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Sheryl Johnson, a Democrat running for U.S. House in South Dakota in 2024, poses with her campaign paraphernalia at her home in Sioux Falls.
Sheryl Johnson has never held political office. What she has done is raise her four daughters, manage retail operations and work in a public school.
That’s precisely why she thinks voters should check her name on the Nov. 5 ballot and send her to Washington.
She’s running as the Democratic nominee in a bid to unseat Republican Dusty Johnson for South Dakota’s lone seat in the U.S. House of Representatives.
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The 61-year-old former Republican, who lives in Sioux Falls, has pinned her hopes for victory on her status as a mother with a range of real-world experiences. She says that makes her a better choice than an opponent whose career is defined mostly by political and government work.
Her campaign materials use the tagline “SD Mom for Congress.” It began as an offhand quip about her frustration with the U.S. House, its infighting and inability to find common ground.
‘They just need a mom’ in Congress
“I said, ‘they’re behaving like a bunch of children. They just need a mom there,’” Johnson said. “And that’s kind of helped spur this idea of a South Dakota mom: The fact that there’s such division. It used to be that they could agree to disagree, make compromises and get along.”
That attitude, she said, resonates with the voters she’s met since signing on back in February to become the Democrats’ first U.S. House candidate since 2018. Dusty Johnson won his seat that year when he bested Democrat Tim Bjorkman, as well as an independent and Libertarian candidate. Johnson got 60% of the vote that year; Bjorkman got 36%.
In 2020 and 2022, Democrats failed to field a candidate, and Rep. Johnson coasted to wins over Libertarian opponents.
Ahlers
Dan Ahlers, director of the South Dakota Democratic Party, said Sheryl Johnson was near the top of the list when the party began to weigh its options for 2024. Her background, attitudes on problem solving and status as a political outsider were among the reasons why.
“The primary calculus for us was, ‘Who exhibits the qualities of a good public servant, who is someone who’s dedicated to serving others and listening to the concerns of the people around them?’” Ahlers said. “That’s what drew us to Sheryl.”
Rural upbringing, military family experiences shape beliefs
Johnson grew up on a farm in northwest Iowa. The area was and remains solidly Republican, and she grew up in a family that shared those beliefs.
But Johnson doesn’t see the values she learned growing up – values like hard work and responsibility – through a partisan lens. As a girl, she remembers her father telling her she couldn’t go swimming until she hopped in the tractor and mowed a field. That’s a boy’s job, she protested.
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It’s a job that needs doing, her father replied, and she was as capable of doing it as anyone else. It was a lesson about hard work, she says now, and about how responsibilities come first. It also served as a confidence booster.
“As much as I was annoyed, it made me a little proud that he thought I was capable of doing that,” she said.
It took years for her to disconnect from the party of her youth. She and her husband Peter, a physician, were both Republicans when they met. He was in the U.S. Navy, and they both supported former president George H.W. Bush in the election preceding her husband’s deployment to Operation Desert Storm in 1991.
The couple and their youngest daughter arrived at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina just days before Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s incursion against his neighboring country.
“We weren’t even done unpacking, and my husband came home and said, ‘Well, Saddam invaded Kuwait. We’re on standby. We’ve got to get ready to head to the Middle East,’” she said.
The year of his deployment taught her what it’s like to be a single parent and the impact that a declaration of war has on military families.
Sheryl Johnson used to be a Republican
Sheryl Johnson is challenging Dusty Johnson in the U.S. House of Representatives race. She was in Aberdeen Sunday, July 28 for the Blue Jeans and Barbecue event hosted by the Brown County Democrats. Aberdeen Insider photo by Elisa Sand.
By then, Johnson said, she’d already begun to move away from the straight-ticket thinking in elections and toward “voting for the person.” It was the nation’s next major military conflict that pulled her out of the Republican camp for good.
“When George W. Bush got us back into Iraq and Afghanistan by lying about weapons of mass destruction, that was a huge turning point for me,” Johnson said of the 2001 and 2003 conflicts that followed the 9/11 attacks.
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She grew steadily more opposed to Republican policies, she said, as she raised her kids and later managed the snack shop at Roosevelt High School in Sioux Falls.
The GOP’s opposition to same-sex marriage and reproductive rights were among her chief complaints.
“I felt like it stopped being about freedom and started being about control,” she said. “They wanted to tell people who they could love, who they could marry, when they have kids, how they have kids and what books kids read.”
Push from Democrat leaders prompts state House run
Her shift from political observer to candidate followed the election of Donald Trump in 2016. She went to a Democratic leadership training event with the intention of helping other Democrats run for office.
“By the end of the day, there were teachers and union people and farmers who were all stepping up to run,” Johnson said. “And I thought, ‘Well, you know, they’re regular people, just like me. Maybe I could run.’”
She’s since run three times for state House in District 11. She’s never won, but says she’s fared better than one might expect in a district where fewer than 30% of voters are registered Democrats. In her third race, in 2022, she challenged Republican Sen. Jim Stalzer and pulled in 44% of the vote.