In bid for re-election, Gov. Kristi Noem presents herself as known quantity for South Dakota

Nov. 1—EDITOR'S NOTE — Democrat Jamie Smith,

Republican Kristi Noem and Libertarian Tracey Quint are the three candidates for South Dakota governor. Forum News Service featured the candidates from the two major parties as part of its election coverage. Election Day is Nov. 8.

SIOUX FALLS, S.D. — Red tablecloths, white plates and blue napkins matched the light fixtures in the rafters as several hundred attendees, made up of veterans and their families, filed into the South Dakota Military Heritage Alliance Center in Sioux Falls.

The gargantuan screen behind the venue's stage welcomed them to "Governor Noem's Salute to Veterans."

As Kristi Noem made her way to the stage just after 6:30 p.m., and approximately two weeks before her chance to earn a second term as governor, the crowd erupted in cheers.

She gave her own remarks on the importance of service before passing the microphone to Johnny "Joey" Jones, a motivational speaker and former staff sergeant and bomb technician in the U.S. Marine Corps who lost his legs in an explosion in Afghanistan.

Capping the night was a Noem-led rendition of "God Bless America," and a silent auction to benefit charities including Wings of Valor and the Alliance Center. The two highest-grossing items — a custom hunting rifle and a hunting trip for four — went for a total of over $11,000.

But what the night, and the host, likely didn't do was change any minds.

Noem's supporters would characterize the night as a selfless act of philanthropy for organizations focused on aiding veterans in the often-difficult transition back into civilian life.

They'd see a farmer's daughter showing off the values that brought her to national prominence.

"I want every veteran in this room to realize that your stories are what teach the younger generation to appreciate this country," Noem said as part of her remarks.

The governor's critics, on the other hand, would see a cynical use of veterans to paper over the campaign's decision not to participate in the cycle's second gubernatorial debate, taking place at the same time in the same city. In declining the invitation, Noem's campaign had accused South Dakota Public Broadcasting, the debate's host, of drifting

"further and further left"

in their coverage.

In her autobiography, released this summer, Noem recalls her worries surrounding her first run for the legislature in 2006, an ultimately successful campaign that kicked off a meteoric rise in state politics.

"Running for local office is just like saying to all your friends and neighbors, 'What do you really think of me?'" Noem wrote in the memoir. "And they'll be honest, because you'll never know how they voted."

As with running in the tight-knit communities of Hamlin and surrounding counties, Noem, after years in the political spotlight, is a known quantity to the entire state. She's made her views on the economy, the pandemic, abortion and countless other issues clear.

And, on Nov. 8, South Dakotans will let Noem know what they really think of her.

Kristi Lynn Noem was born in Hazel, a small town in Hamlin County.

She credits her father, Ron Arnold, as her greatest inspiration. Neighbors remember Arnold as a man of deep faith, larger-than-life work ethic and an often aggressive business sense.

Stephanie Sauder, who babysat Noem, remembers her taking after her dad in the love of the outdoors. During breaks in the farming business, Arnold would take elk hunting trips to Wyoming or Montana; Noem, on a smaller scale, took to farm animals and personal projects on the family's acreage.

"The toughest part was trying to get her in the house," Sauder laughs. "It was sometimes, 'Kristi, you gotta stop, you can do that tomorrow.' And she would say, 'No, I'm not done.' And that's kind of her attitude as an adult."

Beyond shared interests, Arnold made sure to include his daughter in the family business from a young age. Marietta Lakness, a friend of Arnold, recalled sitting with Noem, one of Arnold's employees and Noem's two brothers around the dining room table.

"I thought it showed what Ron thought of what Kristi could do. He was explaining to her how to fix a plow, or some other implement, instead of the hired man or brothers," Lakness said. "He was explaining it to Kristi for her to go do this. He very much involved her in that environment."

As the end of her college career at Northern State neared, Arnold died in a farming accident, and Noem put her education on hold to run the family farm.

With help from her siblings, Noem was able to manage, and even expand, the family business. A few years later, she began drawing on that experience with the South Dakota Soybean Association. Though Noem says she often thought her father was uninterested in politics, the process of researching for her memoir showed that he had been an advocate for federal farm policy.

"For years, I've just thought my dad would probably think I was crazy for doing this job," Noem told Forum News Service. "But he was more politically inclined, and maybe would have thought it was good that I was willing to be part of the solution."

