Politics
Montana isn’t a swing state — but it still could decide the future of the country
Vice President Kamala Harris’ surge in the polls since becoming the nominee has Democrats hopeful about their chances in down-ballot races in November. It’s support she’s going to need if she wins, as many of the policies she’s announced so far will require Congress to get on board. The GOP’s narrow hold on the House is up in the air, but a shaky Senate race in Montana might be all it takes to block any hopes for a Democratic trifecta in January.
As things stand, Democrats have a lengthy wish list in place, should Harris beat former President Donald Trump — including codifying abortion rights nationallyexpanding voting rights and reforming the Supreme Court. There’s even talk of changing or getting rid of the filibuster in the Senate, the 60-vote threshold needed to pass most legislation. That would still depend on Democrats having a majority in the Senate, which would include a 50-50 split with Tim Walz as vice president casting a tie-breaking vote.
A shaky Senate race in Montana might be all it takes to block any hopes for a Democratic trifecta in January.
Democrats currently hold 51 seats, but the Senate election map is worse for the party than it has been in decades. Twenty-three Democrat-held seats are up for re-election, in contrast to 11 for their Republican colleagues. West Virginia is already counted as a pickup for the GOPas voters will almost certainly hand retiring independent Sen. Joe Manchin’s seat to Republican Gov. Jim Justice. The majority will then come down to which party comes out on top in the race for two treacherous seats: Ohio and Montana.
For months, these two races had been seen as the toughest for their incumbents, Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Sen. Jon Tester of Montana. But the Cook Political Report on Thursday shifted its outlook on Tester’s racemoving Montana from a toss-up into its “lean Republican” column. The move follows a similar reshuffling from the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics the previous week to forecast that Montana’s GOP nominee Tim Sheehy holds a slight edge.
Tester’s race was always going to be a tough one, as Montana has gotten steadily redder since he first won his seat in 2006. Running on his background as a moderate state senator and family farmer, he ousted his GOP opponentSen. Conrad Burns, by only 3,562 votes. Tester’s first two re-election campaigns came a little easier. He outperformed Barack Obama by 7 points in 2012, winning re-election in a state the president lost. His third race saw him win more than 50% of the vote during an election season where four of his fellow incumbent red-state Democrats lost their seats.
The headwinds that Tester faces now are the toughest yet. NBC News pointed out last year that Montana is a state “where former President Donald Trump won by more than 16 percentage points in 2020 and where Republican Sen. Steve Daines defeated the once-popular Democratic Gov. Steve Bullock by 10 points the same year.” Tester has an especially large target on his back, as Daines is now leading Senate Republicans’ efforts to retake the majority.
Daines was an early backer of Sheehy, helping drive Rep. Matt Rosendale from the Republican primary a week after he’d entered it. When coupled with Trump’s quick endorsementSheehy, a former Navy SEAL and aerospace entrepreneur, is the toughest challenger that Tester has yet to square off against. The contest between the two candidates has already been brutal, as Leo Wolfson recently wrote for Cowboy State Daily: “The Tester campaign has gone to great lengths to promote his dirt farm roots, while portraying Sheehy as a wannabe ‘rhinestone cowboy.’ Conversely, Sheehy and his supporters say Tester only embraces his agricultural roots when the TV cameras are on.”
The headwinds that Tester faces now are the toughest yet.
Unlike much of the country, the shift from President Joe Biden to Harris at the top of the Democratic ticket might not have much impact on Montana’s mostly whitelargely rural population. The state has undergone a boom in growth in the last few years though, thanks to an influx of new residents in cities like Bozeman and Missoula. But Montanans, who once were more focused on state and local issues in a way that benefited Tester, are more likely to view elections through a national lens. So, while he’s tried to keep his distance from his fellow Democrats — becoming an early voice calling for Biden to drop out and avoiding the convention in Chicago this year — there’s only so far he can run from the D next to his name.
There’s still a chance that Tester pulls out a win here. A recent poll from the AARP that gives Sheehy a strong but not insurmountable lead was the tipping point for the prognosticators to say there’s a better chance for Tester to be toppled. But as Semafor’s Burgess Everett recently noted, “Montana is also hard to poll and its statewide elections can turn on just a few thousand votes, leaving plenty of potential wrinkles and unknowns to potentially tip the race.” Sheehy has had missteps, too, including being caught on tape demeaning Native American residents in comments at fundraisers.
But, it must be said, a Tester loss would almost certainly mean a much tougher political environment for Harris should she win. Without a Senate majority, her Cabinet and judicial nominees are more likely to stall out without at least one Republican crossing over to show their support — if a vote is held at all, that is. Any dreams of major legislation would falter in the face of whichever of the three GOP senators named John becomes Senate majority leader in this scenario.
In effect, we face a reality where the direction the country takes over the next few years will likely depend on how a relative handful of Montanans vote in November.
Hayes Brown is a writer and editor for BLN Daily, where he helps frame the news of the day for readers. He was previously at BuzzFeed News and holds a degree in international relations from Michigan State University.
Brazil has won a record five World Cups, but the most important match it has ever played may have been an exhibition match against Haiti that was meaningless in sporting terms but has had a long influence on each country’s politics.
