Opinion: Start With the People

Sharon Schulz-Elsing argues that Julian Beaudion's campaign has focused on building relationships and earning trust across South Dakota long before asking voters for their support.

By: Guest Columnist Sharon Schulz-Elsing

Editor's note: This article is part of South Dakota Voices, Turn South Dakota Purple's guest opinion series. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Turn South Dakota Purple. 

Julian Beaudion has been showing South Dakota what a long-game strategy to turn us purple looks like.

He has traveled the state for over a year, meeting South Dakotans where they’re at. So far, that’s in 35 of 66 counties. By next week, seven of the state’s nine reservations. He has hosted 28 town halls, creating space for the people of South Dakota to be heard before asking them for power. His recently unveiled People's Platform was shaped by these countless conversations with farmers, teachers, veterans, healthcare workers, small-business owners, tribal leaders, union members, retirees and working-class South Dakotans.

The People's Platform grew out of the things that South Dakotans are dealing with every day: healthcare costs are crushing families, housing is too expensive, public schools need defending, family farms deserve protection, tribal sovereignty deserves more than campaign-season respect, and Congress has become too comfortable serving money before people.

Those are common-sense progressive priorities. South Dakota has been trained to treat them as dangerous because they threaten the comfort of the rich and powerful. Affordable healthcare, clean government, strong schools, fair wages, family farms and respect for tribal nations should be easy things to defend. We should stop acting like they need to be softened beyond recognition before our neighbors are allowed to hear them.

That’s the larger fight underneath this Senate race.

Mike Rounds is the immediate obstacle, and he is good at what he does. Sounding blandly calm while backing policies that make life harder here. Wrapping national Republican priorities in a familiar local voice. Smiling while helping knife actual solutions to South Dakota problems in the back.

People are right to worry about beating him. South Dakota is hard ground. A divided field can help an incumbent with money, habit and a disciplined message. Nobody serious should shrug that off.

But panic has a way of shrinking our imagination.

Some anti-Rounds voters are being told that the safer path is the one with the softer label, the more familiar presentation and the least to explain. They are being told that South Dakota can be moved if we make our values quieter first. Change the container. Sand down the edges. Trade conviction for a first hearing.

Trust requires more.

South Dakotans can tell when politics is wearing a costume. Borrowed cowboy mythology may sound familiar in a campaign launch, but it is also easy to puncture. So is borrowing the language of “listening” after the path has already been chosen. Real listening starts before the platform is polished. It lets people shape the work, not merely appear in the story later. A new label can open a door, but it raises an uncomfortable question: are voters seeing conviction, or are they seeing recalibration toward the lane that looks easiest this time?

Julian's authenticity is priceless. Former state trooper. Community organizer. Small-business owner. De-escalation mentor. Nonprofit leader connected to small businesses and tribal entrepreneurs. Someone who has both stood inside and challenged institutions, and continued talking to people across difference. That record can be attacked, but it is harder to make it look invented for a race.

This is why his campaign should be judged by more than early money or insider comfort. Rounds can outspend either challenger and define them both before voters know enough to resist the caricature. The question is which campaign has built a way around that problem.

Julian has been building one.

A town hall is a campaign asset when someone leaves and tells a neighbor, "I heard him myself." A reservation visit is a campaign asset when it reflects a relationship rather than a photo stop. A county volunteer is a campaign asset when paid ads start flooding the airwaves. A platform rooted in real conversations is a campaign asset because people can recognize their own lives in it.

It’s practical minority-party politics in a red state, building the local trust that outside money cannot buy in October.

It also shows how Julian would govern.

Senators do more than cast votes. They decide whose calls get returned, which communities become visible to federal agencies, which local problems become federal priorities and who gets invited into the room before policy has already been written. Julian's work tells us something important: he listens first, then builds from what people need.

That is a governing strength, especially in a state where too many people have been used as talking points and ignored as constituents.

The calendar is short. That should sober everyone up. Julian's campaign has to sharpen, raise more money and turn its groundwork into visible statewide momentum. Supporters need to stop treating his candidacy as admirable background noise and start volunteering their time and treasure, like Mike Rounds’ supporters did for his successful longshot gubernatorial primary bid almost 25 years ago.

If the goal is only to appear safer on paper, South Dakota will keep repeating the same pattern. We will keep softening the values that could help people. We will keep letting the most cautious voices decide what our neighbors are ready to hear. We will keep mistaking familiarity for electability. If we actually want to turn South Dakota purple, we have to build trust around the values that can improve people's lives, not keep sanding those values down until they disappear.

Julian is offering something stronger than that.

He is asking South Dakota to build politics from the people up: healthcare, housing, schools, farms, tribal sovereignty, clean government and working families at the center. He is asking us to believe that everyday South Dakotans can handle a campaign that names what is broken and says who keeps benefiting from it.

That is the long-game strategy we need, not tactical panic.

Start with the people. Tell the truth about what they need. Build trust where politics has failed. Then make that trust powerful enough to change the state.

About the Author

Sharon Schulz-Elsing is a born and bred South Dakotan finding ways to be useful in political, social and environmental spaces locally and statewide. She has held leadership positions in various partisan and non-partisan organizations that engage, educate and inform voters and potential voters. She stands strong on the principle that politics isn't separate from our everyday lives, but woven into every aspect of daily living, and that the only valid power is that deriving from the people.