BOZEMAN, Mont. – In the deeply polarized elections of 2016, all states that supported President Trump supported Republican senators, and every state Hillary Clinton led voted for a Democratic Senate candidate.
But four years later, Democrats’ hopes for a clear majority in the Senate depend in part on winning in conservative states where Trump can also prevail, even when he sinks in the polls. In states like Alaska, Iowa, Georgia, and here in Montana, Democrats hope their Senate candidates can outdo Joseph R. Biden Jr., their alleged candidate.
That’s the dynamic governor Steve Bullock he has in Montana, where splitting tickets is as much a way of life as fly fishing.
Montanans have supported Republican presidential candidates, with one exception, for more than half a century. In that same period, however, they have elected a number of Democratic governors and senators. Senator Steve Daines, whom Bullock is challenging, was the first Republican elected to the Senate seat he held in more than a century.
However, when faced with Mr. Bullock, whose popularity has increased as he leads the state’s coronavirus response, Mr. Daines expects Montanans to act a bit more like voters everywhere and stick with a party while they advance by the voting.
The race here will measure the political impact of the pandemic. Many governors have grown in stature because of their handling of the virus, and Bullock is the only acting governor running for the Senate. It will also challenge Montana’s iconoclastic identity at a time of invasion of red and blue homogeneity.
But for Democrats, going on the offensive in a red-trend state in an age of polarization is no easy feat. By nominating the more moderate Mr. Biden, they hope they can at least lose more closely, if not directly, in the states where Mrs. Clinton was hit and her party’s Senate candidates fell with her.
“The reason it was so strong in ’16 is because it could go up and down: Democrats and Republicans would tell you they hate Hillary,” said Jon Tester, a Democrat who is the senior Senator from Montana, about Trump. During an afternoon beer in Great Falls.
However, even when Mrs. Clinton overwhelmingly lost Montana, Bullock managed to be reelected as Governor.
A Helena-raised attorney who made a foray for president last year, Bullock won three times statewide, first as attorney general before becoming governor.
“The people of Montana know me,” he said in an interview, explaining how he had overcome Republican claims that he would encourage liberal voices in Washington. “I have worked with Republicans to get things done.”
Winning a federal race, where issues are more national, is hard enough for a Democrat in a red state. But Bullock made that task more difficult by leaving Montana during the middle of 2019 to run for president, shift left on some issues, and repeatedly insist that he would not seek the Senate seat again.
However, without warning last week, he noted that he had clashed with President Barack Obama’s administration over environmental policies that he deemed detrimental to Montana’s agriculture and energy sectors.
That conversation was noticeably absent from his White House bid, when he sought the Democratic nomination. by turning left at gun control and regarding Mr. Trump as a “New York City scam artist with orange hair and gold bath.”
When asked if his ridicule about Mr. Trump had exceeded the line, he suggested some regret.
“By Washington standards, not at all,” Bullock explained. “By my typical standards, stronger than the things I would normally say.”
Sailing with Trump is a touchy subject for Montana Democrats, who must energize their liberal base without alienating state ticket dealers. Tester aired announcements in his 2018 re-election campaign announcing his work with the president, which helped mitigate the impact of Trump’s four trips to the state that year.
Few Republican senators have linked as happily with Trump as Daines, a trained chemical engineer who represented Montana as its sole congressman before winning his Senate seat in 2014.
In an interview at his Bozeman campaign office, he said he was eager for the president to return to the state and revealed that Trump “had also asked to come.”
However, just as Bullock’s failed candidacy for president has complicated his attempt to re-run in Montana, the coronavirus has created headwinds for Daines.
Trump’s situation here has declined, as it has elsewhere, due to his ineffective response to the outbreak. Some Republican polls this summer suggest that he is leading Mr. Biden in single digits in Montana.
When asked to assess the president’s performance in the pandemic, Mr. Daines largely sidestepped the question, saying he supported letting states and localities “take precedence.”
Mr. Daines has more problems: Any effort on his part to adopt the Republican national strategy of blaming China for the spread of the virus in the United States is complicated by his years of work for Procter & Gamble in China. Democrats are already airing commercials that highlight the senator’s work in the country.
However, more than anything, the health crisis has created challenges for Mr. Daines by delaying the strike and pushing the campaign forward, allowing Mr. Bullock to enjoy what his opponent called a “bounce around the flag”.
