South Dakota's GOP Elections Chief Backs Democrat to Succeed Her

South Dakota's Republican secretary of state, Monae Johnson, has thrown her support behind the Democratic candidate hoping to succeed her, splitting with her party after losing the Republican nomination earlier this year.

Johnson was defeated at the state GOP convention in June by Heather Baxter, a state lawmaker whose campaign has echoed President Donald Trump's messaging on elections. In a column published over the weekend in South Dakota War College, a conservative politics blog, Johnson wrote that she was backing Democrat Terrence Davis because "the integrity, stability, and professionalism of this office is at stake."

"I am a Republican. Terrence is a Democrat. I understand that this decision will disappoint some people in my party and anger others," she wrote. Johnson's office said Monday that she would not comment further beyond that statement.

She cited Davis's background as a state trooper and his education in law and policy as reasons for her support. Davis has stressed that the secretary of state's office is nonpartisan and that its purpose is to serve all residents "honestly and fairly."

Baxter, who won a seat in the Legislature two years ago, played down the endorsement. "It's not surprising that she'd rather back someone who won't change what she has done," she said in a statement.

Baxter's campaign website says she aligns with Trump and his concerns about "inaccurate voter rolls, mail in ballots, and voting machine issues." An earlier version of the site said she "advocates for hand-counted paper ballots, no more voting machines." On Monday, Baxter said she had revised that wording because she lacks the authority to change how ballots are counted and trusts county auditors "to do what's best for their counties." She also said Trump's election agenda amounts to a general "reinforcement of current election laws."

Earlier this year, Baxter sponsored a bill to bar the use of automatic tabulating systems; the legislation failed. Hand-counting ballots is widely found to take longer and produce more errors than machine tabulation.

Since returning to office, Trump has sought to federalize election operations even though the Constitution assigns that authority to states and, in some cases, Congress. He has tried to make the Postal Service central to deciding which voters receive mail ballots, pushed for a proof-of-citizenship requirement for voter registration ahead of this year's midterms, and promoted the claim that noncitizens are corrupting U.S. elections. Six years after losing his reelection bid to Joe Biden, he continues to spread false claims of widespread voting fraud.

South Dakota is the latest state where Republican candidates aligned with Trump's views on elections have appeared on statewide ballots this year, in some cases winning their primaries.

Johnson's endorsement marks something of a reversal. When she ran for the office in 2022, she declined to say whether Biden had won the 2020 election and emphasized "election integrity," a phrase frequently used by those who reject the outcome of that race. Last year, she apologized after accidentally releasing information showing whether people on the state's voter rolls were seeking government assistance such as food aid.

Jim Eschenbaum, chair of the South Dakota Republican Party, said delegates turned against Johnson after she failed to appear before a legislative committee to answer questions about a contract her office awarded to an electronic poll book company. She was eventually subpoenaed. "An involved citizenry just won't stand for that from their elected officials, period," he said.

It remains unclear how much the endorsement will matter in a state where no Democrat has held statewide office since 2015 and which has voted overwhelmingly for Trump in the past three presidential elections.