Ben Allan Smith/The Missoulian via AP
Sen. Jon Tester (D-MT) prepares to debate GOP challenger Tim Sheehy at the University of Montana in Missoula, Montana, on Sept. 30, 2024.
This story is part of the Prospect’s on-the-ground Election 2024 coverage. You can find all the other stories here.
MISSOULA, MONTANA—Walking around the University of Montana campus hours before the homecoming football game (Go Griz), I kept seeing people wearing jersey number 37. This isn’t typically the number of the star quarterback, so I asked somebody about it. They explained a tradition going back more than 40 years, started by a fullback named Kraig Paulson, a Montanan from a tiny town called Plentywood.
After a four-year career marked by gritty play over raw talent, Paulson gave his number 37 to another native Montanan, who gave it to another, and so on. Eighteen Grizzlies have now worn #37, which now stands in for the “Spirit of Montana… hard work, dedication to the team, and tough play on the gridiron,” according to the team website.
The Republican governor of Montana couldn’t wear #37; Greg Gianforte is from San Diego. Its two GOP House members are Baltimore-born Matt Rosendale and Ryan Zinke, who is at least from Bozeman but who spends much of his time in Santa Barbara. And the hope of Republicans nationwide to win back the U.S. Senate rests on the shoulders of Tim Sheehy, a Minnesotan who got involved in Montana politics as a donor for other Republicans.
Gianforte owned a software company that he sold to Oracle; Steve Daines, Montana’s GOP senator, was an executive at Procter & Gamble and then joined Gianforte’s firm. (Daines was born in Los Angeles, but moved to Montana when he was two.) Rosendale was a real estate developer; Zinke and Sheehy are ex-military, but Zinke became a property manager, while Sheehy started a company that benefits mostly from federal contracts. There’s an archetype for this generation of Montana Republicans, in other words, that doesn’t jibe with the Spirit of Montana: They’re mostly out-of-state millionaires.
By contrast, when I ran into Jon Tester on a street corner in Missoula, he was in a tractor.
It was the homecoming parade, an annual tradition that stretches for hours; it seems like every small business, high school band, and politician in a 200-mile radius has a presence. Dozens of well-wishers stopped by as Tester awaited the procession, perched atop a green John Deere.
David Dayen
Sen. Jon Tester (D-MT) is seen at a parade in Missoula, Montana.
A Democratic senator from Montana since 2007, Tester’s roots are so deep in the Treasure State that his campaign cut an amusing video of him interrupting speeches to say hi to friends and neighbors. The line you’re most likely to hear from him at events is that he’s a third-generation dirt farmer. (That means someone who doesn’t have hired hands, and works the land themselves.) Other Democrats in the state play up their local bona fides; Monica Tranel, the House candidate challenging Zinke, greeted parade watchers in a shirt reading “Montana Till I Die.”
This bifurcation, between Democrats pitching themselves as authentically Montanan while Republicans rather obviously aren’t, should theoretically produce dividends in a small state with an appetite for local pride and a history of skepticism toward out-of-state money, eastern banks, and industrialists out for themselves. But while Montana is a traditionally Republican state, in 2008, Democrats held every statewide office but one; today, Republicans hold every seat but Tester’s. Before Gianforte, Democrats had a run of 16 straight years as governor; today, Gianforte is poised to win re-election. Polling is so pessimistic on Tester pulling out a victory in November that Democrats are scrambling to find other races to make up for the expected loss.
How did Montana turn so rapidly from a ticket-splitting haven to a place that’s one senator in a tractor away from total Republican domination?
“All the [anti-corporate, anti-outsider] streaks you described are still there. But national politics has come in like a gale-force wind,” said Eric Stern, a former senior adviser and campaign manager to former Democratic governors Brian Schweitzer and Steve Bullock. In some sense that gust is literal: an influx of out-of-state residents, sometimes known as the Yellowstone effect, has changed the electorate and made appeals to being a true Montanan harder to pull off.