Mr. Daines acknowledged that his role was more of a constituent services specialist than a candidate, and that the virus was on the minds of voters.
“These are third-generation business owners who cry over the phone and say, ‘Steve, I’m losing everything,'” he recalled. “And right now you’re not thinking too much about ‘Well Steve Bullock got an F in arms and I got an A +.’ It’s not the discussion.
That was easy enough to see when the two officials made their way through this expanding state, where a candidate’s sweat equity metric is to change tires, not replace shoes.
In the Flathead region, near Glacier National Park, Mr. Bullock visited a food bank.. While touring a nearby logging facility, the governor teamed up with an employee, a Trump voter now dejected by the country’s state of affairs, whose stepmother had contracted the virus.
Closer to Great Falls, Mr. Daines similarly faced the consequences of the pandemic.
He visited a small farm equipment dealer who thanked him for the salary protection loan he had received through Congress. “It was very helpful,” said merchant Steven Raska, explaining that he had been able to pay some employees for more than two months with the money.
Demonstrating his influence with the Trump administration, Mr. Daines also convened a roundtable event for ranchers and farmers that featured Bill Northey, a senior administrator for the Department of Agriculture. Producers gave the two men an idea of how the virus had altered their livelihoods.
“Covid could not have affected the sheep industry at a worse time,” said Leah Johnson, who heads the Montana Lana Producers Association.
With the virus increasing in the state, Bullock finally issued a mask mandate on July 15 for any county with four or more active cases.
Former Senator Max Baucus, a Democrat who represented the state in Congress for nearly 40 years, said the pandemic had initially lifted Bullock.
“But the problem with Covid is that you can’t go out and shake hands, and that would help him compare to Daines,” Baucus said, explaining that he had overcome Montana’s national republican inclination by cultivating individual voters. “My main focus of the state was: people, people, people.”
The uncertainty surrounding the virus, and Montana’s unorthodox political nature, were on display Thursday in Bozeman. A dozen protesters in Trump clothes hoisted signs and marched through the city’s mall in opposition to the mask order.
They passed a series of shop windows that, even before the mandate, had asked customers to wear masks, a reflection of Bozeman’s changing nature. Now there is a Lululemon, sitting across the street from a cafeteria packed with anti-racism posters that could have been removed from the more liberal university campus (“De-prioritize white comfort”).
Few places have such a strong sense of place as Montana, where politicians routinely invoke how many generations their families return to the state. This focus on rooting and the state’s sparse population have helped perpetuate their independent streak as races continue to be more about the individual.
“We have six people per square mile and three times as many cows as people, so it takes a lot of confidence,” said Marc Racicot, a former Republican governor. “The social connection is a little bit richer and not so polluted with just electronic communications.”
However, despite treasuring its status as “The Last and Best Place”, one of its mottos, around one million people, Montana, is being remodeled by transplants. And nowhere more than Bozeman, a community prized for its proximity to Yellowstone Park that locals now call “Bozeangeles.”
Traditionally, Democrats have won statewide by winning or balancing in the county surrounding Billings, the eastern Republican-dominated population center of Montana. However, that is changing due to the population increase in Gallatin County, which includes Bozeman and is the fastest growing jurisdiction in the state.
Mr. Tester’s track record in Gallatin County tells the story of Montana’s transformation: In three elections, Mr. Tester has gone from winning 49 percent to 51.5 percent to 59.4 percent there.
Once rooted in work, the Democratic coalition here increasingly reflects the National Party, with its twin pillars of exclusive whites and working-class minorities (the Native Americans in the case of Montana).
“These urban spaces are growing dramatically, and these spaces are becoming the heart of the Democratic base here,” said David Parker, a professor at Montana State University who wrote a book on the 2012 Senate race.
At the same time, however, Republicans are earning their heavily rural base by even larger margins today: Even Mr. Tester, a farmer descendant who is the only farmer in the Senate, has seen his support drop in sparsely populated counties. since your first visit. ran in 2006.
He joins a small group of persuasive voters.
“It’s not exactly what it was,” said Mr. Racicot, before hinting why so many people want to move to Montana. “But it is much closer to that ideal than the rest of the nation.”
