As the 2022 campaign cycle begins, it would seem that Gov. Kristi Noem doesn't have too much to worry about.
Noem has over $6 million stockpiled in her campaign account, much of it raised out-of-state, and is frequently touted as a possible candidate for president or vice president in 2024. While she barely defeated Democrat Billie Sutton in the 2018 election, no Democrat has announced plans to run against her next year.
She does have a Republican primary opponent, Rep. Steven Haugaard of Sioux Falls, who plans to attack her from the right, but Haugaard may also attack her gaping character issues, including her heavy-handed intervention when her daughter was denied a real estate appraiser license.
Still, while Haugaard served as speaker of the South Dakota House, he is not particularly well-known across the state and will have to scramble to raise enough funds to be competitive with Noem.
Former legislator Lora Hubbel, who also is on the far right fringe, said Wednesday that she also plans to enter the GOP gubernatorial primary.
Despite Noem's evident advantages, she recently penned a frantic letter to her "conservative friends" across the country, imploring them to contribute to her campaign fund. She points to the "radical left wing cabal of Biden, Schumer, Pelosi and the media" and declares that "I do need to defend my name, my record and my state against these radical left wing attacks."
She alleges that this cabal of left-wing politicians and media are destroying the First Amendment, the Second Amendment, and "won't stop until our Constitution lies in tatters." She also fears that South Dakota's election process may somehow be rigged, and asserts that "we must be ready to defend the integrity of our election against the kind of voter abnormalities and 'vote by mail' schemes that we saw in 2020. This is no joke."
In fact, South Dakota eliminated the requirement of an excuse to vote early and absentee several elections before 2020, and there have not been any allegations of cheating or election fraud. But perhaps Chuck Schumer and MSNBC have a diabolical scheme to rig our next election, so they can stop Noem's stalwart defense of the Constitution and conservative values.
Since she stood up to the "Biden/Fauci Democrats" on masks and vaccines, proudly giving South Dakota a higher Covid death rate than comparable states, Noem insists that "this time around I'm going to have an even bigger target on my back" than she apparently sported in 2018.
Perhaps an aspiring Republican politician cannot get any attention unless they utilize extreme rhetoric and assert that diabolical left-wing forces are about to destroy our country and all the values that we hold dear. Josh Mandel, the current Republican front-runner for an open U.S. Senate seat in Ohio, recently attacked federal Covid vaccine mandates by declaring that, “When the Gestapo show up at your front door, you know what to do.”
A Republican rally in Idaho in October got the crowd so worked up that one participant wondered, “When do we get to use the guns? How many elections are they going to steal before we kill these people?"
Meanwhile, death threats have been leveled against the 13 Republican members of Congress who supported the Biden infrastructure package, and death threats against school board members and local election officials have become routine.
In this toxic environment, still heavily influenced by the contention that last year's presidential election was "stolen," Noem apparently needs to resort to extreme rhetoric and images to persuade her supporters to get out their checkbooks.
Original source can be found here.
