Sioux Falls, SD — When your roots are planted too deep in red soil to move, and the GOP has applied Roundup to your party, the question becomes, now what? For our feisty little band of Dakotans, the answer is direct democracy. The instrument is unwieldy. It can explode in your hands. But it’s all we’ve got out here on the prairie. And it’s a lot more than you might think. Over fierce opposition from our GOP tilting legislature (94-11), and Kristi Noem, our puppy-killing governor, direct democracy has gotten us a progressive minimum wage indexed to inflation, Medicaid expansion, a payday loan interest rate cap, campaign finance, ethics reform, and more.

We are now opening democracy centers around the state to recruit and train volunteers for our biggest year yet. This fall we have placed abortion rights and repeal of the grocery tax on the ballot. We have assisted in putting open primary elections up for a vote, and other direct democracy groups have added recreational marijuana to the list. A battle royale is brewing, one that we are hopeful will spotlight the potential of direct democracy to create a threat the GOP Visigoths can’t ignore, one that will reawaken frustrated red state progressives from the Dakotas to Florida and everywhere in between.

The fight here in South Dakota to highlight the potential of direct democracy across all of red-state America is created by the apparent decision of national Right to Life forces to focus on our state as their best chance for a win they desperately need. Since Roe was savaged, and women’s rights thrown to the tender mercies of red-state Republican politicians, the Right to Life zealots have been stunned by their defeats at the hands of the people. In South Dakota, the smallest reddest state to ask the people to stand up for women, they see their best chance yet for victory. If they lose here, they will be forced to admit that Dobbs’ “let the states decide” formula has failed. The people will not stand for it, even in South Dakota, so you will have to go to Congress for a national abortion ban, which pray God is a bridge too far even for them.

That the national personhood forces anxious to ban everything from IVF to contraception have determined to make their stand here in South Dakota has been obvious from day one. When our 500 volunteers hit the streets for signatures to put abortion rights on the 2024 ballot way back in November 2022, they were met by a Decline to Sign campaign which included everything from organized in-your-face harassment that required injunctive relief, to paid advertising lying about our amendment and urging Dakotans not to sign. That was followed by “emergency” legislation rammed through the state legislature to allow people who had already signed our petitions to withdraw their signatures and try to drive us below the required threshold to get on the ballot. Coupled with the fact that the fate of our petition and its 55,000 signatures would depend on just 723 signers who by law were randomly selected by our Secretary of State for verification purposes, if only a couple of hundred of these signatories could be convinced to withdraw their names our entire petition would get tossed.

In a move so blatant even our Secretary of State, a strong supporter of Right to Life herself, labeled it a scam, the Decline to Sign harassers called every one of those 723 signers implying they were calling from her office and asking people if they understood they had been tricked into signing and could withdraw their signatures. Astonishingly, even to us, while scores of those people called the Secretary of State to complain, not a single one of them asked to withdraw, so our petition was easily qualified for the 2024 ballot.

Now, our chance to prove the potential of direct democracy begins. Against determined, lavishly financed opposition we’ll be forced to prove on a shoestring that the people, given the chance to vote directly, free of party labels, will do the progressive thing. With virtually all of the funding on our side understandably going to states where abortion rights being on the ballot can help elect the Harris/Walz ticket, or win the House and save the Senate, ours must be a citizen-financed guerilla effort. But if we succeed, there will be no stronger proof of the thesis that our little group, Dakotans for Health, so strongly believes in.

In 1898 South Dakota was the first state in the nation to give voters permission to go around the politicians and put questions directly to the people. Today, with politicians in such low repute, the potential for going around them to the people seems to us to be at an all-time high. Representative democracy is failing to represent what the people actually want.

In one-party states such as ours the extreme orthodoxies of the dominant party command allegiance by threat of primary election defeat, regardless of the wishes of the electorate. In every state big money in politics moots true voter preferences. And in both of these cases we are convinced there are important single-shot opportunities for direct democracy to help right the balance. If 90% of the people don’t like payday lenders charging extortionate rates but representatives still carry water for their campaign donors instead advocating for the people, then go around them. If a large majority of the people favor Medicaid expansion but one-party politicians insist on voting their party line, go around them.

We think big in South Dakota. We envision a future full of democracy centers teaming with citizen volunteers. We look to a future where direct democracy has squirted oil all over the frozen tin man our representative democracy has become by showing the politicians that when they won’t, we will.

This fall, on abortion rights, the most important issue of personal freedom in our lifetimes, we will see how well our theory holds up under intense fire. If we win, people will hear more from us. If we don’t, people will still hear more from us because we believe direct democracy must become the conscience of representative democracy, and we will be fighting until it is.

Rick Weiland is the founder of Dakotans for Health, the official sponsor of the Reproductive Freedom Amendment on the ballot in South Dakota this fall.  Weiland was formerly Senior Advisor to former South Dakota U.S. Senator and Senate Leader Tom Daschle.