Kyle Schoenfish Switches to GOP in District 19; Primary for Stace Nelson?

Last updated on 2013.03.10

The new District 19—McCook, Hanson, Douglas, Hutchinson, and the Frank Kloucek side of Bon Homme County—now has a full slate of Republican candidates for South Dakota Legislature. Tyndall's Bill Van Gerpen, who has served four terms in the House and who resigned after his third term after winning re-election in 2004 to do his duty as an Iowa Air National Guard chaplain, would like to go back to Pierre as a senator. Fulton's fightin' Rep. Stace Nelson filed first in District 19 to keep his seat and make new friends in his newly assigned district.

And now Scotland's Kyle Schoenfish has filed for the other House seat... or has he filed for Stace's?

Schoenfish ran for District 19 House as a Democrat in 2010. He came in third behind Ed Van Gerpen (Bill's uncle, who is not running) and perhaps the hardest-charging Democrat in the state, Frank Kloucek, who manages to keep flying the Democrat banner in a district with one of the highest GOP/Dem voter ratios in the state (by the February 1 voter registration numbers, District 19 had 175 GOP voters for every 100 Dems; the statewide ratio was 125:100). Schoenfish appears to have looked at the voter registration numbers and decided to take a more expeditious route to electoral victory.

Schoenfish also appears to take a primary as a given. Will the third Republican be Senator Jim Putnam, who is the longest-serving sitting legislator in Pierre? There's bound to be someone: after a long winter of shenanigans in which the GOP leadership seemed this close to trying to boot the rebellious Rep. Nelson out of Pierre, not just out of caucus, SDGOP chair Senator Tim Rave must be jawboning someone else in District 19 to try stealing the GOP flag from Rep. Nelson.

Rep. Nelson likely isn't trembling yet. Given his much-touted fealty to party principle over power politics, Nelson will likely have all sorts of fun in a primary race asking what compelled Mr. Schoenfish to switch parties. Just two years ago, Schoenfish attended the South Dakota Democratic Party convention in Sioux Falls and happily posed for photos with his then-fellow Democrats Kloucek, Senator Tim Johnson, and Sioux Falls mayor Mike Huether. Yet now he switches to the majority party.

A guy is entitled to change his mind, but I suspect that even without a primary, Rep. Nelson and some other District 19 voters will expect some explaining from their new GOP candidate, Mr. Schoenfish.