You’ve probably seen the various maps, like the one produced by the New York Times, showing voters swinging toward Democrats in nearly every county across the country. Obviously, South Dakota did not follow that trend. Consider NBC’s map of South Dakota counties’ margin shifts from 2024 to 2026 in the U.S. House race:
While the average blue-ward shift of voting margins across the country from 2024 to 2026 was 13 points, the net gain for Democrats in South Dakota was 1.8 points. The only double-digit tilt toward Democrats in South Dakota was 10.07 points in Sanborn County, where 2024 voters picked Trump over Harris 76% to 21% and this year picked Marty Jackley over Nikki Gronli 72% to 28%. While most of the ten most populous counties posted blue shifts, those shifts were all 5 points or less, and a majority of counties went more red. Nationwide, 94% of counties shifted blue.
South Dakota’s Governor’s race produced a similar low blue shift mixed with lots of counties going redder:
Dan Ahlers pushed the Democratic shift up a bit, to 2.2 points, thanks to better margins on and around his home turf in Minnehaha County (7.53-point blue shift versus Gronli’s 5-point shift), but Governor Larry Rhoden still shifted a majority of counties even redder than they went for Trump over Harris in 2024.
NBC doesn’t map all of the statewide races, but they do draw arrows for Secretary of State and Attorney General races. South Dakota’s A.G. vote tells us nothing, since Democrats left that post unchallenged for the second election in a row, allowing Republican Lance Russell to win 100% of the meaningless November 3 vote.
The Secretary of State race produces the only map suggesting a whiff of hope for Democrats:
Democrat Terrence Davis was the only 2026 Democratic candidate to get almost every county to vector bluer than 2024. Only Clark, Jackson, Mellette, and Douglas counties went harder toward Republican Heather Baxter than they did for Trump
But that whiff of hope is faint: Davis’s shift map is bluer not because Davis was a spectacular candidate—Davis won fewer votes, number and percentage, than any other statewide Democratic candidate—but because deposed Republican Secretary of State Monae Johnson threw her sour-grapes nomination to Davis and because the Secretary of State race was the only statewide race with a third-party candidate, Libertarian Tamara Lesnar, to split votes and draw the Republican total down below 60%. Gronli’s and Ahlers’s races had no such unique factors. Davis’s map is thus the outlier; Gronli’s and Ahlers’s maps more accurately reflect the very weak blue shift in South Dakota in 2026.
p.s.: A map from Ground News via The New Republic shows that South Dakota, Nebraska, and Montana are the only states where a majority of counties (not population, just jurisdiction) gave Republican U.S. House candidates bigger margins this year than they gave Trump in 2024.
