengs may consider that Weiland had to deploy his $2.4M in an unusual four-way race that included two independents: nostalgiacally popular former Republican Senator Larry Pressler and hard right-wing cattleman and former legislator Gordon Howie. Weiland ran under the Democratic banner during the Presidency of Barack Obama, who was immensely unpopular in hard-white South Dakota, which was eager to replace the last Democrat in statewide South Dakota office, stroke-hamstrung Tim Johnson, with the then-younger and more dynamic former Governor Rounds.
Rounds now is the tired old two-term incumbent with not much to show for his time in Washington. Rounds faces a noticeable anti-incumbent sentiment that already manifested itself in the primary, and he is saddled with the brand of an incumbent President who has won big on South Dakota ballots but has been kicking South Dakota farmers and ranchers and consumers in the crotch for the last two years. And unlike 2014, Rounds now faces just one challenger, an independent with unfaltering and undivided fundraising momentum and the ability to get the word out about Rounds’s lazy tenure in Washington.
Keep raising and spending that money, Brian. Democracy is depending on you!
Brian Bengs is even scaring corpulent Earth hater Pat Powers!