After some time on the interest group side, Noem made the move to the legislature, running and winning a House seat in 2006. At the beginning of her second term, she was elected assistant majority leader. Two years later, in 2010, Noem made the decision to run for the state's at-large congressional seat, beating incumbent Democrat Stephanie Herseth Sandlin by just over two points.

In Congress, Noem points to achievements on a federal level including tax reform and farm policy. On the more local level, staff members remember her working across the aisle to deliver funding to South Dakota in the cases of the Lewis and Clark water system and Black Hills pine beetle prevention, among other priorities.

But Beth Hollatz, a longtime friend of Noem who served as a jack-of-all-trades on the campaign, congressional and gubernatorial staffs, was most proud of how the mother of three managed the personal and the political.

"She always tried to get that first flight home from D.C. so she could get home to the kids," Hollatz remembers. "On the weekends, there were a lot of times we would be going to meetings and I never knew how many kids would be with us and how many relatives would be with us, that's just the way it always was."

In 2018, Noem announced her run for governor, and, after winning another relatively close statewide election, she became the first woman to be South Dakota's top executive.

In writings and speeches, Noem describes her first term as chaotic, pointing to destructive storms early in the term and, in 2020, the global pandemic. Her handling of the pandemic elevated her to a national profile, with her comparatively hands-off approach leading to intense praise and ire from different pockets in .

To several close friends, and Noem herself, the experience was surreal.

"The whole time I just kept thinking there is no blueprint for how to make these decisions," Noem said in an interview. "I was looking at what my job was, what my authority was and then every decision I made had to be based on that, so I could be consistent and know that, 10 years from now, I still would feel like I made the right decisions."

Noem's approach, though less restrictive than most of the country, was not entirely laissez-faire. Schools were closed and practice distance learning until the end of the school year. Noem filed an

executive order

in April 2020 that put stay-at-home orders on vulnerable residents in the state's most populous counties; the order lasted for just over a month.

But, South Dakota was one of the first states to have schools return from remote learning, and it was among the

first dozen states

to end its pandemic-induced state of emergency, doing so on June 30, 2021. The decision meant a forfeiture of

tens of millions in extra food stamp dollars

from the federal government.

"For me, I knew that the longer people stayed home, or those benefits were there, the more people would get used to it," Noem told Forum News Service in defending the decision. "We knew we weren't in a state of emergency anymore, and not only policy-wise did we need to be normal, but also in people's mindsets. The way leaders talk, and the way we communicate, affects people."

Opponents, including Democratic challenger Jamie Smith, have pointed to the

3,059 deaths,

which ranks 22nd in the nation per-capita, as proof of the downsides of Noem's messaging and policies, such as the decision to hold the Sturgis motorcycle rally in 2020.

But those in the Noem circle say that, taking into account the tradeoffs of her decision-making, her response looks better in hindsight. Metrics like

personal income growth,

business applications

and

transplants from other states

bear out the relative economic benefits, although the frequent usage of superlatives like "best" in describing the economy by the campaign are overstated.

A recent study published by education researchers at Harvard and Stanford found that, while every state had negative learning outcomes,

longer periods of remote learning lent themselves to more learning loss.

However, within South Dakota, educational lapses across the state were uneven, and partially aligned with the

proportion of students on free or reduced lunch.

"I think there's no doubt that her decision-making looks better now than it did at the time, when we have the benefit of seeing how some of these things played out, and what the side effects were," Tony Venhuizen, who served as Noem's chief of staff during the first months of the pandemic, said. "It made it pretty difficult at the time, but that's not an accident. That's because she was thinking about some of those other factors."

Outside of her response to the pandemic, Noem points to achievements in her first term including a relatively strong economy, a budget surplus and the expansion of rural broadband, though all three were helped in part by high levels of federal stimulus.

Of course, the term also had its share of missteps and scandal: the "Meth, We're On It" campaign and the murky end to an abuse of power complaint relating to one of Noem's daughters are two well-known examples.

On the night of Sunday, Oct. 23, Kadyn Wittman, a Democratic candidate for House in Sioux Falls, received a call from the Noem campaign, inviting her to a group coffee chat with the governor the very next morning. Wittman said the group, made up entirely of women, was evenly split ideologically. While Noem was willing to listen, the governor stood firm on her beliefs in the role of government.

