For Democrats to maintain Senate control, Senator Jon Tester (D-MT) needs to win reelection in a state Donald Trump won by 16.4 percentage points in 2020.
That brutal reality is reflective of the vicious Senate map Democrats were handed this year in a chamber already tilted against them. After Sen. Joe Manchin’s (D-WV) retirement, Republicans can confidently add that seat to their roster, bringing them to 50 senators, assuming they return their incumbents (whose losses would be major upsets). Tester’s loss would give them the majority.
If Tester wins, and Democrats win the White House and flip the House, that means a 2020-like environment with the possibility of major legislation and the certainty of judicial confirmations. If he does not, Congress would return to 2022’s legislative graveyard, now with a Republican Senate that would likely block many judicial confirmations and move to stop a President Kamala Harris from filling any Supreme Court vacancies that arise. If Republicans win the presidency and keep the House, of course, Democrats’ losing the Senate opens the door to a no-holds-barred, full-scale Trump agenda.
The perennial survivor, the last statewide Democrat in an increasingly MAGAfied Montana, has to turn in the political performance of a lifetime, and do something he’s never done before — overcome those headwinds in an election where Trump is on the ballot.
“Oh yes,” Mike Dennison, currently a political analyst and the former longtime chief political reporter at the Montana Television Network, said when TPM asked if Tester could win in these conditions. “Although it’ll probably be the most difficult test in his career.”
Tester is now a singular breed in the Senate, the last stronghold in a state that has, particularly in the past four years, completely repudiated his party. Sens. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) — also in the fight of his life — and Susan Collins (R-ME) have historically pulled off a similar feat, but still operate in more hospitable environments than Tester. In 2018, the other Tester-like incumbents in the Senate — Democrats Joe Donnelly in Indiana, Claire McCaskill in Missouri, Heidi Heitkamp in North Dakota — got wiped out, presaging the death of ticket-splitting among an increasingly polarized electorate. Tester hung on by 3.6 points.
Now, Tester finds himself in a curious moment. President Joe Biden, whose drag Tester felt acutely enough to publicly beseech him to leave the race, has done so. Democrats have a new nominee in Vice President Kamala Harris, bringing with her an exuberant and newly generous voting base.
Experts have told TPM that an energized Democratic base can only help Tester and Brown, that a rising tide lifts all boats, that any factor lessening the number of Trump voters they have to win over is a boon. But Tester hasn’t exactly been acting like it. He declined to endorse a candidate for president and thus far, per experts in the state, has maintained his strategy of keeping his party at arm’s length.
“If he continues here with the anti-Biden perspective, which tangentially impacts Harris as well, that would hurt him longterm,” said Paul Pope, a political scientist at Montana State University Billings.
“I don’t understand why Tester isn’t saying, ‘look, here are things Democrats have done that are good for Montana: the COVID relief bill, the infrastructure bill, advancing green energy,’” Dennison said, framing the hypothetical argument as “hey, maybe you don’t like Democrats, but here’s some things they’ve done that I’ve voted for that are good for the state.”
When he posed that question to the politically keyed-in in the state, some have offered that the Democratic brand is “so damaged” in Montana that it’s best for Tester to abandon it altogether.
Instead, Tester has tried to keep the race hyper-local, focusing on issues like public land rights and downplaying that his victory would likely seal Democratic control of the upper chamber.
Polling in the state has been scarce, and much of what has been released comes from partisan pollsters. A recent poll paid for by KULR-TV in Billings had Republican Tim Sheehy up six points; an Emerson poll put into the field a few days before had him up two. Dennison told TPM he’s seen a private poll of 6,000 people from the last couple weeks that had Tester up one.
It’s a testament to Tester’s talent that election projectors including the Cook Political Report and the University of Virginia’s Sabato’s Crystal ball have his race in the “tossup” category.
“Recent historical trends suggest both of them to lose,” Kyle Kondik, managing editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball, told TPM of Tester and Brown in a recent interview. “That’s not a prediction — it’s just what history tells us. Just because ticket-splitting has been on the decline for a while doesn’t mean it has to continue to.”
Some onus will fall to Harris to stem the bleeding. There’s no question that she’ll lose Montana, but she needs to keep the margins low enough that Tester can overcome the delta. The recent KULR-TV poll showed her down 14 points, improving on Biden’s 2020 margin; Dennison estimated that if she can keep her loss in the neighborhood of 12-14 points, it would give Tester a fighting chance.
Harris’ entry isn’t the only factor that could shake up Tester’s race. Last Tuesday, the Montana secretary of state’s office certified a constitutional amendment to protect abortion rights, which will appear on the ballot in November. Abortion rights are popular in Montana, which currently protects the procedure until viability.
“Everything looks like the abortion ballot measure to protect reproductive rights is most likely to pass,” Pope said.
The presence of the amendment also won’t guarantee Tester’s path to victory; in other red states, voters have consistently demonstrated their comfort with the cognitive dissonance of voting for abortion rights and Republican lawmakers who oppose them on the same ballot.
Tester’s opponent, political newcomer Sheehy, called abortion “sinful,” saying last December at a Fulton County Republican Women open house, “I think it’s terrible. I think it’s a repulsive thing to do,” per the Heartland Signal, the newsroom for progressive, Illinois-based radio station WCPT820. He also said that he wants it “all to end tomorrow.”
Still, to the extent that the initiative — like Harris’ candidacy — energizes Tester-friendly voters and motivates them to turn out, it can’t hurt.
“It can only help Tester — I don’t know how much, but I think it’s to his benefit,” Dennison said. “It’s going to draw more Democratic-leaning voters to the polls and more women to the polls, who are more supportive of Tester.”
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