Tester still feels like he can survive the storm. “I’m good with where we’re at,” he told me from the perch of the tractor. “I think honesty and integrity matters a lot, and if it doesn’t we’re in trouble.”
IN ANY OTHER STATE WITH A TIGHT SENATE ELECTION THIS YEAR, the Tester-Sheehy race would be no contest. Tester is a three-term incumbent who grew up on land his grandfather acquired a century ago; Sheehy got to the state in 2014. Tester has been crisscrossing Montana, using his good-ol’-boy, crossover appeal. Sheehy was not at the homecoming parade in Missoula; a spokesperson for the county Republicans said he had a “conflict.” Others remarked to me that Sheehy does few events, and only in controlled settings.
“I don’t know much about him,” former Republican House Majority Leader Brad Tschida told me while waiting alongside the county GOP float. “I know his background. I’ve never met the man.”
Sheehy is a former Navy Seal and businessman, and if you stopped the biography there you could see the attraction. But somehow, Montana Republicans found a candidate who has racked up more scandals in fewer days on the campaign trail than anyone in recent memory.
As of this week, volunteers had knocked on 375,000 doors for Tester, according to a spokesperson.
Sheehy claimed that he took a bullet during a firefight in Afghanistan; that appears to be untrue, since he called in an accidental gunshot wound while in Glacier National Park three years later, and multiple witnesses say he wasn’t wounded in war. He’s told other stories about military training in Glacier that turned out to be false. He was caught on audio joking about drunken Native Americans (eastern Montana has two large reservations); he was caught on audio calling young women “indoctrinated” for supporting abortion rights. His autobiography has plagiarized passages; an ad of his was doctored to blur out a shirt he was wearing featuring the logo of a think tank that supports privatization of public lands, a hot-button issue in Montana. He’s claimed Montana has more bears than people, which is laughably untrue by a factor of more than 500 to 1.
He used backroom lobbying to win federal contracts for his aerial firefighting company, whose employees later sued him, claiming they weren’t paid. When the company lost $77 million in the first quarter of the year due to slow wildfire seasons, Sheehy quickly resigned. On policy, Sheehy has called for transferring public lands to let states and counties auction them off, and the “pure privatization” of Medicare and other federal health programs. He opposes a state ballot initiative protecting reproductive rights that is likely to pass this year.
His central Montana cattle ranch, which Democrats decry for turning once-public land into a personal amusement park, is a prime elk hunting spot. But Sheehy charges people $10,000 or more per week to hunt there, which rankles sportsmen. “Go back 20 years, if you wanted to go bird hunting and deer hunting, the wildlife of Montana is owned by the citizens,” Stern said. “When people hear he’s charging tens of thousands of dollars to chase a grouse on his land, that’s not something people are very happy about.” (Tschida countered the most ranchers in central and eastern Montana charge for access. “Do I like it? No… But it’s a fact of life.”)
Democrats are even winning the ad wars. Tester has raised a whopping $77.9 million for re-election, the second-most in the country behind only Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH); Sheehy has raised about $23.7 million. Independent expenditures are just about even. Sheehy is being pounded on the air for favoring privatizing the VA, scooping up land that spikes home prices, and saying in another leaked tape that he would be “the most junior, powerless, useless person in the Senate when I get there.”
In Missoula, the Democratic Party campaign office was mostly empty when I visited on a Saturday afternoon, but only because canvassers were out in the field, the remaining stragglers told me. As of this week, volunteers had knocked on 375,000 doors for Tester, according to a spokesperson; Census statistics show only 443,000 households in the entire state, so that’s nearly all the doors with two weeks to go.
Put this all together, and in an objective environment, you might expect Tester to be cruising. But Sheehy is up seven points on Tester, according to the latest New York Times/Siena poll, a result that has been fairly consistent since this summer. The reason? Donald Trump is winning by close to 20 points, and in the Siena poll, Tester only picks up 7 percent of Trump voters.
David Dayen
A view overlooking Missoula, Montana.
