At the turn of the century, both Dakotas suffered from a sort of political incongruity. Each state was reliably Republican in presidential contests and at the state level, yet each state had two Democratic senators. It was a peculiar combination that John Thune tried to end in 2002 with his run in South Dakota against Democratic Sen. Tim Johnson. Thune, then serving as South Dakota’s at-large congressman, lost that race by just 524 votes.
Thune did not give up, however. He ran again in 2004, this time against Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, and he won by about 4,500 votes. It was an important turning point for both Dakotas.
The Democrats will have a chance if Thune chooses to retire — the possibility of which the local media have been hinting at for two weeks now. As the great John Gizzi notes, former Democratic Rep. Stephanie Herseth Sandlin would be an obvious choice for Democrats to make a comeback in a red state, and in theory, she’d have a great chance of winning — after all, she won a couple of statewide elections in the last 15 years.
But I think this probably overstates the case.
One by one, most of the states that used to split their tickets between the parties have largely stopped doing so or are in the process of stopping. And there is a pattern among Democrats of bringing back retreads, popular centrist Democratic officeholders, only to lose these statewide races by large margins anyway.
In my home state of Indiana, former Democratic Sen. Evan Bayh was probably about the strongest Democrat you could have run in 2016 for the open seat vacated by Republican Dan Coats. Democrats recognized this and even arranged for the winner of their primary, former Rep. Baron Hill, to back out in Bayh’s favor. Bayh still got clobbered — a 10-point loss against Todd Young, a little-known congressman from southern Indiana. Indiana isn’t Idaho yet — you don’t win just by being the Republican nominee — but it’s headed in that direction.
A similar attempt to revive an old-timey centrist Democrat failed in Nebraska when Bob Kerrey ran and lost in 2012. In Montana, one of the few remaining ticket-splitting states, popular Democratic Gov. Steven Bullock lost by 10 points in his bid to continue his political career as a senator. Bullock hadn’t necessarily messed up — he just couldn’t compete. He lost by 10 points against Republican Sen. Steve Daines as Republicans swept all the statewide races for the first time since the 19th Century.
In each of these cases, formerly successful Democrats faced an electorate whose eyes had simply been opened about their party’s continued march toward the far Left. Leaders like Bayh and Kerrey and others had always succeeded by putting some distance between themselves and the national Democrats. Our Democrats, the voters reasoned, are different. But by the last decade, this really wasn’t possible anymore, and it is even less so today. That’s one way of explaining how ticket-splitting is becoming less and less common, at least on the statewide level.
Herseth-Sandlin, though certainly the most promising Democratic candidate, would face an electorate whose eyes have been similarly opened about Democrats and what they stand for. The point is that whether Thune runs again or not, Republicans should not have that much trouble keeping his seat in their column, unless they do something seriously wrong.
