How bad would South Dakota Mess be, without Democrats in DC?

For most of the history of the state, South Dakota has been under Republican control of the State Legislature, Executive offices and via judicial appointments, most of the court system is loaded with Republicans. What has this blind loyalty of South Dakotans to the party of the rich and privileged done for South Dakota? Mostly made a huge mess of the state education and prison system, installed and cultivated a massively regressive tax system, maintained a cheap labor economy that would be the envy only of third world nations and generally kept South Dakota a few generations behind most of the US with the possible exception of a few deep south states.

What kind of a disastrous mess would SD be if it had not been for a few progressive Democrats from SD in the US congress? Consider what SD would be like if all of our representation in Washington had been clones of E.Y. Berry. Would SD be 50th in EVERY rating for a modern society?

I am still mystified why any voter in South Dakota who is not obscenely rich ever voted for a Republican for any office of any kind or would ever do so in the future. There is some kind of collective madness in this state where an apparent majority continues to vote in state and local elections in the same way apparently expecting a different policy result than they get every time from their past votes. .Most of them know they aren't rich, but apparently assume that voting for the party of the rich will cause some richness to rub off on them sometime. It is a political cargo-cult mentality. Maybe they should remember that virtue in the leadership of the Republican Party follows wealth--no matter how it was stolen.