South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem has been all but openly running for vice president for several years, but her campaigning has become increasingly overt in recent weeks. For instance, during an interview with Fox News earlier this week, she laid out what qualities she believes Donald Trump’s vice presidential candidate should have, all of which just happen to be traits she routinely advertises as applying to herself: “ready to go on day one, not from the swamp, has run a small business and balanced a checkbook, has been a commander in chief, and someone who has his back and has never wavered.” Her top spokesman, Ian Fury, went so far as to post a list of those qualities on X — each adjacent to a green checkmark that presumably communicated that Noem meets each of those qualities. When local South Dakota outlet KELO inquired what Noem had meant by those remarks, and whether they had implied that Noem herself possessed those qualities, Fury said, “The Governor’s remarks in the interview and my post speak for themselves.”
On Friday, Noem made her pitch in front of a filled room at the main stage of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) for why Trump should choose her as his running mate. Noem has been a mainstay at CPAC since 2021, having raised her national profile the previous year for her prescient decision to never shutter South Dakota businesses due to the pandemic.. In her speech Friday, she continued that strategy of using her record in South Dakota to position herself as the person best-suited to be Trump’s vice president. She noted South Dakota’s extremely low unemployment rate, population growth, AAA credit rating, paid-off debts, strong pensions, lack of fees for concealed carry permits, highest birth rate in the nation (“People are having babies, and I love it”), and recently lowered 4.2 percent sales tax. She argued that the means through which she created this successful environment were promoting freedom and not infringing on South Dakotans’ lives. “It is the job of the government to empower people to do things for themselves,” she explained.
Noem then put forward South Dakota as a blueprint for the rest of the country and urged her listeners to vote for Donald Trump in order to effect that model nationally. “If America wants to be great again,” she concluded, “I suggest you look at South Dakota and see all that we have achieved and then vote for president Trump.”
Noem has a major chance at becoming Trump’s running mate. New York magazine currently lists her as the most likely option, and she ranks the same in the betting market. But CPAC seemed much more enamored by unsuccessful Arizona gubernatorial candidate and now Senate candidate Kari Lake; it picked her first in the CPAC vice presidential straw poll, and Noem followed far behind in sixth place. Cheers for Noem during her speech were loud but not extraordinarily enthusiastic. Perhaps the South Dakota governor is not populist and anti-establishment enough for that particular crowd.
Noem tried to turn another factor in her favor during her speech at CPAC: the fact that she declined to run for president and instead endorsed Donald Trump. The other candidates who had attempted to take on the former president, she asserted, were just trying to take the spotlight for themselves. “So why did all of these other people and candidates get into the race? For themselves? For personal benefit? For a spotlight for a period of time?,” she asked. It had been known since last year that Trump was the only candidate who could win the support of the Republican Party, she asserted. Some of Noem’s foremost vice presidential competitors indeed ran or are running against Trump during the primary race, including Vivek Ramaswamy, Tim Scott, and Nikki Haley. Other competitors include Elise Stefanik and Byron Daniels.
By far the biggest obstacle to Noem in her quest to become Trump’s running mate is her alleged years-long affair. The affair is particularly embarrassing because of who it was allegedly with: Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s former campaign manager. In response to the Daily Mail’s planned publication of an article chronicling the affair — “EXCLUSIVE: Married South Dakota governor Kristi Noem and Trump advisor Corey Lewandowski have been having a years-long clandestine affair” — Noem at first “issued a statement attacking [the Daily Mail] for the timing of the article,” the publication has asserted. However, Noem later decided to issue a full-throated denial of the affair.
Luckily for Noem, this is probably the time in American history when it is least damaging for a politician to have engaged in an extramarital affair.
READ MORE: