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.
Some top congressional Republicans have privately concluded that it is likely impossible for them to keep control of the House of Representatives in the midterm elections, and they are now focused on limiting the scale of the defeat and salvaging the party’s Senate majority.
Five senior Republican lawmakers, all granted anonymity to speak candidly about their party’s dire position, told Blue Light News the House had all but slipped away.
One senior House Republican said the GOP’s goal at this point was to “save as many Republican seats as we can.” The president, this person said, was not helping.
“President Trump has made this election all about himself,” the lawmaker said. “Now we have to survive that political storm.”
A second Republican member of Congress said the movement of campaign advertising made plain which side was in control of the midterms. This lawmaker predicted Democrats would pick up about 10 seats, more than enough to take control of the chamber.
Even in newly redistricted red states like Florida and Texas, this person said, Republican candidates were “hanging on with their fingernails.”
Republicans have already fallen back from several contested House districts that they feel are no longer winnable, including those held by Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks of Iowa and Tom Kean Jr. of New Jersey. Trump carried their districts just two years ago. The party last week gave up on an Omaha-based district held by retiring Rep. Don Bacon.
Trump officials and other top GOP operatives say more candidates may be cut off in the coming days, in order to shift advertising money to races where it can make more of a difference. Republican groups have already given up on multiple races where they once hoped to unseat Democratic lawmakers.
The Republican Party is under extreme pressure across the Midwest, where it is now spending heavily to defend Senate seats in once-reliably MAGA states like Iowa, Nebraska and Kansas.
Bacon, a maverick often at odds with the White House, said there was no mystery in his party’s political tribulations.
“I’ve talked to some who are making these decisions: The biggest problem is the president’s polling numbers and unfavorables,” Bacon said.
White House officials insist they’re not giving up on either chamber of Congress. In a statement, White House spokeswoman Liz Huston said Trump remained “committed to maintaining Republican majorities in both the House and Senate.”
As he departed on Tuesday to campaign in Alaska for embattled GOP Sen. Dan Sullivan, Trump professed optimism about the midterms but acknowledged that sitting presidents typically see their party lose seats in the off year.
“But I’m doing a tour right now and I’m doing rallies,” Trump added. “The level of enthusiasm for the Republican Party is way up.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson went even further, flatly declaring during a campaign stop in deep-red Texas that “the polling is wrong” in showing his party on the brink of a broad defeat.
Yet at a tactical level, the Republican Party’s moves to shift money away from defending the House and toward saving the Senate are clear enough. In recent days, the Congressional Leadership Fund, the top super PAC for House Republicans, canceled advertising for key House candidates in Nebraska and Iowa and allowed the Senate Leadership Fund – a Republican group focused on the upper chamber – to swoop in and claim the airtime to support Nebraska Sen. Pete Ricketts and Rep. Ashley Hinson, who is running for Senate in Iowa.
“These are not the moves of a party that’s going to keep the House,” a third Republican lawmaker said.
In statements to Blue Light News, both CLF and the National Republican Congressional Committee said they had no intention of giving up on the fight for control of the House.
NRCC spokesperson Mike Marinella said districts are won “one by one,” and that the GOP has “the financial firepower and ground game needed to win.”
Chris Winkelman, president of CLF, said his group would keep moving money around to maximize the impact nationally.
The goal, he said, was to “keep the pressure on the most vulnerable Democrats and preserve a path to 218 seats.”
Former Rep. Carlos Curbelo, a Florida Republican who lost his swing seat in Trump’s first midterm election eight years ago, said his former colleagues were clear-eyed about where the election seemed to be headed.
“The environment is about as tough as one could expect,” Curbelo said. “There is no one who has privately stated that they believe Republicans can hold the House — not in recent weeks, anyway.”
Megan Messerly, Lauren Fedor, Lisa Kashinsky and Myah Ward contributed to this report.
Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff said Tuesday he will not run for president in 2028 and committed to serving a full six-year Senate term if reelected.
