Toby Doeden: A bitcoin evangelist and anti-property-tax crusader who wants to be governor

Toby Doeden says he was born into poverty but climbed out of it through salesmanship, risk-taking and the force of his personality. He thinks those same traits could rescue South Dakota, a state he says needs saving. 

The 51-year-old Republican businessman, landlord, developer, entrepreneur and bitcoin investor has put at least $4 million of his own money into his campaign for governor, according to campaign finance reports. It’s his first run for elected office.

“I’m risking literally everything I have to fight for the future of South Dakota,” Doeden told South Dakota Public Broadcasting last year. 

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His critics, meanwhile, describe him as a pitchman whose confidence veers into overpromising about his campaign pledge to eliminate property taxes, and whose outspokenness has veered into offensive remarks on social media. A fellow Aberdeen resident and Republican, state Sen. Michael Rohl, is one of those critics. 

“He enjoys the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought,” Rohl said of Doeden.

Doeden stunned the political establishment by finishing first in the June 2 Republican primary ahead of the governor, a U.S. representative and the state speaker of the House. But Doeden failed to reach 35%, setting up a July 28 runoff with Gov. Larry Rhoden, the second-place finisher.

Neither Doeden nor his campaign team followed through on pledges to schedule an interview for this story, despite exchanging multiple messages with South Dakota Searchlight. Doeden sent written comments in some of those messages, including one accusing Rhoden of being unwilling to face the media. Rhoden, for his part, allowed a Searchlight reporter to interview him at his ranch in rural Union Center.

Rhoden has declined to debate Doeden ahead of the runoff, after they and the two other candidates in the June 2 primary all participated in three debates before that election. Doeden wants another debate.

“Someone unwilling to make themselves available to the press and to the people in advance of an election has no business holding an office as important as governor,” Doeden wrote to Searchlight.

Although Doeden did not grant an interview for this story, he has revealed much about himself in past interviews and media appearances, including a podcast he started in 2024 called “Toby Doeden — Unfiltered.” 

Growing up in a ‘loose environment’

Doeden grew up in Groton, a town of fewer than 1,500 people about 25 miles from Aberdeen in northeast South Dakota. He told SDPB he had a disabled father, a constantly working mother, and three much older siblings. 

He said his parents left him “behind a little bit,” explaining in his podcast that “by the time they get to their fourth child, especially when it’s a ‘oops,’ so to speak,” his parents were “kind of done with it.”

That shaped him, he said. 

“As a young kid, I remember always having to look for ways to entertain myself,” Doeden said on the podcast. “From a very, very young age, I always had many entrepreneurial ideas. I was a daydreamer.”  

Doeden was interviewed in June for a YouTube show called “After the Call.” He has been criticized for his outspokenness since childhood, he said in that interview. Teachers, bosses, coaches — and now political opponents — have all wanted him to act differently. Doeden’s answer is that he can’t turn it off.

“This is what you get,” Doeden said. “I’m Toby 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, and I’ll never change. I don’t care who likes it. I don’t care who doesn’t.” 

That brashness has manifested in controversial ways. Doeden has commented on Facebook that LGBTQ+ pride celebrations are a “smokescreen to distract the lost” from acknowledging “emptiness” and “loneliness,” stemming from “hyper-sexualized narcissistic lifestyles.” A string of Doeden’s social media posts in 2023 encouraged the shooting of immigrants in gangs, used a profane insult to describe President Joe Biden, and labeled statistics about hatred of Jewish Americans as “fake.” 

During the 2024 campaign season, Doeden’s political action committee hosted a rally featuring a video message from Mark Robinson, a Republican who was running for governor of North Carolina. CNN had just reported that Robinson made racist and sexually explicit remarks more than a decade earlier on a pornographic website’s message board. 

Doeden stood by Robinson. In response to Republican officials who condemned the event, Doeden told Searchlight at the time that the critics “aren’t conservatives.” 

“These people are hacks. They’re clowns. They’re disgusting,” Doeden said. 

Doeden traces his outspokenness to his upbringing, saying in the YouTube interview that his parents allowed him and his siblings to grow up in a “loose environment.” That upbringing became “the number one driving factor to my success today,” Doeden said, “and nobody will ever convince me any different.” The environment gave him the freedom to try and fail, he said, and to express his creativity. 

Struggling to ‘make a buck’

Doeden said on his podcast that he tried college, but it wasn’t for him. He does not have a college degree.

From there, he tried almost everything. Owning vending machines. Selling and installing satellite dishes. Factory work. Starting a paint business with his parents.

“If there was a way to try to make a buck, I tried it,” he said on his podcast. 

While newly married to Liz — his wife of 30 years — and expecting the first of their four children, Doeden was working at a gas station in Groton.

