'People need a choice:' Democrat Sheryl Johnson's improbable dream
The former Republican who believes in limited government and a strong border faces long odds against incumbent Dusty Johnson.
BURKE, S.D. – On a September afternoon in this South Dakota ranch town not far from the Nebraska border, Sheryl Johnson sidled down Main Street.
Burke’s commercial center is a sea of pavement dotted with pickup trucks, a post office, the weekly newspaper and Cahoy’s Kitchen, a relatively upscale eatery where Johnson, the Democratic nominee for U.S. House in South Dakota, scheduled a meet-and-greet.
“We sort of had to set it up last-minute,” explained the 61-year-old Johnson, who saw a slow trickle of visitors at Cahoy’s before deciding to get out and explore the town of about 570 residents.
The stroll was not without challenges for a Sioux Falls Democrat making a stop in Gregory County, a staunchly conservative hunting hotbed that gave Donald Trump 77% of the presidential vote in 2016 and 78% in 2020.
Stu Whitney
Johnson, an overwhelming underdog against three-term Republican incumbent Dusty Johnson, explained to several Burke residents that she’s a former GOP voter who grew up in rural northeast Iowa before moving to Sioux Falls to raise a family.
She picked beans and pulled corn on her grandparents' Iowa farm and learned the value of hard work, she told them, adding that she believes in limited government and a strong Southern border, not your normal progressive campaign planks.
She made it clear, while handing out "SD Mom for Congress" materials, that she's running as a Democrat but considers herself an American first.
'Getting harder and harder to relate'
Some of the folks she encountered on Main Street handed back campaign cards without a glance. Others nodded politely but declined an invitation to attend the meet-and-greet.
Then Johnson entered First Fidelity Bank and made her way to George Kenzy’s corner office, where the conversation picked up.
Kenzy is not only the bank president but also father-in-law to former Democratic state legislator Billie Sutton, who lost a narrow race for governor to Kristi Noem in 2018, the last year a South Dakota Democrat ran a competitive statewide campaign.
Sutton, who grew up in Burke and owns a ranch with a view of the Missouri River, works at the bank along with his wife Kelsea, Kenzy’s daughter. They have three sons, including 2-year-old twins, and hosted a fundraising event for Sheryl Johnson later in the day.
George Kenzy greeted Sheryl in his bank office, decorated with buffalo artwork, a Crazy Horse portrait and a framed vintage rifle. He was asked about the difficulty of the South Dakota Democratic Party gaining traction among voters in rural areas.
It hasn't won a statewide election since 2008.
“This is a Republican state, and you’re out here with very conservative folks,” George Kenzy said, standing behind his desk. “They don’t go for much, but they all have pretty good heads on their shoulders. And Sioux Falls is turning, well, it’s nowhere as big as New York or Los Angeles, but it’s turning pretty blue. It’s getting harder and harder to relate."
Sheryl told him that she’s separating herself from that "urban liberal" persona, highlighting her background as a Navy wife whose husband, Peter, was deployed during Operation Desert Storm in the early 1990s Gulf War. She lived at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina with their young daughter, and they had three more daughters after they returned to the Upper Midwest.
She said that her campaign travels have taught her that people are not quite as far apart as they seem.
Kenzy responded by holding his hands apart, then slowly bringing them together to demonstrate that both sides need to approach the middle before Democrats will find a foothold to relive the days when Tom Daschle, Tim Johnson and Stephanie Herseth Sandlin all represented South Dakota in Washington.
Raising money has been a challenge
Sheryl Johnson is not naïve about her odds, which most campaign pundits rank as somewhere between slim and non-existent. In the jargon of political prognostication, South Dakota’s lone congressional seat is safe and solid red.
She ran a competent 2022 campaign for state Senate in Republican-heavy District 11 but lost with 45% of the vote, following up unsuccessful House bids in 2020 and 2018. Raising $200,000 has been a struggle during this U.S. House campaign, while her future-focused Republican opponent is sitting on an overall war chest of about $5 million.
So daunting is her mission that when she approached her husband about breaking her promise to him to never run for office again, his response was, “I suppose you can try, but you’ll never beat Dusty.”
The quest is about more than winning or losing to Sheryl Johnson, who is retired after working as an education assistant at Roosevelt High School for 13 years and running a small business. After voting Republican for more than three decades, she changed her affiliation to Independent and then Democrat a decade ago after concluding that the GOP didn't align with her "values about caring about people."
When she spoke with South Dakota Democratic Party executive director Dan Ahlers about running for U.S. House, she made her intentions clear.
"I told Dan, 'All right, I'm going to run on one condition: I'm running to win,'" she recalled. "I think they were just looking for somebody to put a name on the ballot."
