In the thick of August in Montana, political advertisements are as ubiquitous as smoke-shrouded mountains and parched fields of wheat.
Over radio waves and on Instagram reels, ads depicting “Shady Sheehy” and “Two-Faced Tester” seem inescapable, as interest groups pour millions into the state in hopes of swaying voters in one of the most competitive U.S. Senate races in the country. The race is not only a reelection bid for longtime Democratic Sen. Jon Tester, but a fight for control of the Senate, as Republicans prop up businessman Tim Sheehy’s efforts to oust the popular Democrat. The two candidates have raised over $57 million — Tester has outraised Sheehy three-to-one — and the Cook Political Report has rated Montana one of four “toss up” Senate races in the country, alongside Michigan, Nevada and Ohio.
While the national implications of the Montana Senate race have dominated headlines, the contest between Tester and Sheehy has revealed questions about Montana’s changing electorate and its Democratic Party, which in recent decades has lost considerable ground in state and local races. Current and former lawmakers, organizers and political experts say a number of factors have contributed to the party’s decline — a rise in hyper-partisan politics, weaknesses in rural organizing, the deterioration of local news and shrinking union power.
As Election Day nears, questions loom for the state’s Democratic Party — What happened to the Montana Democrats? And, if Tester loses in November, is there a future for the party?
U.S. Senator Jon Tester holds a roundtable discussion with veterans in Kalispell on June 21, 2024. Hunter D’Antuono | Flathead Beacon
The history of Montana’s Democratic Party is strong, forged by political stars like Sens. Mike Mansfield and Max Baucus, whose legacies loom large in both Helena and Washington, D.C.
From 1953 to 2015, Montana’s U.S. Senate delegation was staunchly Democratic, save for Republican Sen. Conrad Burns, who served from 1989 to 2007. Montana sent at least one Democrat to the U.S. House every year from 1923 to 1997. Democrats Brian Schweitzer and Steve Bullock held the governor’s seat from 2005 to 2021. In the state Legislature, party control historically flip-flopped. Democrats held the body as recently as 2005.
“It was a tough slog for Republicans to win statewide races, especially when they had powerful Democratic leaders like Mike Mansfield and Governor Ted Schwinden,” Bob Brown, former Republican secretary of state and longtime legislator from Whitefish, said.
Brown served in the state Legislature for 26 years, during which he was the Senate president and the chairman of the Senate Education Committee. Brown was Montana’s secretary of state from 2001 to 2005, before he mounted an unsuccessful gubernatorial bid against Schweitzer.
Alongside former Republican Gov. Marc Racicot, Brown last year was rebuked by the Montana GOP for criticizing former President Donald Trump and endorsing Democrats in select races. Brown and Racicot on Tuesday endorsed Tester alongside a group of Republicans supporting his reelection bid.
During his tenure in state government, Brown said the two parties largely shaped their identities around fiscal policy, as well as their relationships to industry and organized labor. The Democrats saw themselves as “the party of the people” –– idealistic, favorable to spending and tight with unions. The Republicans were industry-focused, traditional and “pragmatic.”
A state once powered by railroads, mines and mills, Montana’s strong labor history fortified its Democratic Party. The state’s first local farmers’ union was established in Ronan in 1912. Montana granted women equal pay for equal work in 1919 — decades before the 1963 federal Equal Pay Act. At its heyday, organized labor flourished across the state, from teachers’ unions in Missoula to the miners’ unions in Butte.
The New York Times in 1977 called Montana’s U.S. Sen. Lee Metcalf “one of labor’s favorite senators.”
“It was a big deal to get the union endorsement, and money came with it,” Carol Williams, former Democratic Missoula legislator and the first woman elected minority and majority leader of the state Senate, said.
According to former legislator and Montana Democratic Party chair Jim Elliott, the party was strong in the 1980s, collecting legislative seats from Missoula to Sidney.
Elliott served for 16 years in the state Legislature — both the House and Senate — representing Sanders County and the rural area around his home of Trout Creek.
In his first run for state House in 1988, Elliott came up with the slogan “a working man for a working district,” which he took from door to door in hopes of unseating a well-known Republican newspaper publisher. It worked.
In parts of the state like Trout Creek, Elliott said, understanding rural constituencies as politically unique and electorally vital was critical to Democrats’ power. He wrote columns in the local paper explaining his legislative record and went door-to-door during election season, fielding gripes from unhappy voters.
Through the end of the 20th century, Democrats also benefitted from the legacy of federal programs that brought infrastructure and electricity to rural America. The Rural Electrification Act, a program borne out of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, took electricity to thousands of farms. Before its passage in 1936, nearly 90% of American farms lacked power.
“The Democrats electrified the countryside,” Brown said. “The Democrats were identified as bringing electrical power and modernization to rural America. They had a strong following in Montana.”
At the time, “You had a lot of really, really, truly conservative Democrats,” Rob Saldin, professor of political science and director of the Mansfield Ethics and Public Affairs Program at the University of Montana, said, describing the wide tent that once won the party comfortable legislative majorities.
By the 1990s, however, Republicans began to gain ground with rural voters, fundamentally reshaping the state’s political atmosphere. Lawmakers and political experts point to a constellation of factors to explain the GOP’s ascension — the weakening of unionized labor, a failure to organize by Democrats and increased political polarization.
Due to economic downturn and environmental lawsuits that halted operations, more than 30 timber mills shuttered in western Montana in the years after 1990. The closure of mines in Butte, Big Timber, Libby and elsewhere forced the layoffs of hundreds of workers. Automation left fewer and fewer unionized railroad jobs. The state’s labor landscape shriveled.
For Democrats, Elliott said, the trend was disastrous.
