The Dakota Effect

If challenged to do so, relatively few I Americans could probably find North and South Dakota on a map, let alone correctly name, spell, and pronounce the capitals of the two states. Nor would they be able to recall anything interesting about the Dakotas, whose main tourist attractions, besides Mount Rushmore, are a drug store, a civic arena festooned in corn, and a peace garden. Although one of the Dakotas bills itself as "The Land of Infinite Variety," its sociocultural di versity consists primarily of different synods of Lutherans who engage in end less disputation with one another because they are so similar. Dakotans prefer their food bland-they consider ketchup dar ingly spicy-and their politicians low key. When they encounter something new, they call it "different," which they rarely mean as a compliment, and they wait for it to go away-which, because there is so little to hold it in the Dakotas, it probably will do. They keep their opinions to themselves (a typical Dakotan being the fellow from Sioux Falls who loved his wife so much that he almost told her), and they do not like it when people make a fuss about them selves or anything else. Thus, when South Dakotans perceived the previously popular Senator George McGovern as having gotten too big for his britches by seeking the presidency in 1972, they saw to it that he would fail to carry his home state, and three decades later they voted long-time Senator Tom Daschle out of office as soon as he repeated McGov em's mistake of seeing a president when ever he gazed into a mirror. As veritable Rodney Dangerfields of the American states, the Dakotas get lit tle respect from the rest of the country. Tellingly, Fargo, the only major motion picture ever named after a city in the Dakotas, was actually set in Minnesota (Coen and Coen 1996). This disrespect tends to irk Dakotans, who are a proud but humble people. (A cynic would say they are humble because they have so much to be humble about.) The most illustrious Dakotans have themselves been a humble lot, to judge by those de picted in Statuary Hall; the fame of these Dakota luminaries-John Burke, Sakakawea, William Beadle, and Joseph Ward-pales in comparison to that of many others-Tom Brokaw, Peggy Lee, Lawrence Welk, and Roger Maris, for example-who got out of the Dakotas as soon as they could. This tendency to leave the Dakotas is the very phenomenon under consider ation here. As a starting point, we note that these two states, which rank seven teenth and nineteenth among the 50 states in land mass, are virtually empty, ranking forty-sixth and forty-seventh in both total population and population density. The prairie dogs and coyotes with which Dakotas' human residents share the frigid tundra easily outnumber them. At first blush, the political impli cation seems obvious: a lack of clout on the political scene. After all, the Dakotas' combined congressional delega tions, which number only six in all, could caucus in an ice-fishing shack. Commanding so few electoral votes and having been safely ensconced in the Republican column in the last 10 presidential elections in any event, the Dakotas are routinely ignored by presi dential candidates, who fly over but rarely drop in. A lack of political clout, at any rate, is the consequence that one might logically have expected based on the sheer dearth of people living in the Dakotas. Yet, while the rest of the country was paying them little heed,' the Dakotas have been successfully pursuing an extra constitutional strategy for advancing their interests-a strategy of selective out migration. In addition to sending their own duly allotted congressional delega tions to Washington, they have been quietly slotting their native sons and daughters into Congress as members from other states. In what follows, we show that this Dakota Effect is not sim ply an artifact of the eagerness of those born in the Dakotas to seek greener pas tures elsewhere, and that it has policy consequences not just for the Dakotas, but for the nation as well. The 107th Congress, for which the Congressional Quarterly noted what it called the "Dakota Connection," con tained 15 natives of the Dakotas, includ ing the entire six-person contingent representing the Dakotas themselves, three representing neighboring Minne sota, and six who had fanned out to more distant venues (one each from Florida, Kansas, Oregon, and Virginia, and two from Texas).2 Table 1 establishes that on a per capita basis the Dakota Connection far exceeds its counterpart in any other state. No other state even comes close to North Dakota's 3.7 exported members of Congress for every 400,000 current resi dents, nor, for that matter, does any other state even come close to South Dakota's 1.6 exported members per 400,000 cur rent residents. Moreover, as just noted, in both North and South Dakota representa tion begins at home: every member of the two Dakota delegations was home grown. Thus, in terms of all members of Congress (that is, natives of a state plus exports to other states) rather than just exports, the very same pattern holds: North Dakota, with 5.6 members of Con gress per 400,000 residents, and South Dakota, with 3.2, stand out far above the rest.3 Notably, the profusion of Dakotans in Congress is nothing new, as evidenced by the long and distinguished careers of senators like Hubert Humphrey of Min nesota (born in Wallace, SD) and J.J. Exon of Nebraska (a native of Geddes, SD). The abundance of congressional Dakotans raises two fundamental ques tions: Why? And so what? Garry Young is associate director of the George Washington Institute of Public Pol icy at George Washington University. While he has never visited the Dakotas, as a kid he did own a Wild Bill Hickok ac tion figure. He can be reached at: YoungG@ gwu.edu.