By Marie Horrigan, CQ Staff

Republican hopes of recruiting a top-tier challenger to South Dakota Democratic Sen. Tim Johnson appear to have hit a dead end with former Lt. Gov. Steve Kirby’s recently announced decision to forgo the campaign. With Johnson already enjoying widespread public sympathy for his comeback from the near-fatal brain hemorrhage he suffered in December 2006, CQ Politics has changed its rating on his race for a third term to Safe Democrat from Democrat Favored.

It is not outside the realm of possibility that the South Dakota contest could return to the ranks of competitive races before November. The state generally has strong Republican leanings, as exhibited in 2004 when President Bush took 60 percent of its votes and John Thune , the state’s former at-large House member, captured the other U.S. Senate seat by ousting the Democratic incumbent, then-Minority Leader Tom Daschle. Johnson himself famously won his second Senate term, in 2002, by a whisker over Thune, with margins of 524 votes and one-tenth of 1 percentage point.

But none of the four candidates who have stated intentions to run for this year’s Republican Senate nomination appears at this point to have the political and fundraising clout to provide a serious threat to unseat Johnson.

The GOP contenders are state Rep. Joel Dykstra; businessman Sam Kephart; Bert Tollefson, a retired real estate broker whose past bids for public office include finishing last with 1 percent of the vote in the state’s five-candidate 2002 Republican U.S. House primary; and Charles Lyonel Gonyo, a political newcomer who is the only Republican who has filed for the race with South Dakota’s Secretary of State.

While Dykstra and Kephart have not yet filed papers with state officials — the candidate filing deadline is March 25 — both did file during 2007 with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) to set up Senate fundraising committees. Neither raised significant money by the end of last year, though. Dykstra led the Republican field with $138,000 in receipts but had only $21,000 on hand as of Dec. 31. Kephart reported raising $23,000 and had $1,700 on hand.

Tollefson and Gonyo have not filed campaign finance reports with the FEC, something required of candidates who have raised or spent at least $5,000 in their campaigns. The next reports for South Dakota candidates, covering the period ending March 31, are due to be filed with the FEC by April 15.

Johnson, meanwhile, raised $2.5 million during 2007 and had $2.4 million left in his coffers on Dec. 31. One reason Republicans were high on the prospect of a candidacy by Kirby is that he has personal wealth that they hoped he might employ to self-finance his campaign and close the fundraising gap with Johnson. Earlier in this election cycle, Republican officials tried without success to persuade two-term Republican Gov. Michael Rounds to launch what would have been a highly competitive challenge to the incumbent.

Rebecca Fisher, a spokeswoman for the National Republican Campaign Committee, said the party continued to talk with potential candidates for the Senate race and other interested parties in South Dakota. “Voters in South Dakota will have a clear choice in November,” she said.

But Max Wetz, executive director of the South Dakota Republican Party, said that he did not expect any additional entrants into the Senate race. “My gut feeling now is that who we have in the race is who it’s going to be,” he said of the Republican field.

Republicans only recently have gone on the political offensive against Johnson, who announced he was running for re-election in October, nearly a year after he was rushed to a Washington, D.C., hospital and diagnosed with bleeding of the brain caused by a congenital condition known as arteriovenous malformation.

“I think some of the candidates who had considered running were reluctant to run against [Johnson] this year because it would be a very, very difficult campaign to run. Even legitimate criticisms about voting records and things like that would be seen as personal attacks,” said Brent Lerseth, professor of political science at Augustana College in Sioux Falls.

“Part of it has to do, I think, with the fact that Johnson’s extremely popular in the state. Part of it has to do with the recent events, and I think part of it has to do with [the fact that] we don’t have anybody on the Republican side that is a clear front candidate unless somebody like Gov. Rounds decided to turn around and run, which is not likely anytime soon,” Lerseth said.

Kirby attributed his decision not to run to what he described as an unprecedented level personal scrutiny, that he said included online postings about his house and family. Kirby said he knew the campaign would be an uphill battle, but that he was not prepared for “creepy surveillance” by Johnson supporters and attacks from Democrats.

“Mind you, I’m just private citizen, and the senator’s own campaign comes after me and uses my perceived balance sheet as a fundraising tool. ... It was a creepy thing to do with someone who hasn’t even announced yet,” he said.

Matthew Miller, spokesman for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, said that Kirby engaged in a long “exploratory” phase preliminary to deciding whether to run, opening him to examination by Democrats. On Feb. 28 DSCC announced it had launched a Web site that the committee said exposed Kirby’s “slash and burn campaign history [and] shady business dealings.”

“It’s not unusual when someone’s publicly considering the race that they become the subject of news stories. As part of that, we thought it was important to share with people in the state some of his record and his history,” Miller said.