As Trump now knows and Doeden may learn, the governing is harder than the shake-up
Toby Doeden announces his candidacy for the Republican nomination for governor of South Dakota during an event on May 28, 2025, in Aberdeen. (Joshua Haiar/South Dakota Searchlight)
And then there were two. In late May, Aberdeen businessman and political influencer Toby Doeden entered the race for the Republican nomination for governor of South Dakota. He joins state Speaker of the House Jon Hansen as the only announced candidates, so far, for the nomination.
Throughout his announcement speech, and sprinkled liberally through his campaign website, are references to Doeden's support for President Donald Trump. It's hard to miss the comparisons between the president and the gubernatorial candidate.
Doeden takes pride, as Trump did in his first campaign, at never having been elected to public office. Doeden, however, knows something about how to get other people elected. Through his Dakota First Action political action committee, he supported a bevy of anti-establishment Republicans who were able to unseat legislative incumbents in the last primary.
While Doeden sees his lack of electoral experience as a positive, voters always run a risk when they decide to put someone in a position of power who has never been there before. In his first term as president, Trump often seemed befuddled by the finer points of how the federal government works. For Doeden, promising to shake things up in Pierre is the easy part. Harder than the shaking is the governing.
Doeden joins race for governor with pledge to eliminate property taxes
While he's shaking things up in Pierre, Doeden has promised to cut spending from a state government budget that he sees as bloated. That made it seem odd when among his first pronouncements as a candidate was the creation of not one but two new state agencies. He has proposed to create the South Dakota Department of External Revenue to find new revenue sources for the state and the South Dakota Department of Government Efficiency, which sounds eerily like Elon Musk's DOGE.
We can only hope that Doeden's version of DOGE has a lighter touch than the Trump/Musk version, which is prone to cutting government by sending in a lumberjack to do work that was best suited for a surgeon. Much of DOGE's work and Trump's attempts to shrink the federal government have ended up in court battles that haven't been winners for the president.
Doeden's version of his personal history seems to play off the Trump-inspired myth that people who have made a fortune can relate to the problems and challenges faced by the rest of us. Doeden touts his hardscrabble youth, something that Trump never had, as a way to connect with voters.
Yet Doeden faces the same ironic set of circumstances as Trump, touting personal success that won't make him subservient to donors all the while that his website welcomes donations. That suggests that somehow candidates like Doeden and Trump are better suited to lead us because they're rich, yet their wealth doesn't keep them from asking for our money.
In his announcement, Doeden railed against career politicians, the likes of which have yet to enter the race for the Republican nomination. Widely speculated as potential candidates are Gov. Larry Rhoden, U.S. Rep. Dusty Johnson and Attorney General Marty Jackley. Hansen hails from the same populist wing of the party as Doeden, which runs the risk of them splitting the primary vote from that group.
It will be Doeden's challenge to get Republican voters to choose his brand of populism over Hansen's. He'll need to do that while getting them to cast aside the established leaders who have devoted their lives to building up government. To be successful, Doeden will have to convince voters that it's in their best interest to let him tear it all down.
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