Who Lost Least Badly Among South Dakota Democrats?
Who’s the most awesome Democrat in South Dakota?
If we can get past the laughter (awesome? in a party that hasn’t moved the needle away from Republican rule since 1992? chortle and guffaw!), and if we allow losers any claim to awesomenimnity, then the obvious answer is Billie Sutton. He won 161,416 votes Tuesday. That’s more votes than there are Democratic voters in South Dakota. If the 62% voter turnout in the gubernatorial race applied equally to all party affiliations, and if every Democrat who turned out voted Dem, Sutton still won over 62,000 votes from independents and Republicans.
Randy Seiler garnered the second most votes of any Democrat in the state, losing the Attorney General’s race with 145,526 voters, or 91.5% of the total registered Democrats in the state. Seiler and Sutton were the only statewide Democratic candidates to break 40%.
Conversely, their opponents, Kristi Noem and Jason Ravnsborg, had markedly lower votes than all other statewide Republican candidates. Noem and Ravnsborg’s vote totals equal less than 70% of the number of registered Republicans in the state. However, in every other statewide race, Republican vote totals equaled a greater percentage of their party base of registered voters than their Democratic opponents managed to win from their base.
Read more: http://dakotafreepress.com/2018/11/11/who-lost-least-badly-among-south-dakota-democrats/