Don Pogreba is a writer for Intelligent Discontent, a Montana politics blog. He teaches English and debate at Helena High School in Helena, Montana.



To those from outside the state, Montana appears to be little more than another one of the states that shows up in a sea of red every fourth November. Following Donald Trump’s sweep of the West and Midwest in an unbroken swath from Idaho to Louisiana and given the failure of a Democrat to win Montana’s three electoral votes since 1992, it must be tempting for political observers outside the state to believe that Montana is a monolith of Republican voters.

But this narrative ignores important facts about the political landscape in Montana. In the past four cycles, Montanans have elected two Democratic governors who cared as strongly about women’s reproductive rights as they did gun rights. One of these governors, Steve Bullock, won in a Trump wave year when Democrats nationally were floundering to understand their electorate. Our senior senator unseated a conservative incumbent in 2006 and fended off a challenge from our state’s Republican representative in 2012; he championed traditional liberal causes like labor and even survived being called the deciding vote for President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act. Montana may be a state that leans conservative—the Legislature is 60 percent Republican and 40 percent Democrat, and the state has voted for a Democratic presidential candidate only twice since 1952—but our voters have repeatedly chosen to elect populist candidates who embrace progressive causes to statewide and national offices.


Why, then, has the state’s lone House seat eluded Democrats for so long? Democrats haven’t won the seat since 1996, when nine-term Congressman Pat Williams retired. The power of incumbency explains some of the losses. A series of uninspired Democrats who ran against Republican stalwart Denny Rehberg is also to blame. And it certainly hasn’t helped that the national Democratic Party has given almost no thought and even less money to those candidates. But it’s not the complete answer.

For the first time in nearly two decades, the national party is paying close attention to Montana’s House race, hoping that in the early going of the Trump administration it can score a victory that will take some of the sting out of the losses felt last November. Democrats are pinning their hopes on Rob Quist, a career musician who edged out three other candidates for the nomination. And they’re pumping in money, too—$600,000 so far from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee alone. Quist, 69, has a political résumé about as thin as a guitar pick, but he is running on an old-school platform that makes some veteran political observers nod with appreciation. If Quist manages to win the special election on May 25 against Republican businessman Greg Gianforte, it will answer what has been lacking in those previous failed campaigns: a commitment to Montana’s particular brand of prairie populism.

Former Governor Brian Schweitzer sketched out the definition of prairie populism in a 2015 interview at Highlands College of Montana Tech, arguing that it meant reminding voters “that we are a community as a whole and that there was a time for government to help … ” He called on Democrats to emphasize a shared sense of obligation and shared need for effective transportation, public schools and public lands. Montana has been described as a small town with very long streets. The Western traditions of respect for privacy and self-reliance are balanced by a very real sense that we take care of those in need in our communities. Despite its wide libertarian streak, Montana is a state whose voters know that it was the Big Government of the New Deal that saved farms during the Depression, that taxes built the interstate system in the 1960s, and that government-funded schools hold our small towns together. A return to that message, once the core of Democratic politics in the West, could offer a model for Democrats to make the West competitive again.



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Quist is trailing in the polls, but the gap has been closing. And that may have something to do with Gianforte’s recent electoral failure. Despite Trump’s dominant 20-point victory and Republicans winning every major seat in the state, Gianforte was unable to unseat the Democratic governor. He spent over $6 million from his tech fortune in a state with only 1 million citizens and still underperformed Trump by 9 percent. Gianforte was wounded badly by his previous support for an unpopular sales tax, a series of gaffes on the campaign trail, and, most of all, a controversy over curtailing public access on state land close to his home outside Bozeman, all issues that have stuck with him in this second campaign.

But Gianforte’s weaknesses alone won’t be enough to win the race for Quist. He needs to do something that many Democratic candidates for the House over the past decade have been afraid to do: avoid the temptation to listen to political insiders who will tell him to moderate his campaign and instead embrace a call for the kind of radical economic reform that protects the middle and working classes. Too many Democratic candidates for the House have been so afraid of being tarred by the epithet “liberal” that they have run from the very message that would have inspired voters to turn out. They have simply been afraid to run as Democrats, the kind of Democrats who have won before.