“DO YOU KNOW WHO THOMAS WALSH WAS?” Monica Tranel asked me on a Sunday morning at one of the coffee shops scattered along the main drag in downtown Missoula. The college town, full of microbreweries and Black Lives Matter signs, is a blue dot in a red state that anchors the swingy first congressional district, where Tranel, a two-time Olympic rower and state government attorney, is challenging Zinke, Donald Trump’s former Interior Secretary.
Thomas Walsh (D-MT) is Tranel’s political role model, a prairie populist who as a senator exposed the Teapot Dome corruption scandal in President Warren Harding’s administration and was nominated as FDR’s attorney general before dying on the train en route. (Rumors suggest that his new wife poisoned him.) “He was very much a champion of the people standing up to corporate power,” Tranel said.
He came from a state that embodied that struggle. In the late 19th century, the Copper Kings—Marcus Daly, William A. Clark, James Andrew Murray and Augustus Heinze—sparred for control of the rich mineral resources around Butte. Clark successfully bribed his way into the U.S. Senate in 1899, which led to passage of the 17th Amendment and the direct election of senators. Daly purchased a small mine in Butte called Anaconda in 1880, and eventually teamed with the Rockefellers of Standard Oil fame to take over his rivals’ holdings. The Anaconda Company, which became the fourth-largest company in the world, was so powerful that people in Montana just called it “The Company.” (I actually tried to visit Marcus Daly’s mansion, a 25-bedroom, 24,000 square foot estate in Hamilton, about 50 miles south of Missoula; it was closed.)
Some workers benefited from good mining jobs with the copper trust; at one point Butte was one of the richest cities in America. But a bitter unionization fight, the Great Depression, and The Company’s disastrous stock speculation raised skepticism toward out-of-state tycoons. Montana’s political culture grew up libertarian and anti-corporate; campaign finance laws to ban corporate money in elections stood for 100 years until the Supreme Court struck them down.
Tagging opponents as wealthy outsiders can work, as it did for Tester in 2018 when he defeated Baltimorean Matt Rosendale. That’s the vibe of Tester’s campaign this time around too: a parochial message of not allowing a “rhinestone cowboy” who’s not from around here to destroy the way of life Montanans cherish.
Some Republicans are aware of this pitfall; several put how many generations their families have lived in Montana on their campaign literature. “My family moved here in 1963, so I’m not a native,” Tschida, the former GOP state representative, told me. “I’ve been here 61 years… People will not consider me a native.”
But there are actually more outsiders in Montana than ever before.
The hit streaming show Yellowstone was a kind of commercial for the Big Sky ranching life, for those who could afford a ranch. Cosplaying cowboys—which Tester and the Democrats say sums up Tim Sheehy—have flocked to Montana. The state grew nearly 10 percent in the decennial 2020 Census, adding a congressional district, and since then it’s been one of the fastest-growing areas in the nation, particularly in the metro areas of Bozeman, Missoula, and Kalispell in the west.
The biggest real-world impact of the Yellowstone effect has been soaring housing prices, a topic on the minds of virtually everyone I talked to in Missoula. A retired grocery clerk I met at a diner told me rents for a one-bedroom in the city jumped 50 percent in a few years. The steep mountain valleys make Montana look deceptively empty, but buildable, attractive land is relatively scarce. A single-family home in Bozeman costs around $750,000.
Tranel and Tester are foregrounding housing costs in their campaigns. “As long as we got folks that want to come to this state that have hundreds of millions of dollars in their bank account, that want to make Montana into a playground for the rich, we’re going to have a hard time having homes for working-class people,” Tester said in a late-September debate, weaving the personal shot at Sheehy with the issue-based message.
When I met one Democratic volunteer along the parade route, she told me that on the doors she kept hearing about the border.
