Can Montana’s “last rural Democrat” survive another election?

Jon Tester has never had it easy.

The three-term Democratic senator from Montana has received more than 50% of the vote only once in his three runs for U.S. Senate, taking 50.3% of the vote in 2018 against state auditor and future U.S. Rep. Matt Rosendale.

This year, Tester’s always perilous path to re-election appears narrower and more harrowing than ever before. And the outcome could determine whether the Senate retains Democratic control or hands it to Republicans.

Current polls and political forecasters are even starting to turn against the moderates from Big Sandy’s farming community with the flat-top haircut. At FiveThirtyEight, Tester’s opponent, former Navy SEAL and businessman Tim Sheehy, is up four percentage points, and the venerable Cook Political Report has even gone so far as to say the race is “leaning toward Republicans.”

For Montana State University political scientist Jessi Bennion, this election could mark the end of an era in rural America.

“I used to call Tester the unicorn candidate because there was no one like him,” she told my students a few weeks ago. “He was a farmer, he was a rural Democrat, the last rural Democrat.”

The end of the unicorn?

I teach political reporting at the University of Montana School of Journalism and send students out every two years to interview candidates, do racial profiling and talk to voters. It’s true that the situation has changed, even since Tester won in 2018.

Despite the influx of outsiders over the past decade, Montana is still a sparsely populated state, with 1.1 million residents at the last census. Although the state has historically relied on mining and logging for much of its economy, new economic activity in tourism and technology has helped the population increase by 10% in the last census.

But with this influx, housing costs have risen sharply and so have property taxes. It also threatens one of Montana’s political traditions.

You see, Montana has done something in the past that very few people do these days – ticket sharing when a person votes for opposing party candidates in an election. It’s hard to imagine in a time of deep polarization, but out here in the Rocky Mountains and the Northern Plains, voters would consistently vote for a Republican for president and often for the Legislature, but also for Democrat Jon Tester.

Tester was able to assemble a coalition of voters in the Liberals’ few factions—college towns like Missoula, union strongholds like Butte, and indigenous voters on the reservation—and filter out enough moderate voters in more rural areas to achieve electoral victories. When I moved here in 2009, it wasn’t just Tester who did it. At the time, Montana had a Democratic governor, attorney general and school superintendent. But over time, all of these statewide offices went to Republicans, often by double digits.

No Democrat has won statewide since Tester did it in 2018.

Migration and the March from Purple to Red

Then COVID-19 hit Montana.

The state experienced a population surge, increasing nearly 5% between 2020 and 2023, and experts like political scientist Jeremy Johnson told my students earlier this fall that it was important to know who these new residents were.

“I still think the race can be competitive,” Johnson said. “I think some of my broader themes here – the polarization, the calcification, the reluctance to split tickets – make it harder for testers. I also think there is evidence that more Republican-leaning voters have moved to the state in recent years than Democratic-leaning voters.”

An analysis published by the Montana Free Press found that for every two Democrats who have moved to Montana since 2008, there have been three Republicans.

There is no party registration in Montana. So when you vote in a primary, you receive a ballot for both parties and you choose which party you want to vote on. In this year’s high-profile U.S. Senate primary, only 36% of voters voted in the Democratic primary, while 64% chose to vote in the Republican primary.

The only question mark of 2024

Ask Sen. Tester and he will say his campaign is far from over. He emphasizes his independence from his political party, the way Republican President Donald Trump has signed the bills he sponsored and his longstanding support of veterans as a cornerstone of his campaign.

But his path to re-election could go directly through Roe v. Calf got lost.

The Montana Constitution was written in 1972 and contains some fairly progressive elements, including a right to a clean environment and an explicit right to privacy, as opposed to the more implied right in the U.S. Constitution. And in 1999, the state Supreme Court declared that the right to privacy included access to abortion.

Still, voters placed CI-128 on the ballot this fall to ensure, in part, that a subsequent court decision could not take away that right, which would explicitly enshrine protections for abortion access in the state constitution.

Tester addressed the issue in his final debate with Sheehy on September 30, 2024.

“The bottom line is: whose decision should be made?” Tester said during the debate. “Is it the federal government’s decision, the state government’s decision, Tim Sheehy’s decision, Jon Tester’s decision? No, it’s the woman’s decision. Tim Sheehy called abortion “horrible” and “murder.” It doesn’t sound to me like he would support the woman in this decision.”

Tester’s supporters hope the initiative could inspire younger voters and moderate women to turn out in droves this fall and that it could make Tester’s path to re-election a little more feasible.

But it may take a bit of unicorn magic for Tester to win a fourth term.

Back at Montana State University, Bennion said the situation looks pretty dire for Democrats in rural states.

“I don’t think a Democrat is going to win in the long run unless our state changes in a lot of different ways,” he said. “Exactly the way our state grows, the type of person who moves here and votes.”