‘Mom for Congress’ pins bid to unseat Dusty Johnson on message of pragmatism, public service • South Dakota Searchlight

Sheryl Johnson, a Democrat running for U.S. House in South Dakota in 2024, poses with her campaign paraphernalia at her home in Sioux Falls. (John Hult/South Dakota Searchlight)

Sheryl Johnson has never held political office. What she has done is raise her four daughters, manage retail operations and work in a public school.

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That’s precisely why she thinks voters should check her name on the Nov. 5 ballot and send her to Washington.

She’s running as the Democratic nominee in a bid to unseat Republican Dusty Johnson for South Dakota’s lone seat in the U.S. House of Representatives.

The 61-year-old former Republican, who lives in Sioux Falls, has pinned her hopes for victory on her status as a mother with a range of real-world experiences. She says that makes her a better choice than an opponent whose career is defined mostly by political and government work.

Her campaign materials use the tagline “SD Mom for Congress.” It began as an offhand quip about her frustration with the U.S. House, its infighting and inability to find common ground.

“I said, ‘they’re behaving like a bunch of children. They just need a mom there,’” Johnson said. “And that’s kind of helped spur this idea of a South Dakota mom: The fact that there’s such division. It used to be that they could agree to disagree, make compromises and get along.”

Rep. Dusty Johnson, R-South Dakota, will debate Democratic challenger Sheryl Johnson at 8 p.m. CST, 7 p.m. MST Tuesday on South Dakota Public Broadcasting. The event will run on SDPB television and be livestreamed at this link

That attitude, she said, resonates with the voters she’s met since signing on back in February to become the Democrats’ first U.S. House candidate since 2018. Dusty Johnson won his seat that year when he bested Democrat Tim Bjorkman, as well as an independent and Libertarian candidate. Johnson got 60% of the vote that year; Bjorkman got 36%.

In 2020 and 2022, Democrats failed to field a candidate, and Rep. Johnson coasted to wins over Libertarian opponents.

Dan Ahlers, director of the South Dakota Democratic Party, said Sheryl Johnson was near the top of the list when the party began to weigh its options for 2024. Her background, attitudes on problem solving and status as a political outsider were among the reasons why.

“The primary calculus for us was, ‘Who exhibits the qualities of a good public servant, who is someone who’s dedicated to serving others and listening to the concerns of the people around them?’” Ahlers said. “That’s what drew us to Sheryl.”

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Johnson grew up on a farm in northwest Iowa. The area was and remains solidly Republican, and she grew up in a family that shared those beliefs.

But Johnson doesn’t see the values she learned growing up – values like hard work and responsibility – through a partisan lens. As a girl, she remembers her father telling her she couldn’t go swimming until she hopped in the tractor and mowed a field. That’s a boy’s job, she protested.

It’s a job that needs doing, her father replied, and she was as capable of doing it as anyone else. It was a lesson about hard work, she says now, and about how responsibilities come first. It also served as a confidence booster.

“As much as I was annoyed, it made me a little proud that he thought I was capable of doing that,” she said.

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It took years for her to disconnect from the party of her youth. She and her husband Peter, a physician, were both Republicans when they met. He was in the U.S. Navy, and they both supported former president George H.W. Bush in the election preceding her husband’s deployment to Operation Desert Storm in 1991.

The couple and their youngest daughter arrived at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina just days before Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s incursion against his neighboring country.

“We weren’t even done unpacking, and my husband came home and said, ‘Well, Saddam invaded Kuwait. We’re on standby. We’ve got to get ready to head to the Middle East,’” she said.

The year of his deployment taught her what it’s like to be a single parent and the impact that a declaration of war has on military families.

By then, Johnson said, she’d already begun to move away from the straight-ticket thinking in elections and toward “voting for the person.” It was the nation’s next major military conflict that pulled her out of the Republican camp for good.

“When George W. Bush got us back into Iraq and Afghanistan by lying about weapons of mass destruction, that was a huge turning point for me,” Johnson said of the 2001 and 2003 conflicts that followed the 9/11 attacks.

She grew steadily more opposed to Republican policies, she said, as she raised her kids and later managed the snack shop at Roosevelt High School in Sioux Falls.

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The GOP’s opposition to same-sex marriage and reproductive rights were among her chief complaints.