Then, in 1997, he landed a job as a car salesman at Aberdeen Chrysler Center. In his first month, he said on his podcast, he sold 20 vehicles.

“I had made more money than I had ever dreamed of,” Doeden said.

He ultimately rose to become general manager, then a partner, and then bought out the mentor who hired him. Doeden said on his podcast that he eventually became uneasy with having all his wealth tied up in his vehicle dealership, and he wanted to diversify.

In an on-the-record meeting last month with members of the South Dakota NewsMedia Association attended by Searchlight, Doeden said he diversified by buying everyday businesses: rental properties, gas stations, a coffee shop, car washes, lumber yards, an event space, liquor stores and casinos.

“I’ve built thriving businesses and created thousands of jobs right here in South Dakota,” Doeden said in one of his early campaign ads.

One of Doeden’s critics, Jim Thares, founder and CEO of Primrose Retirement Communities, is a longtime businessman and developer in the Aberdeen area. He disputes Doeden’s portrayal of himself as the creator of thousands of jobs, arguing that “most of his workers were already employed by businesses Doeden later purchased.” 

Doeden’s adult children all work for his companies. He told the NewsMedia Association that his family life counters a popular caricature of him. 

“How could he be crazy and angry?” he said, referring to himself. Reaching for Liz, he joked, “Why would she still be here?”

Charitable giving

Now that he has the means, Doeden said in the YouTube interview, he often opens the GoFundMe charitable giving website, searches “South Dakota,” and looks for people in need.

Some GoFundMe donations are publicly viewable, though donors can give anonymously. Searchlight found $3,000 from Doeden to an Aberdeen woman allegedly assaulted in her home and hospitalized, $2,000 to a Sioux Falls child fighting leukemia, $300 to help a couple care for their premature baby, and $500 for a similar situation. 

Kelsea Schwab said her family encountered Doeden when he made an unexpected $2,000 donation for her seriously ill daughter who was dealing with liver failure in 2022, after the family had already lost a younger daughter to sudden infant death syndrome. Doeden kept checking in afterward, used his businesses to help raise money for the deceased child’s headstone, and donated “thousands and thousands of dollars” during a Ronald McDonald House gala at her invitation, Schwab said.

“Yes, he has a lot of money, but he also uses it for a lot of good,” Schwab told Searchlight.

Doeden founded a charity, the 4J Foundation, in 2020, primarily focused on Aberdeen-area children and pets in need. In 2021, the foundation gave $250,000 to the Aberdeen Area Humane Society, which used the money to build the Doeden Family Animal Shelter.

“I’ve donated literally millions of dollars to charities, families, humane centers, humane societies,” Doeden told the Aberdeen Insider newspaper in June, adding “nobody has been more generous, not just in giving money, but just giving my time to people.”

Thares said he could not recall Doeden “contributing in a significant way to any of the projects” of which Thares has knowledge from his years of involvement in the community. 

Harvey Jewett of Aberdeen is a philanthropist, attorney, entrepreneur, former president of Super 8 Motels, and former longtime member of the state Board of Regents, which oversees South Dakota’s public universities. He disputes Doeden’s characterization about the extent of Doeden’s charitable giving.

“If someone had donated millions of dollars in the Aberdeen area, I would have known about it,” Jewett said. 

Fighting his own property taxes while pledging to eliminate them

Doeden has also invested extensively in real estate, including buying and renovating dilapidated apartments.

Searchlight located a total of $39.8 million worth of property owned by Doeden or his companies in Brown, Spink and Edmunds counties, with the majority in Brown County, which includes Aberdeen as the county seat. Taxes on those properties total more than $680,000, according to public records.  

Property tax rates are applied to a property’s value, which is assessed by county officials. Property owners who think their assessed value is too high can appeal to a local board.

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One of Doeden’s companies appealed the valuations of 47 Brown County properties this year, according to county Equalization Office records, but later withdrew all but nine of the appeals. The other nine were adjusted downward.

Doeden announced his bid for governor in May 2025 in Aberdeen with a pledge about property taxes. 

“As governor, I will fight to eliminate property taxes so that each and every resident — regardless of class, color, creed or profession — can truly own their home and their land once and for all,” Doeden said.

He has continued to make similar pledges, sometimes saying he will “phase out” property taxes. More recently, Doeden’s campaign spokesman told Searchlight the plan only applies to owner-occupied properties — in other words, homeowners, not agricultural or commercial properties.

South Dakotans paid $1.86 billion in property taxes last year, including $815 million from homeowners, but none of that money goes to state government. It all goes to schools, counties, cities and smaller units of government. Searchlight asked Doeden in a May podcast interview how he would make up that lost revenue for those jurisdictions.