“I have zero interest in running for president. I’m not running for president. I’m running for reelection to the Senate,” Ossoff said during a Georgia Senate debate against Republican Rep. Mike Collins.
Asked by Greg Bluestein of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution whether he would serve his full term if he wins in November, Ossoff replied: “Yes, I will.”
The remarks are Ossoff’s most forceful rejection yet of a potential 2028 presidential bid even as his name has repeatedly surfaced in national Democrats’ conversations about possible contenders for the party’s nomination. His public commitment to a full Senate term on Tuesday is the latest of his campaign’s many efforts to tamp down that speculation.
Ossoff gained national attention this year given his strong fundraising numbers, his consistent lead in public polling against Collins and his ability to generate viral moments on the campaign trail, particularly through his attacks on President Donald Trump. Democrats are bullish about Ossoff’s ability to hold onto his Senate seat — so much so that the Democratic-aligned Senate Majority PAC said Tuesday it was removing its ad spending in Georgia for the week.
He’s also taken steps to boost the state Democratic party in Georgia, a perennial battleground that has been and will be key to winning the presidency. If November brings historic wins up and down the ballot, Ossoff will get some of the credit — and he’ll have confirmed his status as a leader in the swing state.
Democrats may be discovering the political power of calling something rigged.
They’re leaning hard into anti-corruption messaging in the final weeks of the campaign as new research suggests that linking corruption to Americans’ economic struggles can boost Democrats into the home stretch.
Messaging from Democrats that tied corruption to housing, health care and the cost of living increased voter support for Democratic congressional candidates by about 3 percentage points, according to a national survey last month conducted by Blue Rose Research and Democratic-aligned Winning Jobs Narrative Action, which was obtained by POLITICO.
The findings align with a shift in how Democrats are talking about corruption — and help explain why that message has exploded on the campaign trail. From Sen. Jon Ossoff in Georgia to James Talarico in Texas and Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, Democrats have zeroed in on a common argument: Washington is rigged to benefit the wealthy at the expense of everyday Americans.
“We have a corruption crisis in this country, and it is leading to an affordability crisis,” Iowa Democratic state Rep. Josh Turek said during his Senate debate against Rep. Ashley Hinson last week.
It’s a message that is reverberating across campaigns. In a recent presentation delivered to Democratic groups on Capitol Hill, longtime Democratic strategist Jesse Ferguson offered a succinct playbook: “Corruption is why your costs are high,” according to the presentation viewed by Blue Light News.
His presentation also encouraged Democrats to lead with the acknowledgement that costs are high and then go into corruption, acknowledge that it happens across parties and avoid making President Donald Trump the sole focus of their attacks. “Trump works as an example of corruption that raises costs, not as the whole case,” the presentation said.
Since April, Democratic candidates and outside groups in House and Senate races have spent roughly $104 million on advertising mentioning corruption, according to ad tracking firm AdImpact. Republicans, meanwhile, have spent $36 million across House and Senate campaigns over the same period.
“It’s not just like, ‘oh, look at what’s happening with the ballroom,’ or ‘boy, Donald Trump’s made a lot of money on crypto,’” Democratic strategist Chris Meagher said. “You have to be able to tie it to the impact on people’s lives.”
“The narrative works best when it’s an outsider candidate who is linking a rigged economy to a rigged political system,” longtime Democratic pollster Celinda Lake said of the anti-corruption messaging.
Running against corruption is not new. But as Democrats looked for a way out of the political wilderness after 2024, they began turning a familiar attack — anti-corruption — into a broader message tied to voters’ economic pain. What once was an attack largely focused on Trump has become a more expansive argument for candidates trying to connect it to why Americans are struggling financially, potentially providing a blueprint for the party beyond November.
“Democrats used to talk about corruption as a crime. Now corruption is the explanation for costs,” Ferguson, the Democratic strategist, said.
The issue — and messaging around it — is also coming to the fore in a cycle when anger over the suppression of Epstein files hit a fever pitch and public pressure to ban Congress from trading stocks continues to mount.