Stu Whitney
At a bare minimum, said Jon Schaff, a political science professor at Northern State University, it was important to avoid the optics of allowing another South Dakota Republican to run unopposed by a major party for U.S. House or Senate.
"If the Democrats want to be taken seriously they must reach the lowest rung of the ladder, namely running candidates for statewide races," he said. "I recognize that candidate recruitment for Democrats is very difficult as few want to volunteer for what is most likely a losing effort, but it's where you have to start."
Dusty Johnson, first elected to Congress in 2018, has not faced Democratic opposition in the past two general elections, running instead against Libertarian candidates and winning by margins of 55 and 62 points.
“People need a choice," said Sheryl Johnson. "And I'm just fed up with Washington. They are getting nothing done. They're fighting all the time. They're not willing to compromise. And I think it’s time to try something different.”
Abortion differences help define House race
Like her opponent, Sheryl Johnson has an unassuming appearance that comes off as more academic than adversarial. Both candidates are mentally nimble enough to stay on message and occasionally poke fun at themselves.
The difference is that the Republican incumbent is an experienced politician with a wealth of resources, experience and institutional support, while Sheryl has never held public office, employs a skeleton campaign staff and lacks the money for large-scale advertising.
She sees her role as filling a void in a single-party state at a critical time in South Dakota's history. That means trying to make a difference, one town at a time.
When the candidates ran into each other in August at the Turner County Fair in Parker, the Republican incumbent, a tireless campaigner by reputation, shook her hand and paid her a compliment.
“He said, ‘Oh, wow, you're really out here working hard. We see you all over the place,’” recalled Sheryl Johnson. “And I said, ‘Well, Dusty, we're trying to beat you.’”
That means engaging her opponent on wedge issues, with abortion among the most prominent. The candidates will spar on that and other topics in an Oct. 15 debate to be televised on South Dakota Public Broadcasting.
This year's ballot includes Amendment G, which would enshrine the right to abortion in the state constitution and supersede a 2005 state trigger law that took effect when Roe vs. Wade was overturned.
Sheryl Johnson cited personal experience in lamenting South Dakota’s law, which makes it a felony for anyone “who administers to any pregnant female or prescribes or procures for any pregnant female” a means for an abortion, except to save the life of the mother. South Dakota is one of 10 states that has banned abortion and does not include exceptions for rape and incest.
“Voters can weigh in, but I honestly think it's a federal issue because women's rights shouldn't depend on what state you live in,” she said. “I had a pregnancy years ago and went in for my four-month checkup to see my ultrasound and it had fetal abnormalities. There was no way it was going to survive, so I had to have a D&C (a procedure to remove tissue from inside the uterus). If that happened to my daughters today, they'd have to go to another state because South Dakota doesn't allow you to end a pregnancy unless the mother's life is in immediate danger.”
Stu Whitney
Dusty Johnson told News Watch that he will respect the decision of South Dakotans on Amendment G but that he will be voting against the measure.
“I know that there are deeply held opinions on both sides of the issue, but I believe that that baby in the womb is a life worthy of protection,” he said.
Asked for his opinion on South Dakota’s law not including exceptions for rape and incest, Dusty Johnson said such cases are rare and are not his main determinant when weighing the issue.
“I think a lot of people get understandably focused on the exceptions,” he said. “I'm interested in saving babies, and so, as a voter, I have voted for (South Dakota) ballot initiatives that restricted abortion and had exceptions, and I voted for abortion restrictions that did not have exceptions. To me, I think it's most important to focus on the 99% of the issue, rather than the 1%.”
Democrat embraces landowner rights
Sheryl Johnson’s campaign travels have included community meetings on landowner rights, specifically the effort to overturn Referred Law 21, passed in 2024 as part of a legislative package on potential carbon pipeline negotiations.
Summit Carbon Solutions is seeking regulatory approval for a pipeline that would carry liquified carbon dioxide gas from more than 50 ethanol plants in South Dakota and four other states to be stored deep underground in North Dakota.
Sponsors of Referred Law 21 trumpeted a series of landowner protections for potential negotiations between the Iowa-based company and landowners, including mandated payments per linear foot and minimum depth requirements.
Opponents said the legislation paved the way for Public Utilities Commission approval of the pipeline by usurping the regulatory authority of counties.
The Democratic U.S. House candidate sees it as an issue where she can score bipartisan points by emphasizing rural interests against the Republican establishment, which she views as too connected to the ethanol industry to be objective on the issue.
Her campaign manager, James Jacobson, was listed as one of the organizers of a "No on Referred Law 21" meeting she attended in Platte in September.
“There are a lot of Trump voters at these meetings who would normally never vote for me,” said Sheryl Johnson. “But in talking with them, some will support me because I support this issue and can speak from experience. I had an uncle who took over my grandparents' dairy farm and was injured in a tragic farming accident when he was 32. It left him blind and brain-injured and they had to sell off all the cows and eventually they lost the farm. So I understand that relationship to the land, and to think that some private company wants the power to force these pipelines on people and maybe get the power of eminent domain, that is just so unfair to me.”
