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South Dakota Senate; SD & The Indian Vote

From here on out till election day, 24/7, every commercial break has a political ad in SD-- or at least that's what we read. South Dakota Elections carry's the Argus Leader up to date political stories, including one on the new round of advertisements that accuse Sen. Tim Johnson of traveling on the corporate dime and Rep. John Thune of voting for tax loopholes.

The Senate and the House contests continue to be toss-ups, and how the remaining 5% of voters decide may be just as the Common Man describes: “Einee, meenie, minie, mo...”

Kiva Communications has a good run-down on the 2002 Senate races, with updated comments, news links, and ratings. Pretty straight forward analysis and CW forecasting, except for still having "pick em" for the Hutchinson-Pryor race-- with Opinion Research again finding Pryor with a 10% it leans the race. The site doesn't list any polls for the SC Senate race-- like the CRAP Survey USA one that found Sanders behind Graham 49-47, earlier this month.

The recent Zogby poll results showed Thune leading Johnson by a 48-41 margin on the west side of the MO; Johnson leading Thune by a 47-41 margin on the east side of the river; with them being essentially tied at 44-42 in the middle region of the state-- meaning Pierre is ground zero. A recent CS Monitor story, Senate race is intensely local, archly national details this geographical split:

The Missouri River, which runs down the center of the state, is the boundary most locals use to describe two different cultures in their state: East River is farmers, row crops (and enough rain to grow them), meatpackers, and Citibank. West River is ranchers, cattle, windswept buttes, empty missile silos, and hours on the road without an open gas station. West River votes Republican, while East River produces populist Democrats, like former presidential candidate George McGovern, as well as Senators Daschle and Johnson. Thune hails from West River and is a rising star in South Dakota politics, with flash to burn.

The article also details how Democrats are attempting to turn out 10,000 more Indian voters; with a GOP response that might protend subtle racism developing in the contest that could flare up:

...the state Democratic Party has been mounting an intensive voter registration drive on the state's nine Indian reservations... The drive worries some GOP workers. "They have brought all kinds of people from outside the state to work full time to get out the vote on the reservations, and hearsay is that they will use absentee ballots.... It's not right," says Mary Van Loh of the Republican Party in Minnehaha County.

On Native Americans, and their growth in the plains, there was an excellent article written last year in the NYT's, As Others Abandon Plains, Indians and Bison Come Back, that foretold of what is happening in the SD reservations this election year, given the shifting demographics:

"What's happening is really quite astonishing," said Patricia Locke, a Lakota and Chippewa elder and a MacArthur Foundation fellow who returned to the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation here several years ago. "It's like an evacuation one way, and a homecoming in the other."

Indians, of course, are still a fraction of the overall Plains population, making up just under 8 percent of the population in the state, Oklahoma, where they have the biggest population, 272,601 people. But while many Plains counties lost 20 percent or more of their population, the overall Indian population grew by 20 percent in North Dakota, 23 percent in South Dakota, 18 percent in Montana, 20 percent in Nebraska and 12 percent in Kansas. Some of this can be attributed to better counting and higher birthrates, but tribal officials say there has been steady in-migration dating to the mid-1980's.

In North Dakota alone, 47 of the 53 counties lost population. Among the handful that gained people were three counties populated primarily by Indians. In South Dakota, half of the counties lost people. But the second- fastest-growing county, Shannon, is in the heart of Indian country, on the Pine Ridge Reservation, a county that is 94 percent Indian and grew by 26 percent in the last census.

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