Democrats Keep Pushing Out Their Own Nominees. The Party Pays Later.

Julian Beaudion won South Dakota's Democratic Senate primary on June 2 running unopposed. A former state trooper and businessman, he'd filed to run back in April of last year, built out a campaign, and took the nomination outright. By early August he was gone, ending a bid the party had encouraged him to start so that an independent, Brian Bengs, could have the race to himself against GOP Sen. Mike Rounds.

He is not the only one. In Nebraska, Democrat Cindy Burbank dropped her Senate bid so independent Dan Osborn could run unopposed by a party rival against Pete Ricketts. In Idaho, David Roth ended his campaign to clear the way for independent Todd Achilles against Jim Risch. Montana got the same offer and turned it down; Democrat Alani Bankhead says she's staying in against independent Seth Bodnar. Four states, one strategy, one holdout.

The reasoning behind it is not hard to state, and it deserves to be stated well rather than mocked. South Dakota hasn't elected a Democratic senator since 2008; Rounds won his last race by more than thirty points. In a state where the D on the ballot functions less as a party label than as a warning sign, an independent carries none of that weight and can pull in Republicans and independents who'd never pull a Democratic lever on principle. Consolidating the anti-incumbent vote behind one candidate instead of splitting it between two is not fantasy math. It is how fusion tickets have occasionally worked in American politics since before the Australian ballot made the arrangement harder. If the goal is genuinely to beat Mike Rounds, and not to make a statement about party identity, the theory holds together.

It just hasn't produced the resources the theory promises. As of June 30, Rounds had $2.7 million left to spend. Bengs had $51,000. Beaudion, for what it's worth, wasn't sitting on a war chest either: $192,473 raised, $185,994 spent, $6,478 in the account as of March 31. Whatever this maneuver is buying Democrats, it isn't cash, and it isn't obviously a stronger opponent than the one who lost to John Thune by 44 points running as a Democrat in 2022. Bengs is the same man with a different label. Rounds has noticed; he told NBC News his strategy wouldn't change either way.

So set aside the odds in November and ask the question the party is actually deciding, which is not "how do we win South Dakota" but "what does it mean to win a Democratic primary." Beaudion earned that nomination the ordinary way: he filed, campaigned, ran the primary voters set for him, and took it clean. He was then asked by people who do not live in South Dakota and did not vote in that primary to hand the result to a man who isn't in his party. A primary win that can be recalled whenever national strategists decide the label is a liability is not a primary win. It's a placeholder.

I grew up around union halls where this argument got made at kitchen tables more than once: that solidarity means backing the man the local voted for, win or lose, because the alternative is a leadership that treats every local election as provisional pending approval from the international. My father's union didn't always love its picks. It ran them anyway, because an organization that overrides its own members whenever headquarters spots better odds teaches those members one lesson permanently — your vote is advisory. Parties are supposed to be commitment devices. A candidate spends two years building a list, training volunteers, learning a state's roads, on the promise that if she wins the primary, the party is hers to lose. Tell four consecutive nominees that promise is negotiable and you will find the fifth one harder to recruit.

That is the cost nobody's putting on the ledger. Not the Senate seat; long-shot seats in deep-red states were long shots before any of this started, and no one should pretend Beaudion was walking into a toss-up. The cost is structural. A party that treats its own nominees as fungible teaches its future nominees, its future volunteers, and its future donors that the primary is theater and the real decision happens in a room in Washington after the votes are counted. Bench-building is slow, unglamorous work — training a state trooper to run a statewide race, building a list, seating a county chair. It does not survive many cycles of being overruled by the people who didn't do it.

Democrats may pick up a Senate seat this way in one of four states. They won't know for certain until November 3.

What they'll know regardless is that the next South Dakota trooper who thinks about running now has a data point his predecessor didn't: win the primary, and the party might still ask you to leave.