In Sanders County, the former lawmaker said, environmental activism alienated rural constituents from the Democrats, who they saw as turning away from them and shunning their jobs in natural resource extraction. He described a palpable “disdain that a lot of environmentalists have for people who work in the timber industry or mining.”
The Republican Party had also begun to coalesce around opposition to abortion, affirmative action and LGBTQ rights. Republicans “made real inroads on those issues,” Brown said.
As social policy planks became key for political parties, it became increasingly difficult for politicians to differentiate themselves from national party leaders. It’s a phenomenon Saldin described as the “nationalization” of American politics.
“Those local and statewide considerations don’t resonate for voters in the way that they used to. What’s filled that is the nationalized discourse,” Saldin said. “That’s poison for any Democrat running in Montana.”
Crucial, too, to the dwindling importance of local politics was the rapidly shrinking news media landscape. The United States has lost nearly 1,800 newspapers since 2004, including in Montana. According to a 1986 report by the Montana Historical Society, 14 newspapers were published in Kalispell between 1920 and 1980. Today, there are two.
As local newspapers shuttered amid economic pressure, voters turned increasingly to cable TV and hyper-partisan national news sources, which were devoid of the local and state coverage that once flourished in Montana. Americans became more likely to vote Republican or Democratic down the ballot, regardless of the policy planks of individual candidates.
By the mid-2000s, the GOP had established a firm grasp on Montana politics. Republicans have held a bicameral majority in every legislative session since 2011. They’ve held Montana’s U.S. House seats since 1997. In 2020, the GOP swept statewide offices, securing its hold on the seats of governor, state auditor, superintendent of public instruction, secretary of state and attorney general.
The Montana State Capitol in Helena. Beacon file photo
Nowhere has the struggle to break out of the party mold and defy the Montana Democrats’ downward trend been more apparent than in Tester’s reelection bid.
Tester’s campaign has leaned into the senator’s rural bona fides and record of breaking with President Joe Biden, working to distance the vulnerable Democrat from his party.
Tester last month became the second Senate Democrat to call on Biden to end his reelection bid. An April television ad centered around border security featured a narrator saying, “Jon Tester worked with Republicans, fighting to shut down the border … and he fought to stop President Biden from letting migrants stay in America.”
According to POLITICO, a GOP-aligned PAC has spent over $15 million on advertisements criticizing Tester’s immigration record, a vulnerability where the Sheehy campaign hopes to gain ground.
Breaking from the Democratic mold has been Tester’s signature over the years, experts said, which has won him three terms in the Senate.
“The thing that he’s been able to do that’s helped him the most is create his own personal brand that’s distinct from that of the party as a whole,” Saldin said. “Especially the party as it’s understood – and as Republicans try to define it by – the Washington, D.C. version.”
The political scientist added that Tester has built a “longstanding personal relationship with voters that can overcome some of that negative branding.”
While Tester has lost some ground with Republicans, he remains the most popular vulnerable Democratic senator up for reelection with unaffiliated voters, according to a Morning Consult poll from April.
As the Democratic Party waits with bated breath to see if Tester will return to the Senate, it is split on its future, and whether or not the senator will serve as a bellwether for its success.
Sheehy’s campaign has been shrouded in questions over a 2015 incident involving a gunshot wound in Glacier Park, as well as concerns about the aerospace CEO’s business dealings and supposed rural upbringing. The negative headlines have helped the Tester campaign call Sheehy’s credibility into question.
However, according to Saldin, “There’s a question about how much those things matter anymore in an era when the partisan divisions are so intense.”
If Tester loses, Brown said of the Democrats, “I don’t know how they can survive.”
Yet organizers said they believe the tides are changing. Mindy Ferrell, former chair of the Sanders County Democrats who recently stepped down, said she thinks the Democratic Party’s relationship with rural communities is improving, a shift she attributes to on-the-ground organizing and a desire by candidates to connect with constituents in places like Sanders County.
Downtown Hot Springs in Sanders County, Montana on Feb. 26, 2024. Hunter D’Antuono | Flathead Beacon
Ferrell in 2021 helped organize a conference with rural party leaders from seven western Montana counties, where they discussed how to talk to voters about the legislative session and organize around policy priorities. Democratic candidates John Repke, Ryan Busse and Monica Tranel have visited Sanders County so far this cycle, a far cry from a recent past when many Democrats skipped over the area.
For Ferrell, some of her most important successes have come from grassroots organizing within and between rural communities, rather than efforts tied to the state party. She talks frequently to organizers in Mineral, Lincoln, Lake and Flathead counties. She pushed to change the Sanders County Democrats’ bylaws to allow them to support candidates with “democratic values,” rather than just Democrats, a move that she hopes will reflect voters’ independent nature.
Williams, the former Senate majority leader, said that Democrats “have always had an edge on a lot of the issues that people care about in Montana,” like education, healthcare and infrastructure, but have had an unsuccessful “record of selling those issues.” With a stronger party apparatus, she said, the party may be able to make back some lost ground.
Sheila Hogan, executive director of the Montana Democratic Party, said in a statement via email, “Montana Democrats up and down the ballot are fighting to improve public education and access to healthcare, tackle the housing crisis, and will fight tooth and nail to defend reproductive rights and privacy, because Montanans deserve better than Republican policies that are jacking up costs and taking away freedoms from working families. This year we’re running the largest organizing effort the state of Montana has ever seen, and you can see the enthusiasm in the way our candidates, central committee leaders, and volunteers are mobilizing every day with a shared vision: to protect our freedom and our Montana way of life.”
Yet an uphill battle remains, and Tester is at the top of Democrats’ minds.
“Sometimes there’s a tipping point on these things,” Saldin said. “Democrats do strike me as being at one of those tipping points in Montana.”
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Publish date : 2024-08-07 23:59:00
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