Don't write off Sen. Tester just yet

Montana's is often assumed to be a solid red state based on presidential elections, it's not.

This isn’t a normal election; it’s a “normie” election. The group of people who have clutched their pearls with such indignant kayfabe at being called weird, after spending eight years mocking others as “normies,” are convincing themselves that 2024 is in the bag for them (the other side of that coin are those who think Kamala will steamroll Donald).

Both 538 and RCP show Sheehy polling ahead, but that doesn’t mean much. If you look at RCP, the largest sample has the smallest lead.

I’m not trying to sell false hope, though I’m sure I’ll manage to do that for some of you. Looking at things from inside Montana (which I still only see a small part of), things look different. If we are in an election year, the voters who usually have up-and-down-ballot signs up didn’t seem to get the memo or decided against it this cycle. People are selling Trump merchandise, which is new, but so is this profoundly spiritual devotion to a politician.

This year, we have abortion on the ballot, which has always done well in Montana. So well that the GOP wants to strip Montana voters of their ability to vote for judges and move to an appointment system. In 1999, the Montana Supreme Court ruled that our right to abortion was protected under the Montana Constitution’s right to privacy. Montana Republicans are so concerned that judges are accountable that they want to “fix” it. This will bring out a vote that leans more in Tester’s favor.

We also have Gianforte on the ballot, the shining symbol of the most significant property tax increase in over a generation. We’re talking about monthly mortgage payments that went up by $100+ per month for Montana homeowners. Gianforte isn’t particularly popular.

Sheehy has also made some blunders, the most significant being that he shot himself and later lied and tried to claim it happened in Afghanistan. His positions on selling off public lands and banning all abortion aren’t doing him any favors. Most confusing is that his ad campaign consists of the following: Tester has been in Washington too long; Tester is liberal; and too many veterans commit suicide, which is Tester’s fault. He’s trying to sell this idea that Tester isn’t “one of us,” meaning Montanan. He hired some douchey libertarian hipsters to give voice to the message; it’s pretty funny unless you have to watch it multiple times a day.

If you look at who we’ve historically elected for our senators, you’ll notice a lot of blue and red. Mike Mansfield was the Senate Majority Leader after Lyndon B. Johnson. Max Baucus chaired the Senate Finance Committee. My point is that blindly looking at Montana as a red state doesn’t provide any insight. Before the last four years of Gianforte, we had eight years of Steven Bullock and eight years of Brian Schweitzer, both Democrats. To be sure, we have consistently voted GOP for our Representative(s) and president.

Why the democratic streak in Montana politics? We enjoy state worker protections. We don’t have at-will employment; once an employee finishes their probationary period, the employer generally has to have reasonable cause to terminate them. We don’t have tip-credit wages. Your employer also cannot retroactively change your hourly rate, which should be illegal everywhere but isn’t. They must proactively tell you if you’re getting paid a lower wage in Montana. People always think this is illegal, but I’ll never forget learning it isn’t. As long as you’re paid the federal minimum in most states, it doesn’t matter what rate was agreed upon when hired. It matters in Montana. We enjoy abortion access and recreational marijuana.

I think this is why the national view of Montana is divorced from the state view. People like Trump look in and see Tester as a man with the largest belly he’s ever seen. When we meet Tester, we see a man whose hand is fucked up. That’s because it was mangled in a farming accident on the Montana farm he grew up working on. Watch his campaign commercials and see if you can notice which hand he never shows. It’s pretty unsettling, honestly. Yet, that happens when you grow up working on a farm. On the other hand, we have a guy who grew up in a wealthy Minneapolis suburb and owns $10 million in real estate in the Gallatin Valley alone. Sheehy might have hurt himself by mowing a lawn or weed eating, but he likely hurt himself more by running to the lake since he lived in a multi-million dollar house on the shore of one.

A lot can happen between now and election day, especially if Trump's situation becomes increasingly desperate. He has a fantastic ability to offend or annoy all but America’s most hateful buffoons. Whether or not that’s going to be enough to send Tester and his fucked up hand back to the Senate isn’t something we will know before election night (at the earliest pending shenanigans).