“Once the economy starts growing, and it will; once I start collecting external revenue, which we will; and once I cut all the fat and pork out of our state budget, you are going to see, very quickly, within a matter of a couple years, a significant amount of annual budget surpluses,” Doeden said. “And yes, I will use that money to target the phase-out of things like property tax.” 

One of the opponents Doeden beat in the June 2 primary, U.S. Rep. Dusty Johnson, criticized Doeden’s tax plan in an April debate.

“The math just doesn’t work,” Johnson said. “Hopes and dreams didn’t work for Obama and they’re not going to work for eliminating property taxes either.”

Bitcoin evangelism

Beyond his businesses and rental properties, Doeden is an evangelist for bitcoin. It’s a cryptocurrency, which is a type of digital money secured by encryption technology. Cryptocurrencies enable the transfer of value online without a bank or payment processor, and some cryptocurrencies, including bitcoin, are used as investment vehicles.

In his podcast, Doeden said he began investing in bitcoin “very, very heavily” around 2020 after devoting around “500 hours” of research to it.

“I will buy bitcoin forever, every single day,” he said. “We mine bitcoin, we buy bitcoin.”

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Investing in bitcoin means buying and later selling it when its value increases. New bitcoin is “mined” using large amounts of electricity to make trillions of calculations. The goal is to solve a puzzle that awards the “miner” a newly created bitcoin. 

Doeden devoted an entire episode of his podcast to discussing and promoting bitcoin. 

“As I learned more and more about it, I just kept essentially taking almost all of my cash reserves from all of my companies that I knew I wasn’t going to need anytime soon, and we just converted it from cash to bitcoin,” he said.

In 2022, Doeden’s Plaza Rentals company and his son, Jackson, received permission from a local zoning board to operate a bitcoin mining facility in Aberdeen. When Searchlight sent Doeden messages asking for more information about that operation, Doeden responded by text message: “I don’t think there’s a single reader in the state that’s gonna find this interesting.” 

He did not respond to a message asking how much of his current wealth is from or is invested in cryptocurrencies. 

State Rep. Logan Manhart, R-Aberdeen — who lost in the June 2 primary election — has been working with Doeden’s campaign. Manhart sponsored bills each of the last two legislative sessions to allow the South Dakota Investment Council to invest in bitcoin.

The council manages investments that fund the pensions of public employees in the state, ranging from teachers to state office workers to police, as well as other investment funds that produce revenue for the state budget.

Doeden supported Manhart’s bitcoin legislation and took it a step further, posting on social media in January 2025 that “South Dakota needs a Bitcoin Reserve,” while sharing Manhart’s post about his legislation.

The Investment Council and the governor’s budget office were among the opponents who testified against Manhart’s legislation, saying bitcoin is too volatile and would damage the state’s standing with bond-rating agencies. The value of one bitcoin has swung dramatically, from less than $20,000 in 2023 to more than $100,000 last year. 

State law requires the council to prioritize the safety of its funds, “not speculation,” explained Matt Clark, who leads the council.

“Bitcoin does not have any underlying physical use,” Clark said in his testimony. 

Doeden shared a theory on his podcast about resistance to bitcoin. 

“I think the system has programmed regular people to scare the bejeezus out of them because they don’t want you and me buying bitcoin. Because they want to own all of it, right?” Doeden said. “The globalists in this world that want complete control of the world.”

Politically activated by a pandemic and a pipeline

Doeden said on his podcast that he was not politically engaged until around the time of the COVID-19 pandemic, which is also when he and his wife became empty nesters, and when both of Doeden’s parents died — one of cancer and the other of heart disease. 

In his June YouTube interview, Doeden said he started thinking about running for office after attending a pandemic-era rally supporting landowners fighting a carbon sequestration pipeline. Doeden recalled standing up at the rally and declaring that U.S. Rep. Dusty Johnson, R-South Dakota, would become governor “over my dead body.” The crowd’s response, Doeden said, was an “aha moment.” 

Johnson, who led in several early polls, finished third behind Doeden and Rhoden in the June 2 Republican governor primary, ahead of state House Speaker Jon Hansen.

Doeden said he decided to run for governor after the assassination attempt against President Donald Trump in July 2024 at Butler, Pennsylvania. Doeden told the NewsMedia Association that he looked at his wife and said he had “never felt more like a coward.”

“Here I am, living the good life in Aberdeen, South Dakota,” Doeden said. “Who the hell is Toby Doeden to be too good to run for public office?”

His message has resonated with some Republicans looking for change. Abram Naber, 42, of Rapid City, said in a primary day polling place interview with Searchlight that he didn’t cast a vote in the congressional, legislative or local races: “Just Toby.” 

“He’s an outsider of the political spectrum,” Naber said. “I think we need fresh meat, fresh blood in the Governor’s Office.”