SIOUX FALLS, SD (KELO-AM) Donald Trump isn't the first politician to say the system is "rigged."
In fact, South Dakotans need only go back two years to the 2014 U.S. Senate election--as well as today--to hear a Democrat say the same thing.
Rick Weiland ran as the Democrat's candidate against Republican Mike Rounds and Independents Gordon Howie and Larry Pressler in 2014. He had worked for former U.S. Senator Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) and had run unsuccessfully for the U.S. House in 1996 and 2002.
Here's what he said in 2014:
- ". . . big money's rigged the system, and our economy doesn't work for all us anymore.. . ." Source: The Nation, "Can Rick Weiland Win in South Dakota?," Oct. 22, 2014.
Weiland lost to Rounds by almost 20 percentage points.
Then in 2015, he formed "Take It Back!," with former U.S. Senator Tim Johnson (D-S.D.) chief of staff Drey Samuelson, to implement reforms in campaign finance and non-partisan elections.
In 2015 he tweeted:
- Our poliical sysem is rigged and so is our government. We need to "take it back." Source: @rickweilandTIB Tweet, March 5, 2015, via Dakota War College, March 5, 2015.
Then this year, on his group's website takeitback.org, there is a video with the headline, "How Political Parties Rig Elections." The video posits that primaries--a political and electoral reform of the 1890s to 1920s, then implemented for Presidential candidates starting in 1952--help to "rig" the election, largely keeping Independent voters out of the primary process. (The South Dakota Democratic Party allows Independents to vote in their primaries.)
So, while some Republicans are howling about a "rigged" electoral system, a prominent South Dakota Democrat has been making the same claims for at least two years before Trump.