BOZEMAN, Mont. — After 18 years working to topple Montana Democratic U.S. Sen. Jon Tester, Republicans in Big Sky Country see potential victory and control of the Senate majority within their grasp in an increasingly acrimonious contest that’s shattering campaign spending records.
Montana voters, meanwhile, are getting worn out — deluged by negative ads on their TVs, radios, phones and in their mailboxes.
Tester won by a narrow, 3,500-vote margin in 2006 and has held on for three terms despite a dramatic political re-alignment across the U.S. Northern Plains. He’s confronting what analysts say is his most serious challenge yet in Republican Tim Sheehy, a former U.S. Navy SEAL and wealthy aerospace executive aligned with former President Donald Trump.
The two sides have dueling ad campaigns with similar goals: Tear down the opponent.
A Sheehy ad talks about rampant corruption in Washington and calls Mr. Tester “one of the worst offenders.” A Tester ad labels Mr. Sheehy a “fake cowboy” and attacks him for lying about a bullet wound in his arm.
At a weekend Tester rally in Bozeman, Montana — where Mr. Sheehy in August held an event with Mr. Trump that drew thousands of people — the crowd for the incumbent lawmaker numbered in the dozens.
Josh Olsen, an outdoor guide and Tester voter, worried that as Montana’s population expands, its electorate is becoming too partisan to back the grain farmer from the tiny town of Big Sandy who is counting on his cross-party appeal to give him another term.
“A hundred percent I’m worried about it,” said Olsen. “There’s more partisan people coming here … If they’re coming here and they’re Republicans, they’re voting for Sheehy.”
Mr. Tester, 68, entered office as one of a half dozen Democratic senators in a five-state region stretching from Nebraska to Canada. He’s the last one still in office, and Republicans have spent years trying to chip away at his support, particularly in rural areas.
Montana is one of the least densely populated states in the U.S., and only about a quarter of its residents live in cities of 50,000 or more.
“Outside the cities of Montana, Republicans have made gains in most of the towns and rural counties,” said political analyst Jeremy Johnson at Carroll College. “That’s a challenge for Democrats.”
Republicans have a two-seat deficit in the Senate.
Democrats, desperate to retain their majority, are on track to outspend Republicans by almost $50 million in the Montana race, according to Federal Election Commission filings and data from the media tracking firm AdImpact. Total spending is expected to exceed $315 million, or about $487 for each of the state’s 648,000 active registered voters - a record for a congressional race on a per-voter basis, according to party officials.
Former Montana Gov. Marc Racicot called the flood of money into the sparsely populated state “absolutely obscene.” It comes more than a decade after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down political spending restrictions on corporations and unions.
“You can’t stand to even turn on TV,” Mr. Racicot said in an interview. “You’re just confronted constantly with this anger, grievance, sloganeering — everything that goes on in these campaigns — because there’s so much money involved. It’s an abomination.”
Much of the money traces back to shadowy political committees with wealthy donors.
The non-partisan Campaign Legal Center has sued over alleged financial transparency violations by a pro-Tester group, Last Best Place PAC, that has amplified some of the most incendiary claims against Mr. Sheehy. Another complaint from the advocacy group charges that a straw donor was used to conceal more than $2.5 million in contributions to political committees, including one supporting Mr. Sheehy.
The allegations are unlikely to be resolved before the election.
Trump won Montana overwhelmingly in 2016 and 2020. The 2024 election is the first where both Tester and Trump are on the ballot.
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