Stu Whitney
Dusty Johnson characterized Referred Law 21 as a “mixed bag” with concerns about preemption of local governments but also potentially higher payments for landowners. He added that his opponent is trying to use a polarizing state issue for political leverage rather than focusing on national topics more suited to a U.S. House campaign.
"I would observe that Sheryl Johnson spends a lot of time talking about hot-button state issues because hot-button national topics like inflation and the border crisis are not issues that South Dakotans agree with her on," Dusty Johnson told News Watch.
Dormant Farm Bill draws controversy
Another point of contention is the Farm Bill, currently in limbo in Congress until after the election, a delay that Sheryl Johnson attributed to the inefficiency of Republican House leadership.
The legislation was criticized by the nonpartisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities for curtailing potential funding increases in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) over the next decade, “weakening SNAP’s effectiveness in reducing food insecurity and poverty.”
Dusty Johnson called those claims inaccurate, saying that the Farm Bill locks in SNAP, formerly known as food stamps, funding based on inflationary increases and merely prevents an administration from unilaterally imposing increases at a higher rate.
“Clearly, we're a rich enough country that we need to have robust programs to make sure that nutritional needs are met,” said Dusty Johnson, who serves on the House Agriculture Committee. “And that's why I was happy that in the Farm Bill, we locked in increases for SNAP over the entire period of the bill.”
His opponent called for more flexibility of spending to tackle the problem of child hunger. Feeding South Dakota, the state’s largest hunger relief organization, estimates that about 106,000 people in South Dakota, more than 11%, are food insecure. Of that number, 1 out of 6 are children.
“To me, there's a big difference between just spending money as an expense and spending money as an investment,” Sheryl Johnson said. “ I believe we need to invest in the next generation. I worked at Roosevelt High School for 13 years and saw kids coming to school without breakfast. They have a hard time learning, they're not focused. We need to make sure we're adequately addressing these problems before they get worse."
Republican's future plans questioned
Sheryl Johnson took a brief respite from the campaign trail when her father, Gene Knoploh, died Aug. 15 at age 84 in Iowa. The banker and part-time farmer was a stoic presence in her life whose homespun wisdom she likened to the old EF Hutton commercials.
When he spoke, people listened.
"He was a staunch Republican, but he gave me $500 (for the campaign), and my parents didn't have a lot of money," Sheryl said. "He was very wise and raised us to believe that if you work hard and treat people right, you can do anything in this world.”
That includes running against Dusty Johnson, a political wunderkind who grew up in Pierre, was elected to the Public Utilities Commission at age 28, served as former governor Dennis Daugaard's chief of staff and is seeking a fourth term in Congress at 48.
Sheryl Johnson chastised her opponent for raising money with the implicit goal of running for governor in 2026. She compared it to when Noem announced she was running for governor six days after her 2016 re-election to the House, beating a deadline to transfer campaign funds.
“Dusty’s a nice guy and he's done some good things, but he's more focused on running for governor now," Sheryl Johnson said. "Why should we elect somebody and let him have a taxpayer salary for two years while he spends that time raising money and running for governor?”
'The proof is in the pudding'
Dusty Johnson bristled at that criticism, citing his work on agricultural trade in Congress and efforts to strengthen the review process for purchases of U.S. farmland by the Chinese Communist Party.
His pragmatic approach as chairman of the Republican Main Street Caucus has earned him a seat at the table for often-testy negotiations over funding packages, with Johnson seeking bipartisan agreement to avoid shutdowns.
"The proof is in the pudding," he said. "I'm consistently ranked as one of the most effective members of the House, particularly in areas that really impact South Dakota. And I think anybody who knows me knows that I am driven every single day to be effective. No matter what the future holds, nothing's going to change that."
The man that House Agriculture Chairman Glenn Thompson calls "whip smart" and a "consensus builder" has been a force in South Dakota politics for nearly 20 years and will likely remain so for at least 20 more.
That reality wasn't on the mind of Sheryl Johnson and her staff as they left Cahoy's Kitchen in Burke and piled into a Chevy Equinox with a "SD Mom for Congress" sticker on the door. They were bound for the next town, with the conviction that fighting for every vote is worth it, regardless of wins or losses.
Read Stu Whitney's profile of Dusty Johnson:
Stu Whitney
This story was produced by South Dakota News Watch, an independent, nonprofit news organization. Read more in-depth stories at sdnewswatch.org and sign up for an email every few days to get stories as soon as they're published. Contact investigative reporter Stu Whitney at stu.whitney@sdnewswatch.org.