“I felt like it stopped being about freedom and started being about control,” she said. “They wanted to tell people who they could love, who they could marry, when they have kids, how they have kids and what books kids read.”

Her shift from political observer to candidate followed the election of Donald Trump in 2016. She went to a Democratic leadership training event with the intention of helping other Democrats run for office.

“By the end of the day, there were teachers and union people and farmers who were all stepping up to run,” Johnson said. “And I thought, ‘Well, you know, they’re regular people, just like me. Maybe I could run.’”

She’s since run three times for state House in District 11. She’s never won, but says she’s fared better than one might expect in a district where fewer than 30% of voters are registered Democrats. In her third race, in 2022, she challenged Republican Sen. Jim Stalzer and pulled in 44% of the vote.

“It’s because I worked really hard, and I think I was starting to have some name recognition,” Johnson said. “And when I talk to people, I really focus on independents and Republicans, because they’re the ones you have to convince.”

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She talks to voters in that camp about her opposition to a controversial proposal for a carbon dioxide pipeline that would pass through South Dakota, which she opposes because she says it impedes on landowner rights.

She likes some Green New Deal ideas, but opposes top-down mandates that restrict local control. The Green New Deal is a broad outline for revamping U.S. policy to focus on climate change by transitioning to renewable energy sources.

“As we tackle the challenges of climate change, the voices and rights of South Dakotans must not be sacrificed in the process,” she said in a recent press release on the carbon pipeline issue. “I support innovative environmental policies, but I oppose the use of eminent domain to benefit private corporations under the cover of ‘progress.’”

She knows there are anti-abortion voters she’ll never win over. But even with those voters, she’ll sometimes share her personal story of how she needed a surgical abortion, known as a dilation and curettage, four months into a pregnancy in the late 1980s. The fetus was malformed and had no chance of survival, she was told, and continuing the pregnancy would put her at risk of serious infection or of sepsis, a potentially deadly condition.

“I was devastated,” Johnson said.

Or she’ll talk about her own daughter, now a physician, who Johnson said had a miscarriage that left her bleeding on the floor two weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, which overturned the right to an abortion in the U.S.

Johnson is concerned about state laws that put doctors in fear of caring for women who have miscarriages or D&C procedures, which is why she’d vote to legalize abortion at the federal level.

“There are states where they want to investigate it if women have miscarriages,” Johnson said. “I can tell you, as somebody that lost a baby, if I would have had to have somebody investigate me after that, that would have been horrible.”

Johnson is touring South Dakota in hopes of connecting with as many voters as possible. So far, she said, no one has threatened to shoot her if she didn’t get off their property – something she said happened once while she was campaigning for state Legislature.

Tom Cool, who ran for Legislature alongside Johnson in District 11 in 2018 and later ran for secretary of state in 2022, has always been impressed with her work ethic and ability to connect with those kinds of voters.

So even though she told her husband after 2022 that she was done, Johnson was ready to listen when she got a recruitment call over the winter and sat down with party leadership to discuss the 2024 U.S. House race.

“She didn’t take a lot of convincing,” Cool said. “I think most candidates I’ve run into just need to have a little bit of a push.”

The national Democratic Party has offered little support for the race against Dusty Johnson in South Dakota. Sheryl Johnson says she’s almost lost track of the number of times someone has told her she can’t win.

She doesn’t care. Voters deserve a choice, she said, and a chance to vote for someone whose ambitions end with public service.

“My opponent, he’s a nice guy, but he’s running for governor,” she said, foreshadowing the 2026 race when Gov. Kristi Noem will be term-limited. “He needs money for his next election. So I’m not running to be a career politician. I don’t want to be there forever. I’ve got grandkids I want to enjoy someday. But if I could get in there, I’m not really beholden to anyone to toe the party line.”

Ahlers is glad his party has someone to run against Dusty Johnson for the first time in six years. He’s happier, though, that the party’s pick is someone who grew up on a farm, was a military wife, worked in the schools and raised children. Two of them are doctors, one owns an marketing firm and her youngest is a teacher in Sioux Falls.

“She has all these great stories and experiences, and that makes her a special kind of candidate,” Ahlers said.

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by John Hult, South Dakota Searchlight October 14, 2024

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John is the senior reporter for South Dakota Searchlight. He has more than 15 years experience covering criminal justice, the environment and public affairs in South Dakota, including more than a decade at the Sioux Falls Argus Leader.

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