“It’s kind of complicated,” said Wollman, a farmer, irrigator, teacher, sometimes church-addresser at the local Presbyterian, township board member, and former governor of South Dakota (for 162 days). “I hate to tell you this, but when I lost that primary, we lost one half of the Democratic Party because they would not support what the party was doing after that.”
Wollman, at age 43, picked up the state’s top seat after Gov. Dick Kneip became Jimmy Carter’s ambassador to Singapore.
The Democratic Party he led in the 1970s — a time Wollman calls “the golden years” — looks different than today.
That was an era of McGovern and prairie populism. Liberal farm policy and slaughterhouse unions. Wollman served as Senate majority leader. He held monthly meetings at Spink County Courthouse in Redfield for his county Democratic Party.
“These were mostly the older … FDR guys that all went through the Depression,” said Wollman, 86, listing off the Rural Electrification Act, Social Security, and other Rooseveltian, “big government” programs that aided workaday people.
He said the era following the 1970s was different. It was the reign of Gov. Bill Janklow, who referred to the Legislature as the “circus upstairs.” Tax cuts and evangelicalism were linked inextricably to right wing politics.
In South Dakota, there was an increasing centralization of the Democratic Party in Sioux Falls that forever upended the state’s political landscape.
Wollman supported Billie Sutton for governor in 2018, even though Sutton’s grandfather joined forces with Wollman’s intraparty nemesis in the 1978 gubernatorial primary. Wollman still keeps an active pulse on local, statewide, and national politics.
“There’s a few folks down the road from me who still wave their Trump flags, can you believe that?” Wollman mused, during an hour-long interview with Forum News Service this week.
Former S.D. Gov. Harvey Wollman stands beside a statue of himself while artist John Lopez works on the life-sized piece of art. (Photo courtesy of Black Hills Stock Show)
But he’s also not delusional about the progressive party’s chances in the state. He says South Dakota is “mostly a Republican state,” one that will keep its steady streak. That’s what he’s known since his days teaching debate at Doland High School, just a few decades after the school graduated the town’s other famous liberal alumni, Hubert Humphrey, who’d gone east to Minnesota for political career.
Wollman thinks the Democratic Party needs a project, an issue to galvanize voters, just like the one that catapulted Kneip to Pierre in 1970.
“Gov. Frank Farrar, the new governor, was talked into supporting a bill that put the rural electrification under the public utilities commission,” Wollman said. “And that was the issue, that was the issue, and, of course, Kneip and I said, ‘we’re not going to put the REA under PUC’.”
The issue charged voters. Kneip won 55% of the vote. Kneip won three terms as governor (including two two-year terms, with Wollman joining him as lieutenant governor in the final term). But Wollman can’t see that issue on the horizon now. Teacher pay? Medicaid expansion? Cannabis?
“Nah,” he said. “I think most people basically don’t care that much about it.” (Although he noted that recreational marijuana “doesn’t really bother me, so maybe it’s time to bring it out into the open.”)
So goes the party’s elder, who admits he isn’t in the inner-sanctum of party bosses anymore.
Entering the 2022 legislative session, only a handful of candidates without “R” behind their name are running for office. No Democratic challenger has yet stepped forward for Gov. Kristi Noem. It’s the same in the race for the U.S. House, where Rep. Dusty Johnson appears on a smooth, prairie schooner ride to November victory.
The decline of statewide representation, Wollman noted, doesn’t necessarily reflect the voting population. No candidate in South Dakota enjoys much above 60% approval. While the state became known nationally as a bellwether for conservative politics during COVID-19, a progressive opposition — on tribal lands and in the state’s two largest cities — still beats. But rural counties in the middle — those that Wollman won in 1978 in his primary loss to Alcester banker Roger McKellips — have ceased to shine blue, or even an opaque purple.
“Walter Cronkite announced I had won the Democratic primary at about 8:30 in the evening,” Wollman said. “And by 12:30 a.m., I had lost by about 1%.”
Wollman points to a tension between rural and urban voters, even in the late 1970s, saying a handful of Democratic politicians in Sioux Falls thought “we were a bunch of country bumpkins.” Even Wollman’s own values today — abortion rights supporter, firm believer in the selective service, skeptical of CAFOs —aren’t reflected in the contemporary rural voter. At least not by major polling companies.
But he’s not cynical. And he feels for people who are frustrated, but also those in office, of either party.
A few weeks ago, Wollman spotted a man at a funeral who has a job he once contemplated running for: U.S. Senate. Wollman and his wife, Anne, directed Kimberly Weems (now Thune) in church choir in Doland. At the funeral last month, Wollman watched Kimberly’s husband pick up his granddaughter.
“You could see John [Thune] was totally enthralled to be carrying around this little 2-year-old redhead, like his daughters,” said Wollman. “He seemed transfixed by her.”
Whether Thune runs or not may set off a race among far-right Republicans for the primary election. But Wollman is not overly worried about growing anti-democratic impulses in the national GOP.
“I still have an optimistic feeling that the system has a way of cleansing itself,” Wollman said. “We are never done. We are always back in the process of becoming.”
He reads a lot. He’s occasionally asked to speak in church (“I don’t call it preaching”). He watches the sunset from his prairie home.
And he laughs at the thought of running for office at 87.
“No,” he said. “But I still have obligations. I still want to do what I can. And there’s a lot yet to do.”
