South Dakota Secretary of State Monae Johnson, a Republican, has endorsed Democratic nominee Terrence Davis to run the office that oversees the state's elections.
South Dakota Secretary of State Monae Johnson has done something rare in modern American politics: the Republican who runs the state's elections is endorsing a Democrat to take her job.
Johnson announced Saturday that she is backing Terrence Davis, the Democratic nominee for secretary of state, in the November general election. The endorsement came in a written statement she published as a guest column, and it put her at odds with her own party weeks before voters head to the polls.
"I understand that this decision will disappoint some people in my party and anger others," Johnson wrote. She added that she "cannot remain silent when I believe the integrity, stability, and professionalism of this office is at stake."
Johnson's break with her party did not happen overnight. She won the office in 2022 with backing from voters who wanted changes in how South Dakota runs its elections, many of them skeptical of machine tabulation.
Once in office, Johnson moved toward the practical side of the job. She helped implement post-election audits in every county, and those audits largely confirmed the accuracy of the state's ballot tabulators. She declined to pursue a wholesale shift to hand-counting, a decision that cost her support among some of her earliest backers.
"I fully support the use of secure, tested ballot tabulators," Johnson said during a speech this summer, a line that signaled how far she had moved from the positions of her former allies. The shift never sat well with the activists who had helped elect her, and it set up a fight at the state Republican convention in June.
Delegates at that June convention chose Heather Baxter over Johnson as the party's nominee for secretary of state. Baxter, a state representative from Rapid City, supports some of the election-law changes Johnson declined to pursue, including a larger role for hand-counting ballots.
Johnson did not name Baxter or list specific objections to her record. She framed the choice in terms of temperament and stewardship of an office that touches every voter in the state.
"South Dakota deserves a Secretary of State who will strengthen confidence through performance rather than provocation; who will support election officials rather than burden them for political effect," Johnson wrote. She also called for an officeholder who protects voter access and election security "without pretending those goals are enemies."
Baxter pushed back the same day. She said her convention win over Johnson was not the product of "confusion," and she reminded voters that party labels carry real meaning for how an office is run.
"The letter beside a name is not decoration," Baxter wrote. "It tells voters what governing philosophy they will carry into the office that runs our elections."
Davis is a former state trooper making his first run for statewide office. If he wins in November, he would be the first Democrat elected South Dakota secretary of state since Lorna Herseth, whose final year in office was 1979. He would also become the first Black candidate elected to a statewide office in South Dakota history.
His platform leans toward making voting easier. Davis supports automatically registering South Dakotans to vote when they turn 18, an approach that has been debated in statehouses across the country.
He treated Johnson's endorsement as a signal that competence can outrank party in a race that decides who administers the state's elections.
"Monae and I come from different political parties. We will not agree on every issue," Davis wrote. "That is exactly why her confidence in me means so much."
The endorsement lands in the middle of a national fight over how ballots are cast and counted. Republican election officials in several states have pressed the Supreme Court to block a federal mail-ballot rule they say overrides state safeguards before the midterms.
Johnson's move is unusual, though not without precedent. Outgoing officials occasionally cross party lines when they believe an office needs a specific set of skills, and Johnson has made clear she sees the secretary of state's role as administrative rather than ideological.
What makes this case notable is the office itself. The secretary of state is the referee of South Dakota elections, and the race now pits two sharply different visions of that role against each other.
Baxter represents the faction that wants visible, structural change and doubts the machinery of modern tabulation. Davis represents a continuity argument: keep the county audits, keep the tested tabulators, and broaden access to the ballot.
Whether Republican voters follow Johnson's advice is the open question. Split-ticket voting in down-ballot statewide races is rare, and South Dakota has not elected a Democrat to this office in nearly five decades.
For now, the state's top election official has made her preference plain, handing Democrats a credibility argument they could not have manufactured on their own. The ballots go out with her endorsement already on the record.
South Dakota Secretary of State Monae Johnson, a Republican, has endorsed Democratic nominee Terrence Davis to run the office that oversees the state's elections.
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