What Campaign Professionals Saw in South Dakota's Latest FEC Reports
Three veteran Democratic campaign strategists—Steve Hildebrand, Steve Jarding, and Drey Samuelson—joined Turn South Dakota Purple expecting to analyze campaign finance reports. Instead, the discussion became a candid conversation about campaign viability, fundraising, organization, and the difficult realities of challenging an incumbent in South Dakota.
Campaign finance reports were supposed to be the topic.
When Turn South Dakota Purple convened veteran strategists Steve Jarding, Steve Hildebrand, and Drey Samuelson to discuss the latest Federal Election Commission reports in South Dakota's U.S. Senate race, the goal was straightforward: help viewers understand what experienced campaign professionals actually look for when they read campaign finance reports. Cash on hand. Burn rate. Debt. Donor composition. Small-dollar fundraising. Those were the questions moderator Ngoc Thach brought to the table.
Those questions were answered. But as the discussion unfolded, the spreadsheets gradually faded into the background. Again and again, the panelists returned to a different question—one no FEC report can answer on its own: Does this campaign have a realistic path to victory?
That shift revealed perhaps the most important lesson of the afternoon. Campaign finance reports are diagnostic tools, not scorecards. They can tell you how a campaign is organized, whether it is growing or contracting, and whether it has the resources to compete. What they cannot do is predict an election. For that, the panel argued, the numbers have to be considered alongside organization, message, political environment, and strategy.
Watch the full roundtable discussion below before continuing, or use this article as a companion while you watch.
One of the first misconceptions the panel dismantled was the tendency to focus exclusively on how much money a campaign raises during a reporting period. Those quarterly totals generate headlines, but by late in a campaign, Hildebrand argued, they become much less important than what remains in the bank.
"With a hundred or so days left in a campaign, cash on hand is going to be absolutely the most important. It doesn't matter how much you've raised if you don't have anything to spend in the final days when voters are starting to pay attention."
That observation reframed much of the discussion. Campaigns can post impressive fundraising quarters while still finding themselves financially constrained if they spend heavily. Likewise, a campaign that raises less but preserves resources may be in a stronger position entering the final stretch. Samuelson underscored the point by recalling Tim Johnson's successful 1996 Senate campaign against Larry Pressler.
"You can win with less money, but you can't win with very little money."
The panel wasn't arguing that fundraising determines elections. Rather, fundraising determines whether campaigns have the capacity to communicate with voters. Campaign finance reports measure that capacity. They do not measure message quality, volunteer enthusiasm, candidate performance, or the broader political environment.
Jarding offered perhaps the afternoon's clearest expression of that philosophy.
"I don't need to have more than Mike Rounds. I need to have enough to win."
The panel also spent time discussing donor composition. Campaigns with large numbers of small-dollar contributors can demonstrate broad grassroots engagement. Others rely more heavily on larger individual donors or political committees. Both models can work, but they tell different stories about how campaigns are building support.
When Thach pointed out that much of Brian Bengs' fundraising came from unitemized individual contributions, the panel acknowledged that it reflected a meaningful grassroots base. But Hildebrand immediately shifted the discussion from what the number represented to what it needed to become.
"It's a good number of small donors, but he should be re-soliciting the hell out of them so that it adds up to something."
It was one of several moments where the panel resisted celebrating encouraging statistics in isolation. Every positive observation was followed by another question: Does this materially improve the campaign's chances of winning?
That mindset became one of the defining characteristics of the discussion. The panelists rarely lingered on whether a fundraising number was "good" or "bad." Instead, they evaluated every metric through the same lens: does it change the strategic picture?
Throughout the conversation, fundraising was repeatedly tied back to campaign organization. Town halls, volunteer recruitment, earned media, social media, candidate visibility, and voter contact were discussed not as separate activities but as interconnected parts of a functioning campaign. Money makes communication possible, but campaigns still have to earn attention.
Hildebrand argued that organization should eventually produce visible momentum.
"You've got to show repetition, passion, fierceness. You've got to show a clear difference between you and Mike Rounds."
He added that even among politically engaged Democrats, he was encountering people who still struggled to remember the challengers' names despite months of campaigning. To him, that suggested a communications problem no fundraising report alone could explain.
About halfway through the discussion, however, it became clear that the conversation was no longer really about campaign finance reports.
Thach continued asking about grassroots organizing, fundraising models, and campaign infrastructure. The panelists answered those questions, but their responses increasingly circled back to viability.
Hildebrand was the first to say plainly what had only been implied.
"If I were Julian, I'd shut down my campaign and call it good."
Samuelson approached the issue differently, warning that campaigns without sufficient financial resources risk accumulating debt that can linger long after Election Day. Jarding, meanwhile, argued that South Dakota simply does not have enough in-state fundraising capacity to sustain a competitive U.S. Senate race against an incumbent. Any challenger serious about winning, he suggested, would need to build a national fundraising operation capable of bringing outside resources into the state.
Although they arrived there by different routes, all three were wrestling with the same question: what does a viable path actually look like?
Perhaps the most revealing quote of the afternoon came from Jarding.
“Politics is a bottom-line business. I can’t serve if I don’t have title.”
Whether readers agree with the panelists' conclusions is ultimately beside the point. The value of the discussion was not that three experienced strategists shared opinions about the current state of the race. It was the opportunity to watch them explain how professional campaign operatives interpret the numbers that dominate so much political coverage.
Throughout the conversation, they looked beyond headline fundraising totals and asked harder questions. Is there enough money left to communicate with voters? Does the campaign's fundraising model support long-term growth? Is the organization translating effort into momentum? Most importantly, is there still a credible path to victory?
Campaign finance reports cannot answer those questions by themselves. But as the discussion demonstrated, they often reveal where campaigns are headed long before Election Day does.