South Dakota State Senate Majority Leader Casey Crabtree, R-Madison, speaks to the Senate State Affairs Committee on Feb. 5, 2024, at the Capitol in Pierre, South Dakota. (Photo by Makenzie Huber/South Dakota Searchlight)
South Dakota’s race for its lone seat in the U.S. House of Representatives got a little more crowded last month with the entrance of state Sen. Casey Crabtree, a Madison Republican. The seat will be up for grabs next year because Republican U.S. Rep. Dusty Johnson is running for governor.
In making his announcement, Crabtree let people know, in no uncertain terms, that he will be loyal to President Donald Trump. Whether that kind of blind loyalty can get him elected remains to be seen.
“I am the only conservative Republican in the race who has always delivered on an ‘America First,’ ‘South Dakota Always’ agenda,” Crabtree said in an interview with South Dakota Searchlight. “He needs strong allies like myself who will be serving in Congress to make sure he can deliver the America First agenda.”
State senator from Madison formally launches congressional bid, pledges to be Trump ally
In the interview, Crabtree went so far as to back Trump’s tariff policy as well as his handling of the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. There are plenty of photos of Trump with his arms wrapped around an American flag. If Trump were a flag, it would be wrapped around Crabtree.
Like the Lloyd Bridges character in the movie “Airplane,” who picked a bad day to give up smoking, Crabtree may have picked a bad year to run for Congress. That’s particularly true if he is going to market himself as a Trump loyalist.
Off-year elections are traditionally tough on the party in power. With Republicans controlling the White House and both chambers of Congress, the GOP can expect to take a few hits in the 2026 election.
Something must be up, because South Dakota’s usually candidate-averse Democratic Party already has two announced candidates for the party’s nomination for the U.S. House with another who has filed the paperwork to run. It’s hard to imagine a Democrat getting elected to the U.S. House in South Dakota, but that level of Democratic interest is unprecedented in recent history.
By wrapping himself in Trump, Crabtree is betting that the president’s popularity in South Dakota will help him win a primary against another declared GOP candidate, Attorney General Marty Jackley (a third Republican, James Bialota, of Piedmont, has filed paperwork to run). Crabtree is likely to find that service in the Legislature doesn’t necessarily transform into recognition from the electorate.
In an April poll about gubernatorial hopefuls by South Dakota News Watch, state Rep. Jon Hansen, the only announced Republican candidate at the time, was at the bottom with 2% support from registered Republican voters, despite being the current speaker of the state House. That means Crabtree, a former legislative leader, has his work cut out for him. That’s especially true running against Jackley, a veteran of multiple statewide campaigns.
How Crabtree got to be a “former” majority leader in the Senate may also point to a weakness in his candidacy. He was on the wrong side of the carbon dioxide pipeline law that voters rejected in the 2024 general election. Voter opposition to that law contributed to losses by 14 incumbent Republican legislators in the 2024 primary, and also contributed to the Legislature’s adoption of a ban on eminent domain for carbon pipelines earlier this year.
Crabtree easily handled “election integrity” advocate Rick Weible in their primary, earning 72% of the vote, and was unopposed in the general election.
But Crabtree was ousted from his post as Senate majority leader last winter when Republican legislators gathered to elect their leadership, and the populist branch of the party is known for having a long memory and a love of primaries. That means a populist candidate for the U.S. House could still emerge and put Crabtree’s cloak of Trump loyalty to the test.
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