But the political impact of this migration is that those with the means to come to Montana bring a different mindset, and younger, more liberal residents seeking opportunity leave, deepening the partisan divide. Political adviser Eric Stern reckons the state has gotten three or four percentage points more conservative than it was the last time Tester was on the ballot, a race he won by about three points. “That’s the struggle for Jon Tester, those voters don’t know him,” said Stern. “It’s different people than it was years ago.”
The weakening of local newspapers and broadcast bureaus has led to nationalized politics. Many of the Sheehy revelations were dug up by local media, but its presence is so diminished that news doesn’t always get spread widely. I read the political section of the Missoulian and every article was an Associated Press reprint. Meanwhile, blue-collar decline—the death of sawmills and paper mills and mines—has increased the clout of wealthy out-of-staters. Organized labor has collapsed save for a few public employee unions.
Republicans can now just hunker down and ride the conservative wave. “Gianforte hasn’t done a single publicly advised event in four years,” said Democrat Ryan Busse, a former gun company executive and rancher who’s running against the incumbent governor. “They don’t talk to the people, they don’t take questions. They’re totally shrouded. They’re in this sort of bubble of secrecy and they think that’s enough.”
It may be enough. Driving in the Bitterroot Valley, I flipped on the talk radio station, and it was clearly piped in from somewhere, since the host was talking about how expensive it was these days to go to Shabbat dinner. (There are approximately 1,500 Jewish people in Montana.) But caricaturing national Democrats can pay dividends, even against an authentic Montanan like Tester.
“You’ve got very conservative folks but you have a very liberal senator who represents them,” Tschida said. “Senator Tester has been identified as somebody who does not reflect the ideology and will and beliefs of the people of Montana unless it’s election time.” When I pressed him on what things Tester, a fairly middle-of-the-road Democrat, did wrong, he said the Second Amendment, low taxes and low regulations, standard national Republican topics.
Democrats, by contrast, highlight local issues. Busse is running hard on Gianforte raising property taxes by an average of 21 percent (Gianforte’s own home got a property tax cut, somehow), while over 10 percent of the population have lost health insurance. Democratic ads stress the high cost of housing locally, along with maintaining public lands for public use. “I think [Gianforte] sees everything in the state as a point of potential profit,” Busse said. “Instead of this place where we help each other, he’s like selling it off for parts and people hate it.”
But when I met one Democratic volunteer along the parade route, she told me that on the doors she kept hearing about the border.
“The Canadian border?” I asked.
“No, the southern border,” she responded. “And I’m like, how does that affect your life?”
The culture-war attacks, including five separate ads on transgender issues, are what Republicans are playing up. Sheehy’s ads hitting Tester on immigration and guns have been deemed inaccurate but continue to pile up. The economy has generally been good in Montana, so it’s been red-meat attacks instead. National groups have moved in to capitalize, sensing the opportunity to take down Tester. The Koch-funded group Americans for Prosperity has full-time staff in the state.
“There are a lot of new people here who get excited about a vision,” said Charlie Carpenter, an attorney from Missoula. “I have a lot of new friends who have brought their perceptions with them.”
THE HOMECOMING PARADE WAS OLD-FASHIONED HOKUM, with floats representing Elks lodges and local restaurants. (One was handing out strips of bacon to attendees.) Tester was warmly received. “Expedite my passport!” one kid yelled out. I said he could probably actually do that, and the kid replied, “He already did about a year ago.”
Rep. Zinke was also on the parade route, passing out American flags to kids and robotically repeating “Go Griz” over and over. “Go back to California!” said one Missoulian. “Jackass!” said another.
But Missoula is a home crowd for Democrats, who are expected to get at least two-thirds of the vote here. Even the small group of pro-Palestine protesters took Democratic bumper stickers. Get slightly outside Missoula and the Tester yard signs dwindle to a trickle, with Trump banners dominating. Tester has to run up the score here to have any shot.
How can Democrats turn around this polarized political environment where they’re simply outnumbered? “Part of what we take as our mission is to rebrand what it means to be a Montana Democrat in a loud and proud way,” said Busse. “We’re running to keep a weirdo governor out of people’s doctor’s offices. We’re running to keep public schools funded. And we’re running on public lands and access to wildlife. Like these are super-centrist things. But we’re doing them in a way that’s proud and progressive.”
