Why is South Dakota’s GOP governor visiting Kansas twice in April?
Kansas isn’t the kind of must-go destination for prospective presidential candidates as nearby Iowa, but it’ll be getting back-to-back visits from a potential 2024 contender in the span of nine days in April.
South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem is the keynote speaker at the Kansas Independent Oil and Gas Association’s (KIOGA) annual conference in Garden City on April 15. A little more than a week later, she’ll return to headline the Kansas Republican Party’s convention in Manhattan on April 24.
“It’s a coincidence. The two events aren’t connected in any way except that they’re in Kansas,” said Ian Fury, Noem’s spokesman.
Before working for Noem, Fury was a spokesman for former Gov. Sam Brownback and worked for the Kansas chapter of Americans For Prosperity, a group funded by Wichita’s Koch family.
Fury said that the KIOGA event will give Noem a chance address energy policy, including President Joe Biden’s decision to block the Keystone XL pipeline project, which would have run through both Kansas and South Dakota.
“She realizes that green energy is not enough to keep our homes warm in the dead of winter,” Fury said.
Regarding the Kansas GOP convention, Fury said that Noem’s focus will be Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly, a Democrat up for re-election in 2022.
“Gov. Noem and Gov. Kelly obviously took very different approaches to pandemic,” said Fury, who noted that Noem was the only governor not to order the closure of any businesses or churches last year.
Fury noted that South Dakota has outpaced Kansas on vaccine distribution.
South Dakota has distributed more than 56,000 vaccines for every 100,000 residents, roughly 8,000 more than Kansas, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s tracker.
However, South Dakota has had more deaths per capita with 218 per 100,000 residents compared to 168 for Kansas, according to the CDC. It’s also outpaced Kansas in overall cases per 100,000 residents, 13,281 to 10,362.
Noem became a hero on the political right for her opposition to lockdowns and has been touted as a rising star in the party by former President Donald Trump. But her visits to Kansas comes at a time when she is facing backlash from social conservatives.
Noem rankled social conservative groups when she issued a style-and-form veto to a South Dakota bill to ban transgender women from competing in women’s sports programs. Noem’s style-and-form veto asked for lawmakers to exclude college sports from the legislation out of concerns about a legal challenge from the NCAA, according to an Associated Press report.
The move led to a string of condemnations from the religious conservative groups pushing for a ban.
Fury objected to the term “veto” for the governor’s decision to block the legislation and pointed to a National Review piece in which Noem argued the bill passed by the legislature would have been immediately enjoined by a court if she signed it into law as written.
Noem issued two executive orders on the issue Tuesday, but it hasn’t assuaged her critics.
This story was originally published March 31, 2021 at 5:00 PM.
