U.S. Journal: The Montana Voters Who Could Decide Control of the Senate

In a race that may end with a vanishingly thin margin of victory, the state’s Native Americans and union members are playing a central role

By E. Tammy Kim @ NewYorker.com, Oct. 21

On the cool, drizzly last Saturday of September, Montana’s governor, Steve Bullock, spent yet another afternoon on the road, travelling from the capital, Helena, to the western part of the state for a string of appearances. A former state attorney general and onetime Presidential candidate, he is challenging the freshman Republican senator Steve Daines in a race that could very well flip the Senate in the Democrats’ favor. Bullock was trailing or leading in the polls by a point or two, depending on the week. As a sitting governor, his handling of the coronavirus pandemic has been on trial: his spring shutdown earned high praise, but case numbers have recently soared. To win, Bullock needs every vote he can get from Montana’s traditional Democratic coalition, which is composed of seniors and conservationists and, above all, Native Americans and union workers. Which is why, on that Saturday, he made sure to visit a union headquarters and a tribal reservation

[....]

Native Americans are the largest minority group in Montana and, from the perspective of the Democratic Party, as presumptively reliable a voting block as Latinos in the Southwest or Black voters in big cities and the South. In 2018, when Montana’s other Senate seat was on the ballot, Native voters, concentrated among late-count absentees, were widely credited with securing a third term for the Democrat Jon Tester. But they are not a monolith. Ian I. McRyhew, a Jicarilla Apache citizen and student at Salish Kootenai, told me at the rally, “I don’t identify as a Democrat or a Republican. Some of my views fall more into Libertarian.” In 2016, he voted for Donald Trump, he whispered—a fact he rarely discloses. But “I’m definitely voting for Bullock,” he said.

This year, the Senate race in Montana, population one million, could be decided by a vanishingly thin margin. Bullock’s fate, and perhaps the nation’s, may rest on the ballots of around forty-five thousand voting-age Native Americans and forty-six thousand union workers, half of whom belong to the Montana Federation of Public Employees.

Every election, in every state, invokes its own peculiar imagery and slogans and categorically “American” tests of authenticity. In Montana, candidates must wear the worn blues of old jeans, along with belt buckles, cowboy boots, and rugged fall jackets. They must pose in various outdoor settings, lift guns in the air, and speak of “access to public lands” in lieu of climate change. They must distance themselves from candidacy-killing concepts like a sales tax, friendliness with China, or a ban on the Keystone XL pipeline, while promising health care, jobs, and tribal sovereignty. Republicans like Daines, a wealthy businessman from Bozeman, hope to benefit from their association with President Trump and Vice-President Mike Pence, who won the state in 2016 by a margin of twenty per cent. Meanwhile, Democrats like Bullock avoid gratuitous references to “Chuck and Nancy”—Charles Schumer, the Senate Minority Leader, and Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House.

Montanans pride themselves on voting independently. Since I moved here, in early August, for a journalism fellowship at the University of Montana, several people have used the same gesture by way of explanation. Holding an imaginary pencil, they start at the top of a ballot and move down in a series of left-right zigzags: Democrat, Republican, Democrat, Republican. The statewide and federal offices currently abide by this logic: a Democratic governor (Bullock), a Republican congressman (Greg Gianforte, famous for body-slamming a Guardian reporter), a Democratic senator (Tester), a Republican senator (Daines), a Republican secretary of state, and a Republican auditor. The question is: Will this purple pattern hold four years into the Trump era and in the thick of an ever-worsening pandemic?

At the end of March, Bullock shut down the state [....]

Wow Lindsey Graham is finally getting payback for his flipflopping in spades from all sides, not a friend left in this world, it seems:

quickly rising to top of the charts @ WaPo: Trump privately tells donors it would be ‘very tough’ for GOP to hold Senate

By Josh Dawsey and Rachel Bade, Oct. 24, 2020 at 4:31 p.m. EDT

President Trump privately told donors this past week that it will be “very tough” for Republicans to keep control of the Senate in the upcoming election because some of the party’s senators are candidates he cannot support.

“I think the Senate is tough actually. The Senate is very tough,” Trump said at a fundraiser Thursday at the Nashville Marriott, according to an attendee. “There are a couple senators I can’t really get involved in. I just can’t do it. You lose your soul if you do. I can’t help some of them. I don’t want to help some of them.”

The attendee shared the president’s words on the condition of anonymity as the event was a closed-door gathering. It was held before the last presidential debate between Trump and Democrat Joe Biden.

The president — in a sentiment not shared by many of his party’s top officials and strategists — said he instead thinks the Republicans “are going to take back the House.” And many strategists involved in Senate races say the party’s chances at keeping the chamber are undermined by the president’s unscripted, divisive rhetoric and his low poll numbers in key states [....]

National Journal sez about the Senate:

edit to add an interesting excerpt that Josh points out in another tweet (lots of 3rd party voters in Alaska!)