Party chair candidate shares optimism for future

HURON – Democrats can increase their chances of winning legislative and statewide races if they start talking to voters earlier, spend more time on voter turnout and interact better with the growing number of registered independents, a candidate for chair of the South Dakota Democratic Party said Thursday.
Tom Cool, unsuccessful in his race for state auditor last November, said there is reason for optimism moving forward.
Democratic gubernatorial candidate Billie Sutton came up short about 11,500 votes to Republican Kristi Noem, but did particularly well in some areas.
“Surprise, surprise, Minnehaha County went a majority for Billie and that is the first time since, I think, the ‘70s that Minnehaha County has gone for a Democratic candidate for governor,” Cook said at the District 22 Democratic Forum.
Cool, executive director of Dakota Admissions for College Admission Counseling, is one of six people who want to lead the state party. State Central Committee members will elect the next chair March 23 in Oacoma.
In his full-time job, he works with about 100 post-secondary institutions, 180 high schools and about 12,000 students.
“What I do is set up the college fairs around the state and do conferences and workshops for school counselors and work with all of the colleges in and out of state,” Cool said.
In the aftermath of the 2018 election – in what he said was post-election therapy for him – he put together a power point presentation on election results, which show where Democratic candidates did well and where improvement is needed. The statistics will be helpful as the next party chair and staff map out how to make changes between now and the 2020 election.
Democrats finished last year with 16 legislators, five in the Senate and 11 in the House, the same number they had going into November. Republicans maintained their super majority in Pierre. But some Democrats came within a recount of victory, and Cool said he sees hope for the future in Minnehaha County where Democrats gained two seats.
For those who came up short – “I tell people when you run you’ve got to run at least twice, because you learn so much the first time you run,” he said.
Four Democrats campaigned for statewide offices at the party convention last summer, while Cool and others were candidates who were asked to run for seats so Republicans didn’t have a free pass to election.

“The rest of us I have to say were recruited to run as candidates so we’d have a full slate, but we all got out there and worked as hard as we could,” Cool said.
“We got across the state, we got a lot of good reaction from people,” he said. “We just didn’t quite make it.”
Reservation counties, along with Clay County, for example, were the only ones that consistently went for all Democratic candidates.
“Really, for a non-presidential year, we did pretty well for turnout,” Cool said. “Most of our counties did about 60 percent, some of them got up to 70 percent turnout.”
Those who cast ballots in the reservation counties supported Sutton and others on the Democratic ballot and the party spent a lot of money and effort there. But they were also the counties with the lowest turnout.
“We need to figure out a more effective way to work with those areas,” Cool said. “I think one of them is we need to get out now and start talking. We need to figure out a way to motivate a few more people to get out and vote.”
In his analysis of the election, he also noted that hundreds of people voted for candidates at the top of the ballot, but failed to fill out the rest of it.
“That’s something else we need to work on, is getting our people to go all the way down the ballot,” he said.
Voter registration trends show Republicans continuing to outpace Democrats by a large margin, but there have also been more gains among independents.
“We do have counties where we have more independents registered than we do Democrats,” Cool said. “And I think a lot of that is that a lot of the younger voters want to think of themselves as above politics.”