#jeff barth

SD Dist 25 State Senate Gen Election: Langer and Barth

SD Legislative District 25. Screenshot from LRC website 5/23/16. South Dakota legislative District 25 has  a general election for State Senate. District 25 is an oddly shaped district north of Sioux Falls and NE of Sioux Falls. Towns in this district include Baltic, Brandon, Colton, Dell Rapids, Garretson, Sherman, Sioux Falls, and Valley Springs. The Republican incumbent Sen Scott Fiegen is not…

Minnehaha County commissioner, former U.S. House candidate and current Minnehaha County Democratic Party chair Jeff Barth might run against fellow Democrat Mike Huether in the Sioux Falls mayoral race.

That's the scoop this afternoon from my colleague Janelle Atyeo:

Barth’s concerns about rising rates of crime and poverty in the city are what’s prompted him to consider a run for the city’s top job, he said. He said the mayor is not doing enough to address those issues.

“While we’re building swimming pools and football fields, we’re allowing an underclass to gain more than a foothold in our community,” he said.

He would like to see the city contribute funding to facilities such as the Glory House that offer treatment substance abuse and facilities that help inmates re-enter society when their term is served. He would also like to see the city focused on bringing more living wage jobs to Sioux Falls.

The Sioux Falls mayor position is officially nonpartisan, and candidates of all parties run in a single race. The top two candidates advance to a runoff.

In the 2010 mayoral race, many Republicans felt that too many GOP candidates divided the conservative voters and allowed Huether to win.

Could Democrats now be facing a similar situation?

The election is a long way off, and a lot can change. Perhaps Barth will be able to claim victory from bringing new issues to bear and then pass on running. But this can't be considered good news for Huether.

Barth is a spunky campaign who made national headlines with a viral video in his 2012 U.S. House campaign:

Matt Varilek, the Tim Johnson aide who ran for Congress in 2012, has been appointed to a post with the federal Small Business Administration.

Varilek will be the regional administration for SBA's Region 8 -- a six-state region including South Dakota. It's one of 10 regions for the federal agency.

As a Johnson aide, Varilek focused on economic development.

He resigned from Johnson's staff in late 2011 to challenge Rep. Kristi Noem for Congress, and handily won the Democratic primary against Minnehaha County Commissioner Jeff Barth. But Noem beat him handily, 57.5 percent to 42.5 percent.

Minnehaha County Commissioner and former U.S. House candidate Jeff Barth was elected chairman of the Minnehaha County Democratic Party last week.

It's the blunt-spoken Barth's second turn at the helm of the county party. And in a twist of fate, his first time as chair happened indirectly because of Rick Weiland.

It was 1996, when Weiland was engaged in a tough primary against Jim Abbott and others, the chairman of the Minnehaha Democrats was Roger Andal. In the middle of that campaign, Andal blasted Abbott for being a Democrat-In-Name-Only.

"He wrote a letter that he sent out statewide, saying Jim Abbott... was really a DINO and that he wasn't a real Democrat the way the that Rick Weiland was," Barth recalled.

An old 2005 post from the conservative blog South Dakota Politics tells a similar story:

In May of 1996, Andal resigned as chairman of the Minnehaha County Democrat Party, saying that Democrat congressional candidate Jim Abbott had both contributed money to the state Republican party and had accepted thousands of dollars from Republican sources for his congressional campaign. Twenty minutes after Andal released his resignation letter to the press, Democrat congressional candidate Rick Weiland issued a press release attacking Abbott's Republican connections.

Barth said that account sounded mostly right. The resignation, though, was not necessarily planned.

"Roger rhetorically offered his resignation with his endorsement of Rick Weiland, and we unexpectedly accepted his resignation," Barth said.

Barth was the secretary of the Minnehaha Democrats at the time, and said he was asked by Tom Daschle's office to take over after the vice-chair passed on the job.

(Andal, a longtime figure in South Dakota Democratic politics, died in 2006.)

Barth, by the way, said he doesn't "have a dog in this fight" in terms of the U.S. Senate.

The other day I called up Jeff Barth to ask him a question or two for another story, and he talked a little bit his state of mind after his larger-than-expected loss to Matt Varilek in the June 5 primary.

Barth said he's "still recovering, in a sense, from this last ordeal." In the days after his ad went viral, he told me he was "running on fumes."