Courtesy Monica Tranel for Congress
Democratic candidate for Montana's first congressional district Monica Tranel
One step on the road back could be Tranel’s race. The Cook Political Report rates Montana’s first Congressional district as six points higher for Republicans than the national average. Yet internal polling from September showed the race as a virtual tie, with Tranel cleaning up among independents. Cook rates it Lean Republican, and Democrats have spent close to $4 million in outside expenditures.
Tranel’s record as a staff attorney on the state electricity regulator, the Public Service Commission, is tied to fighting corruption. “I got my start in the world of utility regulation, and I’ve always said, if you can follow the money in utility regulation, you can follow it anywhere,” he said. “These monopoly corporations, they’re not bad people. They’re going to make as much money as they possibly can until somebody says no. And it’s [about] holding people accountable.”
Zinke is a big target in that respect. As Interior secretary he resigned amid multiple investigations into acceptance of government-funded personal travel and the installation of $139,000 doors on his office. A land deal with the chair of oil services giant Halliburton drew another investigation. He faces an ethics complaint over receiving in-kind campaign contributions from his chief of staff, which violates federal law.
Tranel has made hay out of Zinke running several Airbnbs in Montana that he rents for up to $16,000 a month. Tranel’s campaign actually rented one Zinke property and showed off its interior, while cutting a second ad outside another property in Whitefish, where Zinke makes a special appearance. “Housing profiteers like Ryan Zinke are the reason it’s so expensive to live here,” Tranel says in the ads.
“That entire street of houses is empty,” Tranel told me. “You have an entire street that includes Ryan Zinke’s Airbnb that is sitting empty and you have sheriff’s deputies living in campers, kids going to school, waking up in a car? I mean is that a policy we want?”
In a recent debate, Zinke tried to claim an invasion of privacy, with Tranel barging into his properties and making his family feel unsafe. But the properties are publicly listed on Airbnb.
Tranel believes the housing and corruption issues can override the culture-war signposts. “I was on the doors in Butte,” she said. “This guy answers. He’s like, ‘I’m not voting for a Democrat, because you’ll take my guns.’ I said, ‘I’m not here to take your guns, I am working on housing.’ And he said, ‘If you’re working on housing you’ve got my vote, I’m paying $1,300 for a 600 square-foot apartment, raising my three kids. I have no hope of ever buying a house in Butte.’”
After the Dobbs ruling, abortion is a rare culture-war issue that plays into Democrats’ hands, with a state constitutional amendment codifying the protections of Roe v. Wade on the ballot. One political observer told me that the Women’s March was the biggest political gathering in Montana’s recent history, and that a hands-off attitude toward abortion plays into the state’s libertarian bent. Tester has been campaigning on it.
Local Republicans believe that if Zinke can grab 35-40 percent of the vote in Missoula, he can run up the score enough elsewhere to hang onto the seat. But if Tranel wins, she could break the winning streak of out-of-state Republican millionaires by tying outsider corruption to local concerns. And Tester’s following the same model; nobody in Montana I talked to was totally counting him out.
Not so long ago, these were paths to a winning campaign. In 2008, former Sen. Max Baucus and Gov. Brian Schweitzer won all 16 counties in the first district. Tester won those counties by 10 percentage points in 2018. “Those people aren’t all dead,” Tranel said. “I go out there and I tell them that. You have voted for Democrats.”
Will they? “We’ll find out on November 5,” she said.
Talking to people in Montana, I definitely could see where local issues still made a connection. The retired grocery clerk at the diner, whose name was Lee, wouldn’t stop talking to me about the old businesses that closed down, the housing prices that have gone up, and the changes in Montana’s culture. But then I said I was here covering the election and asked him if he votes. He said yes, then trailed off. He wouldn’t say who he supports.
