South Dakota’s abysmal voter turnout in the 2026 general election may have been part of a nationwide phenomenon of rural voters choosing not to participate:
Across the country, rural voters — staunchly Republican in recent decades — either defected to Democrats or stayed home to protest the spread of data centers, rising fuel prices, the war in Iran and other grievances.
In Texas, about 90% of the counties where turnout decreased were rural, according to The Texas Tribune. While many rural voters stayed faithful to GOP candidates, their diminished numbers at the polls helped clear the way for Democratic victories: In the state’s U.S. Senate race, the Democrats improved their performance in all 254 Texas counties, compared with the 2024 U.S. Senate contest [David Montgomery, “This Time, Rural Voters Nationwide ‘Just Weren’t There’ for the GOP,” South Dakota Searchlight, 2026.11.13].
The difference is that in South Dakota, where 44,372 fewer South Dakotans voted in the 2026 general election than in the 2022 midterm, the rural sit-out didn’t produce the “epic Democratic victories” that Montgomery identifies in other states. None of South Dakota’s statewide Democratic candidates broke through. The only Legislative seats South Dakota Democrats flipped were five House seats in entirely urban districts in Sioux Falls. The six districts where Democrats came within 500 votes of beating Republicans for Senate seats were two Sioux Falls districts, two Rapid City districts, and two rural districts. Those two close rural districts, 27 and 26, represented not Democratic gains amidst rural Republican disengagement but a failure of the Democrats to turn out the Lakota vote that has traditionally helped Democrats win in those districts.
Rural voter disenchantment may have affected South Dakota’s overall turnout, but it did not produce the same left-shifting results that rocked Congress and statehouses nationwide.
Of the five voter districts Texas cheated to redistrict before the midterms, four went blue. #grins