This week he took some time to visit grandchildren in Virginia and generally relax.

Barth also told me he wasn't exactly chomping at the bit to make another statewide run -- though he didn't rule anything out.

I thought Matt Varilek was going to win yesterday. But I thought it was going to be a lot closer.

In my prediction for our newsroom contest, I pegged Barth at 43 percent of the vote. I thought I might be going a little bit high, but I was worried about missing a Barth surge.

Barth actually got 28.07 percent of the vote. He lost all but one county, Dewey, where a grand total of 37 people voted, 20 of them for Barth. In Minnehaha County, where Barth has been in the news and on the ballot for years as a county commissioner, he lost almost exactly two-to-one.

Why did I think Barth would do better? It wasn't just his viral video, though the conversation has to start there. More than 170,000 hits, and overwhelmingly positive reaction, couldn't hurt. (What on earth would the margin have been had the election been held three weeks ago? 90-10?) More significant, I thought, were the opportunities that video gave Barth to get exposure on CNN and MSNBC, along with local media like the Argus Leader and KELO. That's free media that helps get Barth's message out to voters.

I had also heard, first- or second-hand, from a lot of Democratic voters who said they were switching from Varilek to Barth. Varilek's hesitant position on same-sex marriage infuriated a lot of activists for whom same-sex marriage has become a core civil rights issue for which moderation is a sin. And in a lot of recent public appearances, Barth's rhetorical boldness, his rough-hewn, give-em-hell attitude, had won over a converts. And converts tend to be zealous folks who try to convert others. Barth's supporters were loud and vocal, and I thought they would grow rapidly.

They didn't. I didn't think Barth would win -- or even come within a few points -- simply because Varilek didn't seem very concerned about losing, and I couldn't believe he would raise that much money and that much support from politically savvy Democrats and not have a sense about whether he was in trouble from the Barth surge.

Turns out Varilek had even more reasons to be confident than I thought. The Barth surge turned out to be more smoke than fire.

Jeff Barth was recently criticized by Republicans for saying their health plan would leave people who aren't "healthy or wealthy" to "die quickly." He didn't back down, intensifying his language to say Republicans "want to kill millions of Americans."

You can debate whether accusing the other side of wanting people to die is inappropriate political speech. It's clearly not going to do anything to further constructive dialogue, and might contribute to inflaming partisan passions on both sides. Barth insists his words are appropriate because of the effects he says the Republican health care plan would have. (Noem and Republicans deny these effects; obviously to a certain degree the appropriateness of these allegations hinges on the factual question of whether the GOP health plan would lead more people to die — but even if it would, taking something that might be a terrible side-effect and accusing the other side of WANTING those deaths is still a pretty serious allegation.)

At the meet-and-greet in Rapid City I briefly stopped in at today, Barth went a step further — and possibly beyond the area where reasonable people can disagree about whether the word choice was appropriate.

Talking about Noem, Barth said:

"I don't know why she doesn't answer any of those questions about her fictitious support for a balanced budget, or her final solution for people on Medicare."

Yesterday, I reported that the South Dakota Republican Party had launched a video criticizing Jeff Barth for some of his statements, vowing to not "let him get away with stuff."

At the time they had nothing major to criticize Barth's rival Matt Varilek about, snarking that was because Varilek didn't talk about anything but the '95 Buick he's been traveling around the state in.

Today, SDGOP executive director Tony Post finds something to bash in the Buick, sending out this press release:

The South Dakota Republican Party today asked U.S. Congressional candidate and long-time government worker Matt Varilek to come clean on his support for Barack Obama.

"It is widely known that Varilek drove around in his Buick with a Barack Obama bumper sticker prominently displayed on his bumper before he entered the Congressional race, but that same Obama sticker vanished when Varilek became a candidate," said GOP executive director Tony Post. "South Dakota voters deserve to know where Varilek stands," Post added.

Post called on both Vaikek and Jeff Barth to let South Dakotans know of they will be endorsing another four years of more debt and fewer jobs by voting for Obama in the fall.

The core of the attack is factually accurate: my Argus colleague Jon Ellis says he lives near Varilek and saw the Obama bumper sticker.

Will Varilek and Barth be voting for Obama in the fall? I presume so. Neither one is very critical of the Obama administration, defending his signature health care plan as a good idea that should be tweaked, not repealed or replaced. If I get anything more concrete I'll post it here.