Tester faces Sheehy in Montana race that could decide Senate control. 1/3
Liz GoodwinOctober 16, 2024
THREE FORKS, Mont. — Wylie Gustafson has been voting for Sen. Jon Tester, a third-generation Montana farmer, for years, sticking with the Democrat even as Montana turned redder and redder.
But this year, Gustafson, a 63-year-old rancher and musician, will be voting for Tester’s Republican challenger, Tim Sheehy, a businessman born out of state — even if he feels a bit badly about it.
“Maybe there’s a little bit of guilt involved with not going with Jon this time,” he said. “Because I think Jon is a good guy.”
Whether other Montanans feel the same way will not only determine Tester’s fate, butmay decide which party controls the U.S. Senate next year, with profound implications for federal tax policy, judicial nominations and more.
The Senate is split 51-49 in Democrats’ favor, and West Virginia’s seat is almost certainly going to flip after the retirement of Sen. Joe Manchin III. That leaves Tester as Republicans’ No. 1 target next month, and Republicans and Democrats have flooded the airwaves with more than $270 million in advertising to try to influence the race.
There was a time when the Senate had many like Tester in it — Democratic lawmakers who charmed votes from people who chose Republicans at the top of the ticket, or vice versa. But in recent years, split-ticket voters have become more rare, as people line up in their partisan corners, voting straight red or blue up and down the ballot.
In Montana this year, voters are weighing their affection for Tester, 68 — a local fixture with a flattop haircut and three missing fingers lost in a meat-grinding accident — against their discomfort with the Democrat’s votes to convict Donald Trump in both impeachment trials.The election will reveal whether the once-purple state has trended even redder since Tester won his last race by 3.5 percentage points in 2018.
The latest polls suggest Sheehy, 38, a former Navy SEAL who moved to Montana 10 years ago and became a millionaire founding an aerial firefighting company,has a seven-percentage-point edge. With Montana in jeopardy, NationalDemocrats have poured millions of dollars into long-shot attempts to unseat GOP senators in Texas and Florida.
Voters, many of whom refer to Tester by his first name, rarely brought up those national stakes in interviews with The Washington Post this month, instead wrestling with more local and personal concerns about Montana’s rapidly changing identity amid an influx of newcomers in recent years.
Gustafson decided his appreciation for Tester’s authenticity as a native Montanandoes not outweigh his desire for a representative who more closely matches the state’s politics, saying he turned away from Tester after he voted for a bipartisan $1 trillion infrastructure bill and Democratic climate change legislation.
He is voting for Sheehy, despite his “reservations” about the veteran not being a native Montanan. “You know Montana: It’s like, you have to be here for a couple of generations before we consider you not a Johnny-come-lately,” joked Gustafson, who is related to the state’s lieutenant governor. “But I will give them the benefit of the doubt that they come to Montana and understood why Montana is what it is.”
That question of what makes Montana what it is has loomed over the Senate contest, with Tester repeatedly charging that his opponent is a wealthy outsider who wants to change the state, and Sheehy, who has never held office, punching back that Tester’s liberal votes are what do not belong here.
Tester is fighting for his political life in a state that backed Donald Trump by more than 16 percentage points in 2020by playing off many Montanans’ anxieties about the wealthy outsiders relocating here and driving up real estate prices. He has blanketed the airwaves with grainy images of his ancestors arriving to homestead their land in Montana eons ago and painting his opponent as a wealthy carpetbagger.
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