On Aug. 18, 2004, Brazil’s players drove through the streets of Port-au-Prince in armored personnel carriers, World Cup champions greeted like liberators. Two months earlier, Brazil’s military had arrived to lead a multinational peacekeeping force established by the United Nations following a bloody coup d’état.
“We’ve only seen such joy in the eyes, the exuberance of the eyes, when we paraded in Brazil after winning the World Cup,” coach Carlos Alberto Parreira said afterwards. “I will never forget this moment.”
The team was accompanied to the U.N.-hosted friendly match that followed — “They play, peace wins,” went the slogan — by Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, then in his first term as Brazil’s president. More than two decades later, Lula is back in office, now cemented as the most accomplished leader the world’s left has seen in the 21st century. His approach to foreign policy, say observers, was shaped partially on the soccer pitch that day in Port-au-Prince.
“It showed he was trying something different as a diplomatic tool,” said Mauricio Savarese, an Associated press political reporter in São Paulo who has researched the legacy of the 2004 game. “That match at the time was a symbol of Brazil’s soft power. You really showed how Brazil could win hearts and minds with a policy that was not exactly bowing to the United States or to the China or to Russia, but independent.”
The match, designed to build goodwill between a shell-shocked population and its benevolent occupiers, began after players from the two national teams unfurled a pre-match banner that read “Social Justice is the True Name of Peace.” The peacekeeping mission represented an early commitment to “continental solidarity,” as Lula defined it in a speech the following year to up-and-coming diplomats where he cited the Haiti mission as an example of “non-indifference.”
Lula was feeling his way toward a foreign policy centered around South-South Cooperation and the BRICS alliance of emerging markets. Lula has used that role as de-facto leader of the democratic developing world to, with mixed results, position Brazil as a leader on climate change — it hosted last year’s COP30 in the Amazon city of Belém — and a mediator when thorny international conflicts arise. It has a position of official neutrality in the Russia-Ukraine war, so as to serve a potential role as mediator, as it did when partnering with Turkey in 2010 to broker a nuclear-fuel swap with Iran.
That same year, an earthquake hit Haiti, killing over 100,000 people while injuring and displacing millions more. It also destroyed the headquarters of the U.N. Stabilisation Mission in Haiti, even as Brazil led a post-disaster humanitarian relief effort. The experience further deepened ties between the two countries, as Brazil introduced a humanitarian-visa program for the first time to welcome Haitians fleeing the devastation; it has since been extended to Syrian war refugees, as well. One historically Italian neighborhood in São Paulo is now known as Little Haiti.
The broader peacekeeping mission began to resemble a military quagmire in humanitarian garb: Brazilian troops were blamed for human-rights violations and a cholera epidemic, while doing little to improve the overall security situation. For Lula and his protegée Dilma Rousseff, the Haiti project became a political liability, in both Haiti and Brazil.
As the two nations prepare to face off against one another in Philadelphia on Friday, Lula is not expected to be in attendance. Instead his travel schedule this week was built around the G7 summit in France, in which Brazil participated as one of five “partner countries” — a reflection of its increased global standing over the past few decades. If Lula shows up at one of Brazil’s matches later in the World Cup, it will likely be with a domestic audience in mind rather than a foreign one: he is in the midst of a reelection campaign for his fourth term, against a son of his longtime antagonist Jair Bolsonaro.
“I doubt that anyone is going to vote for him just because he’s recognized abroad as a key leader,” said Savarese, Brazilian political journalist who wrote the book “Dilma’s Downfall.” “But of course that helps with some moderates, which are a very thin part of Brazil’s electorate, and they’re going to be decisive in October’s election, that is also one of the things that tips the balance in his favor, as is being seen as this pragmatic leader who can also be respected even when he’s speaking about issues that clearly don’t affect as much in Brazil’s daily life.”
That day in Haiti, not yet a global figure, Lula confronted one limit on his power. He reportedly asked his team not to score too many goals, in the interests of goodwill. The players did not oblige, winning 6-0, including an astonishing solo effort from Ronaldinho.
Blue Light News has been crunching the numbers to see how all 48 of this year’s World Cup participants rank in several other off-field categories, which we’ll share more of over the weekend.
In today’s item, we look at whether GDP per capita has any connection to soccer performance. As you can see, the chart does show some positive correlation — note, for example, wealthy tournament contenders such as France, the Netherlands and Germany all in the upper right corner.
But it’s not a perfect indicator. By this metric, Qatar is the wealthiest country in the tournament — and it lost 6-0 to Canada on Thursday …
CANBERRA — It was disappointment from start to finish around the USA vs. Australia match in the Bush Capital, won comfortably by the American side.
Neither of Canberra’s Socceroos made the starting lineup and the local government failed to provide an outdoor watch site for the match, despite a heavy social media campaign from locals. With federal politicians out of town and back in their districts this week, the campaign lacked star power and fell on deaf ears.
That left thousands to fill inner city pubs and the University of Canberra, which were allowed special trading hours for the match, from 4.30 a.m.
Australia’s politicians — vocal in their support in the lead-up to the match — went silent quickly, after Australia’s own goal 11 minutes minutes into the game.
If the Aussies’ lackluster performance left the crowd subdued, they found energy to boo Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — a notably unpopular figure in Australia, which embraced harsh Covid lockdowns and vaccines — when he appeared on the match broadcast.
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