Who will win in South Dakota?

[SteveRogers]

Rounds is clearly still favored, but the dynamics of a three-way race like the result really hard to predict. A lot of times what happens is that whoever is clearly viewed as being the third place candidate about a week or two out from election day will suffer a catastrophic collapse of support. If further polling confirms that Pressler has fully supplanted Weiland as the viable opposition, then I'd expect the floor to fall out from beneath Weiland's numbers in the final week of the campaign in which case Pressler would have a really good chance of pulling this off. If, on the other hand polls continue to show Weiland not far behind Pressler, or show Weiland and Pressler jockeying back and forth for second place, then they'll continue to split the vote and Rounds will probably win.

Because three-way races can be volatile, there's a very good chance that SD polling will lag too far behind reality to capture the final shifts in the endgame. The numbers on election night could be markedly different from whatever the final polls show.