MONTANA — Behind one of the most competitive Senate races in the country, Democrats are clashing over how to build power in a rural state that’s turned increasingly red in recent years.
In Montana, Sen. Jon Tester is running as the only Democrat who has been able to keep statewide office. All eyes are on him, inside and outside the state. But now that polls show Tester falling short against Republican Tim Sheehy, Democrats in Montana are warning of a power vacuum that could damage the party irreparably. And they are pointing fingers about how it got to this point.
“One candidate should not run an entire party,” Reilly Neill said. She’s a former state representative who’s currently running a write-in campaign in Montana’s 2nd Congressional District after feeling the party was negligent about fielding a Democratic candidate. “In rural areas, it hollows out the party because then you just don’t have that consistent engagement.”
At the center sits Tester, who acknowledges he takes up a lot of space in a state where Democrats have been ceding ground. He is the state’s Democratic Party, at least when he’s running, insiders tell NOTUS. But these same insiders also don’t see him as an organizing leader in Montana politics. And absent one, those involved say the entire operation could fall apart.
“I don’t think Tester is at all interested in being the alpha Democrat. I think Tester’s interested in being a good senator for Montana,” Jesse James Mullen, who is running to be Montana’s secretary of state, said. “You can’t be in D.C. and be the de facto leader of a group back home.”
Tester himself acknowledged the difficulties of being any other Democrat in Montana but expressed a bootstraps attitude toward running.
“I have an inherent advantage because this is my fourth time around. People know me. They know the record. They believe in me,” he told NOTUS after a rally in Billings. “When I ran the first time, honest to God, I would spend 12 hours a day making phone calls, and I wouldn’t raise enough to buy me a hamburger at McDonald’s.”
“I get the frustration, but you just, you can’t give up,” he added.
Every six years, Democratic politics revolves around Tester. The state party runs a coordinated campaign, which Tester essentially finances. That funds offices across the state, which in turn helps everyone, said Nancy Keenan, who was the state party’s executive director and served as the statewide superintendent. Tester is the reason the official campaign arm for Senate Democrats has been able to pour millions into the state, a spokesperson for the state party told NOTUS.
But while everyone appreciates getting the senator’s support on the campaign trail, many are also in the hunt for a strategic leader, which Tester is not.
In a different political era, former Gov. Brian Schweitzer said he made a concerted effort to maintain Democratic participation in every state House seat, which other active Montana Democrats confirmed. But that time has passed. Democrats lost their grip on the state’s Senate delegation in 2014 and the governor’s mansion in 2020 after Steve Bullock’s governorship — a cycle where they lost every statewide race along with seats in the state Legislature.
“I’m not necessarily frustrated with any individual candidate; I just don’t feel like we have anybody leading people,” Jami Woodman, who has worked to support candidates from both parties in nonpartisan Montana Supreme Court races the last few cycles. She said now, there’s no one “minding the henhouse.”
She had her first foray supporting a partisan candidate last cycle, and it opened her eyes.
“What I found out in that little stint, little short period of time, is that the Republican Party is a machine,” she said. But of the Democratic Party, “The machine that we should be here in Montana, it is not a machine.”
“They bring a butter knife to a gunfight every single time,” she added.
There’s little agreement over why. Woodman pointed the finger at the state party. Schweitzer, however, called out the legislature for not helping other candidates and for not getting out of safe districts.
“Who should be doing it would be leaders in the legislature,” he said. “There are people all across Montana, if given a reason, will vote for a Democrat, but we’re not showing up.”
Several candidates and operatives said that now, a lot of onus is placed on local committees and parties to field and support local candidates. If there’s not a motivated small-town Democrat taking charge of organizing, it means there’s no real party presence at all.
“There are people like me in other rural communities, in eastern Montana and central Montana, rural parts of our state, who can win these races,” said Paul Tuss, a Democrat who won in an R+8 district. “The first thing we need to do is identify those folks, recruit them to run for office, give them the support they need and make sure that our message resonates.”
Forget about us, and you’ll never hold statewide office again, these Democrats say.
“If you don’t cut the margins in those rural areas, you won’t win,” said Bill Lombardi, a political operative who has worked for various Montana politicians, including Tester. “That’s why the party is losing.”
Lindsey Ratliff, a Havre city council member and chair of the Hill County Democrats — a rural area that has supported both Donald Trump and Tester — said she’s noticed a shift in where the party shows up. The fact that Tester goes everywhere is why he has won in the past, she said.
Multiple candidates said that’s part of why Tester has remained successful.
“If your strategy is to just focus on turnout in cities, there is no way to win. It won’t happen. It can’t happen. There’s not enough people to do that,” Mullen said. “You see this in Tester’s campaigns.”
“Jon Tester is from Big Sandy, a town of nearly 600 people — rural voters are at the heart of his campaign, just as they are for Big Sky Victory,” a Montana Democratic Party spokesperson said in a statement.
The party pointed toward their “Blue Bench Project,” which is designed to “help with recruitment, candidate training, professional campaign advising, and coordination with state party partners.”
There’s ample dispute in the state over who, if not Tester, should be the party’s unifying Democratic leader. Ryan Busse, Democrats’ candidate for governor, is raising his hand.
“Everything revolves around Jon and the Senate seat, but I think the governor’s seat, and Raph and I have believed this from the beginning, I think if we’re going to reset Montana politics, it is going to be in the governor’s seat,” he told NOTUS of his campaign with running mate Raph Graybill.
It’s hard for a politician at the federal level to pay attention to state politics, Schweitzer said.
“Tradition in Montana is the people that are elected to the U.S. Senate, the Democrats, they kind of got their thing going on in Washington, D.C., for five years, and then they come back on the sixth year,” he said. “On that sixth year, they show up with a lot of money, and we get a lot of effort in getting Democrats to show up to vote.”
“That’s all very helpful, and the party gets organized, but then the senator gets reelected and goes back to Washington, D.C., and we’ve got five years of drought again,” he added.
Keenan had a perspective closer to Tester’s own. Everyone runs their own race at the end of the day.
“The candidate has to raise the money. They have to run the race,” she said. “The party there is to do the candidate services to make sure they have what they need, but it is not to raise the money.”
She pushed back on the idea that the more localized party structure was a bad thing and called it “people-based.” She also protested the notion that the state needed a centralizing force in the first place.
“You benefit from a strong candidate and somebody that’s been there,” she said, but “you don’t need an alpha person to basically rebuild a party.”
Defenders of the state party said that in any election, there are factors that are out of the realm of control, but the pendulum always swings back their way.
“I’ve been listening to the complaining for 24 years, and in the intervening 24 years: Steve Bullock, Jon Tester, Brian Schweitzer. In political circles, those are national, household names,” Matt McKenna, a political consultant in Montana, said.
Tester did say that there was some room for improvement.
“Republicans are better messaged than Democrats are. We got to do better,” he said.
—
Casey Murray is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.