Political lifer Dusty Johnson answers criticism by pointing to record and “private sector experience”.
Republican U.S. Rep. Dusty Johnson and his political allies say the accusation that he’s a career politician is an empty one.
His Democratic opponent in the Nov. 5 election, Sheryl Johnson, bases the criticism on narratives that many South Dakotans have heard about the congressman.
His rise from a Republican upstart who hustled his way at age 28 to a seat on the Public Utilities Commission to becoming the state’s lone U.S. House representative has been thoroughly documented.
State- and national-level profiles of Johnson abound with familiar tropes: about his work ethic, his policy wonkery and the self-deprecating humor that had him comparing himself to teenage TV doctor Doogie Howser in the election night speech he delivered when he was first elected to Congress in 2018.
Johnson also frequently leans into a “workhorse, not a showhorse” narrative by chastising his fellow members of Congress for slinging mud instead of solutions.
When asked why he’s still interested in being part of an elected body he often describes as dysfunctional, the 48-year-old Johnson points to his membership in the pragmatist Main Street Caucus, or to articles with headlines like “Nerdy South Dakota Republican Is Quiet Power Behind the Speaker,” published last month by Bloomberg Government.
He posted a link to that story on his official congressional webpage.
“I helped to negotiate new work requirements for able-bodied folks in assistance programs, I helped to negotiate the biggest reforms to siting American energy projects in a generation,” Johnson told South Dakota Searchlight. “I mean, these are all things that actually got signed into law.”
Sheryl Johnson has criticized her opponent as someone who’s always eyeing his next job.
Rep. Johnson vacated his PUC seat in 2010 shortly after being elected to a second term, to work as chief of staff for then-incoming Republican Gov. Dennis Daugaard. Now, six years after winning his seat in the House, Johnson is widely thought to be considering a run for governor in 2026 when Gov. Kristi Noem is term-limited.
2024 U.S. House candidate debate
Rep. Dusty Johnson, R-South Dakota, will debate Democratic challenger Sheryl Johnson at 8 p.m. CST, 7 p.m. MST Tuesday on South Dakota Public Broadcasting. The event will run on SDPB television and be livestreamed at this link
Sheryl Johnson said those are the moves of “a career politician,” and she chose her “SD Mom for Congress” slogan in large part to make the contrast clear.
Congressman: Private sector could have won over politics
Daugaard doesn’t agree with that characterization of his former chief of staff.
“The question is, ‘Can he relate to people who are not in politics?’ I think he can,” Daugaard said. “Just because someone’s been in politics for a number of years doesn’t mean they’re bad at it, or that it would be good to have someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing come in.”
Rep. Will Mortenson, the current state House majority leader, worked on Johnson’s first PUC campaign. He said charges of “career politician” stuck to Democratic former U.S. Sen. Tom Daschle in his losing race against Republican John Thune in 2004 because Daschle lost his connection with the state.
“Daschle moved to D.C.,” Mortenson said. “Everybody knows that Dusty is back every weekend, because they see him at county fairs.”
Daugaard and Mortenson also pointed to Johnson’s four years in the private sector at Vantage Point Solutions in Mitchell — the city where Johnson still lives with his family when he’s not in Washington — as proof that he’s about more than political ambition.
In political circles, his time at the company was seen as little more than private sector window dressing on an otherwise exclusively public sector career.
Johnson’s lifelong engagement with politics and policy plus the timing of his move to the private sector suggested that Vantage Point was strategic politically.
Current Gov. Kristi Noem held the state’s congressional seat in 2014. Daugaard ran for re-election that year; former Gov. Mike Rounds was running for U.S. Senate.
“The general path of someone who’d worked for PUC, then worked for Gov. Daugaard, that’s someone with political ambitions, Schaff said. “He was waiting for the timing to work out. He was ready to move up, but there weren’t really any openings. Almost everybody saw Dusty’s move to the private sector as biding his time.”
