LAST YEAR--on August 16, 2003, speeding in a borrowed white Cadillac down one of those long, dusty South Dakota highways that glide across the plains like endless ribbons--a Republican congressman named Bill Janklow ran a stop sign at 70 miles per hour and killed a passing motorcyclist.

It was a horrible incident, and it brought an end to Janklow's long domination of South Dakota politics. Though routinely reckless, he'd always gotten the good breaks before, pushing his luck so often that it must have seemed to him not luck at all but his right, his privilege, always to have things go his way. His subsequent manslaughter conviction, resignation from Congress, and jail term formed a sad apostrophe to his winning campaigns, his 16 years as governor, his power, and his visibility. "All of my elections have nothing to do with the issues or whoever else is running," he told me in 2002 after he had defeated a perky young Democrat named Stephanie Herseth for Congress. "All of my elections are only about me."

The line seemed at the time breathtakingly arrogant--but it was also true, and it remains true even now that he's out of office. With Janklow's conviction last December, a special election gave the congressional seat to Herseth--which made every member of South Dakota's delegation to Washington a Democrat. The destruction of the Republican party in a majority Republican state is the real legacy of 30 years of Janklow's personal dominance.

One hardly needs to add it up: Janklow campaigned against an incumbent Republican named James Abdnor in 1986, and the result was Democrat Tom Daschle's election to the Senate. He systematically undermined every rising Republican from Clint Roberts to Dale Bell, and the result was Democratic Senator Tim Johnson's election in 1996. He opened up South Dakota's sole congressional seat with his manslaughter conviction, and the result was Democrat Stephanie Herseth's special election. Outsiders sometimes wonder why a strongly pro-life state like South Dakota is represented in Washington entirely by pro-abortion officials; the answer is Bill Janklow.

With Janklow gone at last, is this the year South Dakota Republicans recover? Many are excited about Republican John Thune's chances against Daschle in the Senate race, and, indeed, Daschle seems to be in more trouble than he has known since 1978, when he pulled out a last-minute congressional victory by swearing, "I will do everything in my power to persuade others that abortion is wrong"--and getting the nuns who taught him in grade school to write a public letter declaring, "We know and we tell those with whom we speak of your abhorrence for abortion--and of your commitment to life."

Needless to say, that was Daschle then. The Daschle of today writes fundraising letters for the largest abortion lobby in the country and filibusters pro-life judges.

The opposition to Daschle has been making much of this trope of the "two Daschles." Mostly it's been heard from various political action committees and 527s. In 2002, the two main Republican candidates for governor slanged each other so viciously that the state elected in self-defense the nearly unknown Mike Rounds, who ran on a platform that consisted of little besides saying: "I'm a really nice guy, and I don't use negative ads." The Thune campaign seems to have learned the lesson. Of course, the Daschle campaign has learned the lesson as well, screaming "Negative ad!" whenever his record is called into question. But the truth is that Thune's campaign has been very mild.

Still, the message has gotten out: Daschle is one person back home, and another person on the East Coast. In South Dakota, he proudly announces his support for the president; in Washington, he's the minority leader of the Senate who does his best to thwart the president. In South Dakota, he campaigns as a man of the people; in Washington, he and his lobbyist wife recently bought a $1.9 million house, for which they promptly claimed a "homestead" tax credit that requires declaring the house one's primary and legal residence--leaving curiously unresolved the question of how the couple remain registered voters in South Dakota.