And it’s not just the research by Blue Rose that shows the potential potency of that message.
In another recent survey from the Democratic group Navigator Research, obtained by Blue Light News, the vast majority of Americans — both Democrats and Republicans — say corruption is driving up their costs. That same survey of registered voters, conducted in August, found majorities, including roughly a quarter of Republicans, say Trump is bringing more corruption to Washington than fixing it.
And new results from the nonpartisan Center Square’s Voter Voice Poll, conducted this month by Noble Predictive Insights and shared first with Blue Light News, show 10% of voters ranking government corruption as the second most important issue facing Americans, tied with the economy and jobs, and only behind inflation and price increases.
In some instances, Democrats have wrested the word “rigged” away from Trump who has used it in the context of unproven election fraud and turned it into a mobilizing political talking point. That’s a departure from March 2024 when Democrats criticized then Rep. Katie Porter for accusing special interests of spending money to “rig” the California Senate race after she lost in the state’s primary. But now some Democrats are embracing that language as a way to rail against what they see as a corrupt system.
“They’re rigging the rules to benefit their wealthy donors and corporate special interests,” former Ohio Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown said in a message to supporters announcing the launch of his campaign to return to office.
But the corruption resonates across parties. Republicans who spoke with Blue Light News said Democrats do not own the issue — voters everywhere are animated by it. While polling shows that voters in both major parties believe the government is corrupt, Republicans accuse Democrats of lacking credibility on the issue.
“Americans have been disgusted by the level of self-serving corruption that spread like herpes through the slimy politicians who run the Democrat Party, and now they’re suddenly changing their tune because it’s an election year,” National Republican Congressional Committee spokesperson Mike Marinella said in a statement. “Voters see through the facade, and they know Republicans are cleaning up the rot left behind by Democrat leaders.”
On the Senate side, National Republican Senatorial Committee spokesperson Bernadette Breslin pointed Blue Light News to a poll in Minnesota — a rare offensive opportunity for Senate Republicans this cycle — that shows there are just about as many voters who blame Democratic Gov. Tim Walz for widespread fraud of federally-funded government programs in the state as there are who blame the criminals. Walz’s lieutenant governor, Peggy Flanagan, is running for Senate against Republican Michele Tafoya, and corruption under Democratic rule is a key theme for Republicans in the race.
“The overwhelming majority of Minnesotans blame the Walz-Flanagan administration — and the criminals it aided and abetted — for plundering their hard-earned taxpayer dollars,” Breslin said. “They’ll vote for Michele Tafoya to right the ship this November.”
Steve Pierce, executive director at Winning Jobs Narrative Action, said one of the biggest shifts for Democrats this cycle on corruption has been a move away from a message largely rooted in concerns over democratic norms, which have struggled to break through in a way that moves voters in past cycles.
“You’ve seen Democrats, rather than connecting corruption to democracy, connecting it to affordability, connecting it to the top concern that voters have,” said Pierce. “It’s connecting it in a way that’s meaningful to voters around the things that they are thinking about every day.”
The anti-corruption message has played out across the country, and as an explanation for frustration against different economic pain points, including rising electric bills and local data center projects.
A recent memo on data centers from House Majority PAC, the main super PAC working to elect House Democrats, noted the “message environment in the 2026 election cycle has been dominated by costs, with an important secondary theme around corruption that began to emerge last year.” The group’s spokesperson, CJ Warnke, told Blue Light News that “every single poll and every single focus group shows affordability to be voters’ number one issue, and they specifically point to corrupt politicians as being responsible for driving up prices.”
Next month’s midterms will offer the clearest test yet of whether Democrats can turn this message into votes. But Democratic operatives increasingly see anti-corruption messaging as more than just a short-term political weapon — as long as they try to do something about it if they win control next year.
“I think the thing for Democrats, if they do want to keep it on the radar heading into 2028, and I think they should because I think it is a really potent issue for them, they are going to have to also deliver on it,” said Pierce.
“They have to be able to show up to get caught trying,” he said.
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