Control of the Senate rests on Tester’s appeal in a changing Montana

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, but may 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 flap top 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, according to a recent New York Times/Siena poll. With Montana in jeopardy, National Democrats 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 those national stakes up 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 Montanan does 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 2020 by playing off many Montanans’ anxieties about the wealthy outsiders relocating here and driving up real estate prices. He’s 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.

The state’s Republicans think many of the tens of thousands of transplants who have flooded in since 2020 are conservatives who were fleeing covid-19 restrictions in the nearby blue states of California and Colorado. However, the state does not register voters by party, making it difficult to precisely assess the newcomers’ lean.

Almost half the state is now made up of people who were not born there, according to U.S. Census Bureau data, including Sen. Steven Daines (R) and Gov. Greg Gianforte.

“There is a theory that Jon Tester has a 10-year overdue invoice on the changing demographics of Montana and I don’t know if that’s true,” said Matt McKenna, a Montana Democratic strategist who’s worked on past Tester campaigns. “You should be very skeptical of anyone who tells you they know who these new people are.”

Several voters who had moved to the state recently and planned to vote against Tester said they saw Montana as a red haven.

“We left California to get away from the politics,” said Rhonda Brennecke, 58, who moved to Montana 5 ½ years ago and stopped for a brief interview on her way into a GOP fundraiser for Sheehy and others in Gallatin County. “So happy to be here. We’re just really happy for people like Sheehy and [GOP Rep. Ryan] Zinke.”

Tester has painted many of these newcomers, including Sheehy, as lacking “Montana values” of fairness and trustworthiness.

“There’s a lot of folks that move here that have hundreds of millions of dollars who want to buy their friends and buy places, buy houses and buy, buy, buy, buy, buy,” Tester told a crowd of a few dozen voters in Butte this month. “But the truth is, this state’s always been about the working man. It’ll always be about the working man.”

Sheehy, who has largely shunned the news media, has protested that he couldn’t control where his mother’s womb was when he “crawled out of it,” and moved to the state as soon as he could.

“What Jon Tester is saying is that unless you were born here, you don’t matter to him and your voice shouldn’t be heard,” Sheehy’s spokeswoman Katie Martin said in a statement. “It doesn’t matter if you moved 30 years ago, 40 years ago or 10 years ago like Tim and his wife did after their military service. In Jon Tester’s mind you don’t matter, your vote shouldn’t count, and he doesn’t represent you in Washington.”

Tester said in a brief interview that his message against Sheehy is not targeted at all newcomers. “A lot of working folks have moved here,” he said. “Just a few people are trying to buy the state and make it into their own personal playground.”

Tester’s argument has broken through to some voters, some of whom blame newcomers for the housing crisis in Montana, which was recently ranked the least affordable state by a national Realtors group.

“The fact that Tester has been homesteading his family’s property for so long and [is a] third generation Montana and dirt farmer, represents Montana values or represents what Montanans are like — a lot of people just vote strictly on that,” said Katie Campbell, a grassroots engagement coordinator for the Americans for Prosperity Action conservative group, which is canvassing for Sheehy.

Campbell said she tries to convince skeptical voters in the bluer southwest part of the state that Sheehy is also a true Montanan. “I just try to say, ‘What makes you Montanan?’” Campbell said. “I think that if an individual has chosen to put down their roots here in the state of Montana and build up their family and build up their life and their business and create their future here, I mean, that qualifies you as a Montanan to me.”

As Tester faces a cascade of daunting polls, Democrats hope his sophisticated ground game operation, built up over several cycles, and an abortion rights initiative on the ballot will boost their candidate, who has campaigned on abortion rights.

“If Tester goes over the top, I think that will be what will do it,” Don Seifert, the former GOP county commissioner of Gallatin who supports Tester, said of the abortion rights initiative. Still, he conceded he’s very concerned about his candidate’s chances.

Tester appears frustrated that the race is tight, telling the crowd in Butte it “shouldn’t be.”

“He’s made a ton of mistakes. Just a ton of mistakes,” Tester said of Sheehy.

Sheehy has been dogged by reporting that raised questions about the origin of a gunshot wound in his arm that he once told a park ranger was the result of an accidental discharge in Glacier National Park and later says he sustained in combat, leaked recordings that revealed him disparaging Native Americans as drunks, and young women as “indoctrinated” single issue voters on abortion, and questions about the financial health of his firefighting business that he touts as a success story.

Sheehy has hit Tester for taking campaign contributions from lobbyists, and has also attacked Tester in personal terms, taking a page from Trump’s playbook. In leaked recordings of Sheehy’s campaign stops released by the Daily Montanan, Sheehy made fun of Tester’s “stupid” haircut, described him as “waddl[ing]” around the state and called him “Jabba the Hutt.” Trump and his allies have also gone after Tester’s weight.

“I think Montana is going to decide that Jon Tester is 350 pounds of B.S.,” said Zinke, one of the state’s two GOP congressmen, when asked to comment on the race while riding a horse at the Montana State University Homecoming Parade in Bozeman. “His record finally caught up with him.”

Laura Benshoff contributed to this report.