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.
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Politics
Trump wants the Postal Service to radically overhaul mail voting. But ballots are already going out.
President Donald Trump’s controversial demands for the Postal Service to overhaul and monitor millions of mail ballots hit another snag on Friday, when North Carolina became the first state in the nation to start sending out ballots for the November election.
In March, Trump signed the initial executive order, which aimed to crack down on mail-in voting — which he regularly alleges without evidence is a vector for widespread voter fraud — and assert an unprecedented amount of federal control over the upcoming elections.
Under this order and the subsequent rule drafted by the U.S. Postal Service, the USPS would refuse to deliver ballots to states that failed to provide lists of eligible mail voters or did not adhere to an approved envelope design style.
Since then, the order has faced legal challenges, and it remains paused by a federal judge’s orders. But the Trump administration has asked the Supreme Court to allow the new rule to proceed — something current and former election officials from both parties say would be both a legal nightmare that oversteps the federal government’s traditional role in elections and a logistical one that is happening far too close to the November election to implement even if they agreed with it.
“Why the hell are you rocking the boat this late in the game?” said Stephen Richer, a former Republican recorder of Maricopa County, Arizona, who has clashed with Trump allies for defending the security of the 2020 election.
Still, election officials are trying to project a sense of normalcy for voters, particularly in North Carolina, which serves as a test of whether established local election systems can operate normally amid intensifying federal scrutiny.
“I want to emphasize this point because there has been a lot of outside noise: Our county workers are ready,” Sam Hayes, a longtime Republican lawyer in the state and now executive director of the North Carolina State Board of Elections, said in a Thursday afternoon press conference.
He added, “All we can do is what we’re doing. … It is business as usual as far as I’m concerned.”
Despite the legal challenges, the Trump administration has continued to press the courts to let it proceed. The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court on Thursday to lift an order from a Massachusetts judge which temporarily prevents the USPS from enforcing their rule. It is the second time the Trump administration has asked the Supreme Court to step in, after winning an earlier victory in which the high court dismissed an earlier hold on the rule as premature.
“The uncertainty is coming from a single activist judge who continues to try and obstruct President Trump from implementing commonsense measures to protect the security of mail-in ballots and ensure only Americans vote in American elections,” White House spokesperson Lauren Bis said in a statement. “These safeguards for mail ballots were proposed months ago giving election officials ample time to prepare for the 2026 election.”
The USPS did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Election officials said that if the rule goes into effect this close to November, it would cause chaos and place added strain on the USPS and election officials. And an anonymous federal whistleblower said in a report circulated earlier this week by Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) that the USPS was moving forward in a “secretive, rushed, chaotic, and fundamentally flawed process” to try to implement the new system ahead of the midterms.
In the coming weeks, states across the country will follow North Carolina’s lead. Nine other states will begin mailing ballots in the next two weeks, according to a tracker from the National Conference of State Legislatures — with the biggest day for mailing coming 45 days before the election in mid-September.
“It would be so outrageous to try to let this go into effect. It’s hard to even imagine,” said Ben Hovland, a senior fellow for democracy at the progressive think tank Center for American Progress and former Democratic commissioner with the Election Assistance Commission who was fired by Trump in July.
He added, “It would be a break-glass moment for our democracy.”
The rule would require meticulous changes to ballot handling and tracking practices that Hovland said are impossible to implement before Election Day in about two months, effectively disenfranchising millions of voters.
“Ballots are printed. Envelopes are printed. You can go on and on with all the practical reasons that show that implementing something like this at this time is not feasible,” he said.
Richer said he doubted the new rules would bring about more security. Even if the USPS received lists from the states, according to the postal service’s final rule, it would not do any additional vetting of the list, Richer said.
“It’s just that the mail ballots have to be on that list, and I don’t see what added value for election integrity that does,” he said.
He added, “It creates a lot of administrative burden, and I think it creates a lot more opportunity for error.”
While a decision looms in the courts, election officials and experts cast doubt on the likelihood of the rules going into effect before November. A more pressing issue, they said, is the confusion and uncertainty surrounding mail-in ballots, which could subvert and change the behaviors of voters.
“It makes things seem messy or difficult, and it can dissuade people from participating or coming out to vote,” Hovland said. “It certainly also helps establish a pretext to make bad faith claims about election results.”
Hovland said that while none of these claims of voter fraud are backed up with facts, they could cause Americans to lose faith in the voting process.
Still, some current officials contended they were well-prepared for whatever happens — and that they’d be able to communicate effectively with voters who have become increasingly buffeted by dramatic rhetoric about the once-unmentioned nuts and bolts of actually running an election.
“There’s always a lot of noise around elections, that’s not going to change, and it can be hard to differentiate that from what’s actually going on on the ground,” said Jason Tyson, director of external affairs for the North Carolina State Board of Elections.
As Election Day approaches, Tyson and election officials said they urge voters to check their registration status and make a plan to vote.
He added, “I think we’ve got a really well-trained, solid staff who are ready, and who have gone through all of the checks and balances and points of contact that we need to do to get to where we are.”
Missouri’s Supreme Court suspended a congressional map that state Republicans drew last year that would have netted the GOP an additional House seat, likely keeping the seat in Democratic hands this November.
The court ruled unanimously on Thursday that a referendum petition organized by Democrats to put the new congressional maps to a vote was incorrectly deemed insufficient by Republican Secretary of State Denny Hoskins, and ordered that the gerrymandered map be put to a vote in the fall.
Voters will ultimately decide the fate of the new lines in November. But in the meantime, it cannot be in place for the midterms, meaning Rep. Emanuel Cleaver’s original Kansas City-based district will likely stay in Democrats’ hands this fall.
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