Vantage Point offered opportunity to bridge gap between policy, engineering
To hear the congressman tell it, his return to politics wasn’t certain. He made more money at Vantage Point than he can make in Congress, he said – he was a co-owner during his time there – plus the job allowed him to spend more time with his family.
“I’ve been in elected office 11 of my 48 years,” Johnson said. “I’ve been proud of the six years I had on the PUC and the five-years-plus I’ve had in Congress, but I’m every bit as proud of the very successful career I built in the private sector. That company’s got 450 employees right now. It is absolutely the national leader in rural broadband. And I helped get it to that point.”
Little has been written about Johnson’s work at Vantage Point, perhaps because of the complexity of the business.
Vantage Point actually employs around 500 people at this point, CEO Larry Thompson told South Dakota Searchlight, the lion’s share of whom work at its headquarters in Mitchell.
Even so, Thompson said, the company is little understood in its hometown.
“Everybody wants to work here because they always hear that we’ve got good pay and good benefits and things like that, but nobody knows what we do,” Thompson said. “It’s not like when you go down to the eye doctor or the chiropractor. You know exactly what they do based on what it says on the outside of the building.”
The engineering firm serves a range of urban and rural clients, but its primary customer base has historically been rural telecommunications cooperatives. A speciality is helping rural co-ops connect customers to or upgrade broadband networks.
“How critical that is was really made apparent during COVID, when all the kids were going home, and people weren’t showing up at work,” Thompson said. “Everybody realized how important broadband really was.”
Thompson said it was his interactions with Johnson the public utilities commissioner and his policy chops that made him a strong candidate to lead the company’s consulting division when the position opened up around 2014.
Rural broadband networks rely on federal funding, because there aren’t enough customers for them to make business sense. The federal government offers a host of programs and grants to bridge the gap and connect rural Americans.
But the programs and their compliance requirements are complicated. Johnson’s understanding of utility regulation, his ability to rapidly absorb policy minutiae and convey that information to co-op board members, Thompson said, made him an ideal candidate to lead the company’s consulting division.
“It’s a relatively small part of our business, but it’s an important part, in the sense that they’re the ones that figure out how to pay for and fund the networks,” Thompson said.
Thompson also praised Johnson’s energy and “marketing flair,” which wasn’t the company’s strong suit in the past.
“He did a lot of good for the group, probably more than we had initially envisioned when we hired him,” Thompson said.
Johnson said he appreciated being the guy who helped rural co-ops make “huge business decisions that were putting the finances of these rural providers on the line.”
“And I was really good at it,” Johnson said. “Revenues went up 35% after I’d been there just a couple of years.”
Back to politics
He also said he loved the work. Engineers, he said, deal in facts and evidence. There’s a certainty and finality to engineering decisions that he doesn’t see in his work in Congress.
“That can be the most frustrating thing about politics, how often people say things that they have no evidentiary support for,” Johnson said. “I just loved being able to talk real-person talk to the engineers, and engineering-talk to the real people.”
Eventually, however, Johnson returned to the political arena. In 2018, during his first campaign for Congress, he told South Dakota Public Broadcasting’s Lori Walsh that he “just kept feeling tugged on; that it was time for somebody to run into the fray and try to make a difference.”
Six years later, Johnson insists he’s done that, in spite of the “knuckleheads” he says take the work of legislating less seriously than they do their work on the next soundbyte. He also says he’s earned another term, in spite of his opponent’s contention that he’s only waiting for the right time to throw his hat in the race to become the state’s next governor.
“If I’m ‘the power behind the speaker’ while I have my eye off the ball,” Johnson said, referring to the Bloomberg Government article and his opponent’s allegation about his future ambitions, “it’d be interesting to see what I could get done while I’m focused.”
As far as a run for governor, Johnson said he’s focused on his current job, but that “if there are opportunities that pop up down the road, obviously I’d be interested in anything that would give me an opportunity to help South Dakota.”
Daugaard, his former boss, hopes Johnson takes that opportunity.
“I think he plans to run for governor, and I’m four-square behind him,” Daugaard said.
