Mom, runner, legislator, life time Sioux Fallsian, state representative for District 15
Sioux Falls, SD
Joined March 2009
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Linda Duba retweeted
Dear Senator @cindyhydesmith, since no one else is telling you this, let me.
Put on your big girl panties, come out and concede this election to Senator-Elect @scott_colom. He needs to be able to participate in the New Senate Orientation and office selection that starts next week. The MS GOP needs to reassess their positions and prepare for 2027. This is a distraction.
If you are wondering why you lost:
1. You were an unpopular candidate during an extremely unpopular presidency. Senator Wicker showed that he was willing to push back against Trump, but I can’t recall a single time you ever did that.
2. Did you even campaign?
3. He outworked you up and down the state. Seriously, his signs were up and down 45, from the Alabama state line to 78.
4. Again, were you aware you were up for reelection? Because I’ve traveled the state extensively since July and I’ve seen maybe five signs for you.
5. You really tried let em eat cake in one of the poorest states. You didn’t even attempt to be relatable. The irony, of course, is that your family is in cattle farming. Such an unforced error.
6. Gas and grocery prices are up but wage growth hasn’t matched those increases.
7. Because at least 23 Americans have been lost in a war that no one wanted.
If you care about the State of Mississippi and this nation, it’s time to face reality. Concede. You’re gonna be fine.
Signed,
Non-Delusional Conservative
Linda Duba retweeted
This is the Mississippi that Cindy Hyde-Smith comes from. The woman went to a segration high school in 1955
Starting to reverse the damage done since the 1980s. This strategy must continue from the school board on up.
BREAKING: The Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee @DLCC says Democrats have officially won a majority of state legislative seats nationwide, flipping more than 500 seats across the country.
Well done Elwood
The next week he came back with a geologist from the state, a woman named Annette Boyle. They spent two days walking the slope with a probe. Near the top of the stump she found a groove running around the trunk, a scar healed over with bark. She dug into it with a knife and hit metal.
It was cable, old steel cable, grown right into the wood. Under the leaf litter, forty feet uphill, they found the other end, wrapped around a slab of concrete buried in the ground.
"Somebody anchored this tree," Annette said. "On purpose."
What they pieced together took another month. The sinkhole drains the whole hollow. A creek disappears into it, and when the ground under it gives way, the water backs up. In 1967, it started giving way. The slope slumped, the hemlock tipped, and someone cabled it to a deadman to hold the hillside together, then spent seven years adding stone and logs to the throat of the hole, which is exactly how long the rings were bent.
The seller's file had the name. Elwood Brandt, who owned the tract from 1949 until he died. His daughter had sold it to us. I remembered her saying her father was "a bit of a hermit about that land."
In 1968, according to the county records, a lumber company offered him more than the farm was worth for the hemlock stand. He turned it down. He turned down two more offers. Gil told me the stand was the only thing holding that slope together, and the three dairy farms downhill all sat in the path the water would have taken.
Elwood never told them. He kept his taxes paid and his mouth shut, and the neighbors thought he was too stubborn to sell. One of them, Gil said, had written the county in the seventies asking why a man would sit on that much timber and let it rot.
We never touched the hemlocks again. The state helped us put the land under a conservation easement, and Annette's crew installed a few monitoring stakes that I check every spring. I also found the cable. I kept a piece.
I spent a month thinking Gil was a man who wanted to tell me what to do with my own land. Elwood Brandt had spent seven years, and every offer he turned down, making sure nobody downhill would ever have to hear about it.
That is a ridiculous statement. Women should have the right to choose their health decisions. In this patriarchy, men decide.
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Republicans will spend time and treasure, likely years and millions of dollars, for consultants and experts and pundits to find out what went wrong and how this happened. Save your money and don’t waste your time. The answer came 10 years ago by a Senator from South Carolina who didn’t live to see his prophetic words come to pass. “If we nominate Donald Trump we will get destroyed…and we will deserve it.” Republicans blew up their party, their values, their dignity and decency for a man who wasn’t even a Republican. Unilateral tariffs on our allies by executive orders isn’t conservative. Siding with Vladimir Putin’s murderous war in Ukraine isn’t conservative. Accepting a bribe from a foreign country in the form of an airplane that costs hundreds of millions of dollars isn’t conservative. Turning untrained thugs in masks loose in our communities to murder American citizens in cold blood isn’t conservative. Threatening to invade and conquer a sovereign country, an ally, isn’t conservative. Pardoning people who assaulted law enforcement officers isn’t conservative. The list is too long and too exhausting to contemplate. Republican law makers lit themselves on fire for a thrice married, sociopathic, mentally unstable reality tv personality who bragged about acing a test to check for dementia and spoke about the asses of male candidates for the US Senate. There was a time when I believed we should welcome any of them who finally spoke up back into polite society. But that ship has sailed. These people should live in shame for the rest of their days, shunned and repudiated in history books, never to hold a position that requires the public trust ever again.
Thank you Peggy. You’ve always been the voice of reason.
Peggy Noonan, the Reagan speechwriter who has spent decades as the Wall Street Journal’s keeper of the old Republican flame, has written the GOP’s obituary. Her verdict: Trump is the author of the ruin.
It wasn’t the war alone, she argues. It was the prices. The tariffs. Above all, the corruption, showy and shameless: crypto, pardons, federal contracts for his sons’ companies. Then came the decadence. Three days before the election, Trump threw a jungle-themed Halloween party with a caviar bar while Americans outside the gates added up their grocery receipts.
Ron DeSantis called Tuesday’s results “close to an extinction level event” for his party. Trump’s response: sign a ballroom beam, declare his office a national monument, and blame Fox’s polls.
Noonan has a line for that: “Please. It was you, Fredo.”
When a Reagan speechwriter is quoting The Godfather at you, the party is over.
wsj.com/opinion/trump-is-the…
Karma is a bitch
Four years ago, Pres. Biden nominated Scott Colom to serve as a federal judge in Mississippi.
Mississippi Republican Senator Roger Wicker supported the nomination of Mr. Colom. The state's other senator, Cindy Hyde-Smith, refused to do so based on absurd claims.
Mr. Colom reached to Sen. Hyde-Smith to address her concerns and respectfully point out misunderstandings on her part and appeal to her better angels.
Other prominent Mississippi Republicans reached out to Sen. Hyde-Smith asking her to reconsider and support Mr. Colom's nomination.
She still refused, effectively killing his nomination for no good reason.
She's now on the verge of losing her seat to Scott Colom, who would have never been a threat if she had supported his judicial nomination.
Linda Duba retweeted
Katherine Clark: "There is one image that has stuck with me. It's the video of the memorial to Alex Pretti and Renee Good. It is covered with 'I Voted' stickers. Hundreds and hundreds of people went to that memorial and put that sticker there. Each one placed by an American who cast their ballot in the ultimate act of hope."
I agree. Chuck needs to step aside. It’s time for younger voices and thinking
Jon Stewart on Chuck Schumer: “Someone has to meet this moment. You have an opportunity to actually govern. One of the first things you need to do is remove that system of seniority from Democratic politics. It’s a bullshit system and it needs to go. Chuck Schumer fought tooth and nail against half of these fucking people. He does not understand the urgency of the moment and what the future demands”
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Normally, I think you should always take your opponent’s concession call. But in this case, Amy Acton had every right to send that motherfucker straight to voicemail. newsweek.com/vivek-ramaswamy…
Linda Duba retweeted
Interesting to watch VP Vance now try to reposition himself. Interesting he thinks the reason they lost is just the war. Fascinating that he doesn’t understand it’s all of it: the war, the healthcare cuts, the tariffs, the ballroom, DOGE, USAID, our standing in the world, the Kennedy Center, the corruption, January 6th, the constant chaos—all of it.
One of the things the data analysts on our side obsessed over was "composition"—whether the electorate looked close enough to 2024 for Republicans to win. And despite polls that showed a Democrat blowout, the data kept on telling us the same story: in some states turnout was merely OK, in other states it was downright amazing, and in no state was it catastrophic. There was a genuine sense of optimism on our team: our people were showing up.
So, I asked the smartest data guy I know, does that mean we're going to shock the world? "No," he told me. "We might do better than the polls suggest. But the data is telling us that a lot of Trump/Vance 2024 voters are pissed and planning to vote for the other guys. Our voters are turning out, but they may not vote for us."
Well, that looks prophetic now. Our voters did show up. In Florida, for example, the electorate was 9 points more Republican than Democrat, just a couple points worse than 2024. Undoubtedly there were places we could have done better on turnout. But the main problem is not turnout. The main problem is that many people who voted for Trump/Vance in 2024 voted for Democrats in 2026.
There will be a lot of infighting and arguing over what happened and why that is. One of the pollsters I really respect told me that our economic messaging wasn’t sharp enough down the stretch. I’m sure that’s true.
But the real reason we lost is obvious to almost everyone.
Another pollster—one of the smartest people I know in politics, told me yesterday we’d lose the generic ballot by 13 points. I felt negative going into Tuesday, but even I was shocked by this. In his polling, he saw that a lot of Trump 2024 voters were angry and planning to vote for Democrats. He asked those voters who had abandoned us what would cause them to come back on our team. The top four answers, accounting for nearly all of the responses were:
1) End the war
2) Focus on cost of living/inflation
3) Put America First
4) Change our relationship to Israel
Our voters showed up. And the above four reasons are why many of them voted for Democrats. This is according to a pollster who nailed the results. While many spent Monday attacking Rachel Campos Duffy for calling for a diplomatic resolution to the conflict, it turns out her political advice was sound. (She’s also a great person.)
In the next few months, there's going to be a lot of gaslighting. Expect to hear any number of establishment politicians say the solution to our woes is amnesty. I'm open to the idea that we should change enforcement—by focusing more on businesses that hire illegal labor, for instance. But anyone pushing amnesty is lying to you.
The reason we lost is the war. The president himself said so last night.
If you'd like to argue it was worth it, that losing the Senate for the next 6 years was worth it, then do so. Argue it was a worthwhile cost to pay. Agree or disagree, that's at least honest.
But everyone knows why we lost. And any honest conversation about where we go from here must start there.
I remain hopeful about our country. To the people who are pissed off and want to say, “I told you so”: you’re right, you did tell us so. Take that energy into electing Republicans who share your worldview. To the people who are just pissed at the results, you should be. Let’s take that anger and get back to the work of saving our country.