If this sounds suspiciously like the kind of message that carried Bernie Sanders deep into the presidential primaries, that’s not an accident. But that kind of message has deep roots in Montana, too. It goes back to former Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield, who fought for the passage of the Civil Rights Act and opposed the Vietnam War, and Senator Burton K. Wheeler, who ran for vice president on the Progressive ticket in 1924. It goes back to the reformers in both parties who cast off the yoke of the Anaconda Copper Mining Co. in 1972 when they wrote one of the most progressive state constitutions in the nation.

For proof that this message can work in a modern campaign cycle, look no further than the approach pioneered by former Governor Schweitzer and Senator Jon Tester. Instead of trying to water down the Democratic message, each approached it from a populist perspective. For Schweitzer, that meant using his credibility as a horse-riding, bolo tie-wearing rancher to publicly take a hot branding iron to veto Republican bills at the Capitol. For Tester, it was using his experience as a dirt farmer to take tough votes on climate change and food policy despite opposition from agribusiness and the coal industry in Montana. Tester likely won election in 2012 because independent female voters understood that he would not allow health care to vanish or reproductive rights to be threatened.

Quist needs to not just rack up votes in the more progressive Western part of the state, but to win them by large margins, exciting young and economically disaffected voters with a message of opportunity. The success enjoyed by Sanders in his primary against Hillary Clinton when he won the state by 7 points and the passion his supporters showed in the race demonstrate that a progressive message can turn out young voters, blue-collar workers who have seen little income growth for years, as well as those who have been turned off by politics. Standing next to Sanders is exactly the kind of bold move that would have terrified previous Democratic House candidates. But it’s also the path forward for Montana Democrats if they want to be seen as offering a true alternative to the dominant Republican message that prosperity will come only from massive tax cuts and reduced social services. The potential power of the Sanders message to blue-collar workers can be seen in that fact that he not only defeated Clinton in Montana’s most liberal county, Missoula, but in blue-collar counties like Rosebud and Big Horn, where mining is still more important than Montana’s largest economic drivers, tourism and agriculture.



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In the sole televised debate for the race on April 29, while Gianforte stuck to a message of reducing government and lowering taxes, Quist outlined a bolder set of progressive priorities. He argued that “the assault on women’s reproductive rights” must come to an end, that “there are enough millionaires in Congress,” and that “the war on drugs has been an abject failure.” Not a winning combination in every part of the West perhaps, but Montana voters have demonstrated a willingness to mix and match at the ballot box; in November, they voted down a prohibition on animal trapping, but approved a medical marijuana measure. The latest poll, from the Senate Majority PAC, shows that Quist has closed the gap in the race from a 15-point margin to 6. The margin narrows to 1 point among the most motivated voters.

In Montana, authenticity matters more than other places. One of the common slurs hurled at a political opponent is that he is “all hat, no cattle.” Quist has the hat—he favors a white Stetson—and if he sticks to a message that combines respect for personal privacy with concern for the economic well-being of our communities, he has a real chance to convince disaffected voters that Democratic candidates can focus on jobs and the economy just as effectively as Republicans. Attacking Gianforte for being a successful businessman will backfire in a state that admires entrepreneurs, but there is plenty of room for Quist to remind Montana voters that they need a voice in Washington who understands that if the Republican assault on health care is successful, tens of thousands of Montanans will be back to one health crisis away from economic ruin. Quist’s personal story of a working middle-class life that was derailed by a botched gall bladder surgery and subsequent financial woes is one many Montanans have experienced.

Establishing authenticity was certainly the goal when the Quist campaign released an ad of its candidate shooting his grandfather’s rifle at a TV playing an ad by the National Republican Congressional Committee criticizing Quist’s positions on guns. Released the same day as a Gianforte ad showing the candidate firing his own gun at a computer screen, the ad was designed to shore up a potential weakness for Quist by framing Republican attacks as coming from “a millionaire from New Jersey” who was “attacking his Montana values.” A candidate can win statewide in Montana embracing a message of economic populism, but not if he is perceived to be weak on protecting the Second Amendment.

A cowboy poet may not be the person most would have guessed would be the Democratic standard-bearer in the race for Montana’s House seat, but Quist represents an opportunity for the Democratic Party in the West to look forward by looking to its past. If the Democrats want to reestablish themselves in the prairie, they need to look to candidates who speak boldly about populist economic themes of shared responsibility and public good. And it certainly won’t hurt if they know how to handle a rifle, too.