"Daschle is seen as the Darth Vader of American politics by conservatives,'' said Stephen Moore, president of the Club for Growth, an anti-tax group that has been running attack ads in South Dakota since last summer...
The New York Times Magazine has an interesting article by Sheryl Gay Stolberg titled Hunting Mr. Democrat on the efforts of the national Republican Party to defeat Tom Daschle in this year's Senate race. The article begins to explain the many ways that South Dakota politics fail to follow any simple script or stock formula. It also makes clear just how much the Republicans care about this election:
Toppling the Democratic leader would hand Bush and the Republicans a political trophy, the domestic equivalent of Saddam Hussein's pistol.
What makes this story more interesting than just a local contest that happens to have national implications is the peculiar nature of South Dakotan political dynamics.
In his 1980s classic The Hidden West, Rob Schultheis describes his first trip to the American West:
Sometime in the night, half dreaming, half awake, I had crossed the Dry Line, the 100th meridian. I didn't know it then, but at that moment my life had changed... I had journeyed West through the depths of night and come to in a strange, strange land.
I have similar memories of my thoughts and feelings in crossing the Missouri River on the old highway bridge at Chamberlain, SD on car trips when I was growing up. For in South Dakota, the course of the Missouri runs mostly north-to-south fairly closely tracking the 100th meridian (the line just to the left of the word 'Dakota' in the map above) to neatly bisect the state into two distinct regions. As Stollberg's article describes, West River and East River differ politically as well as geographically. Indeed, the political differences follow directly from the geographical mediated through the cultural differences of ranch vs. farm. (Imagine taking a chunk of Minnesota or Iowa and attaching it directly to a piece of Wyoming.)
The main point of the article is to explain how in such a dominantly red state vis-a-vis presidential voting it is possible for Democrats to be contenders. In addition to the rivalries between different factions of Republican leadership, it comes down to a significant portion of the East River registered Republicans being open to some of the positions of Democratic candidates and thus serving as swing voters.
In addition, two factors appear to be contributing to a strengthening of the Democratic party in South Dakota. First, the Sioux Falls area is undergoing substantial growth (Lincoln county, containing the southern suburbs, was among the fastest growing in the nation over the past decade) with resulting gradual urbanization. While it would certainly never be described as cosmopolitan (at least not by New York or San Francisco standards), it has come a long way from being the sleepy stockyard town it used to be.
The second factor, of course, is the emergence of the Indian population as an active player in the political mix. Given the shifting dynamics of the rest of the South Dakotan political scene, the Indian factor is likely to play an increasingly important role. It potentially provides a real West River base for Democrats to build on in combination with their traditional East River constituencies.
This is a story that will be very interesting to watch as it unfolds over future elections as well as during the remainder of Daschle's fight to keep his seat. If you want to do more than just watch, here is the Daschle campaign site.