Q: Why was ballot security an unusual problem in South Dakota?
TIMMONS: I’m not sure it’s unusual in South Dakota. I think it’s always an issue in close races, and there are [00:53:00] some precincts in this country that are a little bit less vigilant about the security and the integrity of the ballot box than others. And that just happened to be one precinct where it was a problem.
Q: Was this focused on — or concentrated on reservation land, the concerns?
TIMMONS: Yeah, so I’m not — I don’t remember how the whole thing unfolded; I just remembered that there were some concerns around the state, and I don’t remember which precinct this was, but I knew it was one that was in question.
Q: Really unusual aspect of this election was that the Senate Majority Leader, Bill Frist, went out and campaigned against his Democratic equivalent. I don’t know that that had ever happened before.
TIMMONS: Probably not, but it certainly has happened since. (laughter) So, I’m not sure that that’s a good thing to do for the comity of the Senate, but it seemed to pay off for Bill Frist at that point.
Q: Well, when [00:54:00] you said that toward the end of the general election campaign, you were getting indications that this —
TIMMONS: Right.
Q: — that a lot of close races were starting to break in the Republican direction. I don’t know that that was the trend in the presidential polling at that time, when it really seemed to be still neck-and–
TIMMONS: Right, it was difficult.
Q: — neck-and-neck. So why do you think Senate races were breaking Republican before the presidential broke Republican? And here’s a chance for you to claim credit.
TIMMONS: Well, ultimately — no, you know, it takes a team to build any of these things, and the credit always is the candidate. I mean the candidates are the ones that ultimately are on the ballot. They’re the ones that put their names forward, and I think the Republican candidates had made their cases, not only for the direction that they wanted to see the country go in, but also for their ability to do the job as United States Senator. And I just think they made those connections, and they held, those connections [00:55:00] held, and they didn’t make mistakes, mostly, at the end. And they ran really good campaigns.
Q: Can you give your sort of professional opinion of the Democratic committee that was the equivalent of the NRSC, how energetic, how skillful they were at playing the hand they were dealt?
TIMMONS: I think they were very good. I mean, look, Andy Grossman who ran the committee — the Democratic committee in the 2002 cycle, and started running the committee when — in 2004, before he went off to do, I believe it was Organizing for America at the time, there’s no better professional on the Democratic side. He and I had a very good relationship. We decided to meet early on to kind of set the ground rules at the beginning, and make sure that each other understood that we were going to be focused on these races, and it wasn’t going to be a staff-to-staff fight, or any of the [00:56:00] silly — none of the silly stuff. We wanted to be as professional as possible during — you know, during the election cycle. And I think, generally speaking, they were very, very tough opponents, and made a lot of good decisions. It just turned out not to be their cycle.
Q: You know, another way of interpreting this election that maybe diminishes the role of the campaign, is the South had been trending Republican.
TIMMONS: Sure.
Q: Lots of Democratic incumbents saw this coming, retired, and basically you happened to be in place when the harvest came in.
TIMMONS: (laughter) Well, a lot —
Q: That’s — I’m stating that strongly.
TIMMONS: Let me tell you what, a lot of these things are all luck. (laughter) So, I was lucky to be there that cycle; there’s no question.
Q: And then six years later, this class did very well.
TIMMONS: Sure, yeah, well —
Q: Two thousand ten.
TIMMONS: Well, and again, you said a lot of the trends had embedded themselves into certain regions of the country.