"I specifically asked her about our nursing homes closing across the state," Wittman recalled. "She insinuated that it's not the government's place to step in when businesses are failing, referring to nursing homes when she said that. And that made me a little upset, because I think helping care for our elderly is part of what our government is for."

Wittman also took issue with the framing of the event later that day on social media, which could have been interpreted as saying that "Biden's inflation" was part of the discussion.

"Biden's name didn't come up once," Wittman said.

In the weeks leading up to the election, the Noem campaign has put on dozens of forums of various sizes, allowing the incumbent governor to hear from potential voters.

At other discussions, the focus has not been on conversations between supporters and opponents. Rather, at a stop at Marlin's Family Restaurant off Interstate 90 in Mitchell, the different priorities among South Dakota's conservatives were on display.

Even the attendees told of a career, and a Republican party, at a crossroads.

Scattered throughout the private room were several current and former Davison County politicos, among them Lou Sebert, a lifelong public servant, former legislator and former mayor of Mitchell.

Also in the room, leaning against a doorway, was Corey Lewandowski, the controversial adviser who is now back within the Noem circle on a volunteer basis; the re-emergence comes just over one year after headlines that

Noem had distanced herself from Lewandowski

after a woman claimed that he made unwanted sexual advances at a fundraising event in Las Vegas.

The topics showed Noem doing her best to balance economic and cultural priorities.

"I am wondering how you feel about election integrity, and these machines, and where we're going with that?" one woman asked to kick off the question-and-answer period.

While Noem opened her response with an acknowledgement that South Dakota has a "better system than most states," she also expressed a distrust of electronic voting and support for secretary of state candidate Monae Johnson; "passionately getting a lot of traction from people, because that's her number one issue," Noem said of the candidate, who has

sidestepped opportunities to affirm the legitimacy of the 2020 election.

"In one month, I had over 16 million hacking attempts into the state's computer systems. So bad actors, and people from other countries and criminals are trying to hack into our state systems," Noem said. "Can you imagine how much they would want to get into our elections and manipulate them?"

However, she soon clarified that "most places in the state here, people are voting on paper ballots."

On a question from a man who said he had attended several school board meetings pointing to examples of critical race theory in Mitchell schools, Noem emphasized her work in creating a new social studies curriculum, and defended her decision to go out-of-state for that process.

"In this country, there's less than a handful of companies that have written a curriculum," Noem said. "And that's where schools are getting their curriculums, and they've all been left-leaning."

The next topic, broached by Sebert, was Noem's plan to

repeal the sales tax on food,

which he opposed.

"I understand you have a nice budget right now, cash flow is good," Sebert said. "But down the line, we won't have this influx of money from the federal government, can your budget keep up with that?"

Noem understood the concerns, but said her team of economists had spent "hundreds of hours" going "16 years" into the future with predictive models. Noem said that her policies, especially the decision to stay open during the pandemic, had injected "permanent growth" into the economy, which would more than offset any pinch felt by the loss of more than $100 million in state revenue each year.

"I wouldn't make this decision thinking that two years down the road we would be in a huge hole," Noem assured the audience. "That's why back when I was in the legislature it was a hard topic, because we weren't growing."

Finally, Noem addressed a question about her back injury, which she announced in early September and said would somewhat limit her ability to campaign. Though widespread news at the time, Noem's schedule and activities do not appear to have taken a meaningful hit.

"I went back to [the Mayo Clinic] last week and had a check-up on Sunday and Monday, and the doctor said, 'You're healing faster than you should be, I'm surprised you're off all your medicine, you need to listen to me more,'" Noem said, leading to laughs from the crowd. "In two or three months, I'll be back to normal."

Though Noem communicated a sense of optimism both personal and political throughout the event, there are certainly challenges ahead if she wins a second term. In the second quarter of 2022, South Dakota's real gross domestic product shrank by 1.7%, among the bottom 20 performances among states, according to

the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

The state is also, in line with much of the rest of the country, experiencing shortages in

workforce,

housing

and

childcare.

But Noem's legislative allies, when summarizing the stakes of the upcoming election, say she has the ability and the ideology to meet the moment.

"South Dakota is at stake. We can go the way of the nation with the failures of Joe Biden," John Wiik, a Republican legislator from Noem's home district, said. "Or we can stay a free state and a beacon of freedom to those who are getting sick of the failures of the country."

Jason Harward is a

Report for America

corps reporter who writes about state politics in South Dakota. Contact him at

605-301-0496

or

jharward@forumcomm.com.