In a dispatch from the Guardian’s Ben Jacobs sent before he was ‘body-slammed’ by Republican candidate Greg Gianforte, the reporter finds both parties spending millions in a race with national significance

This report was filed by Ben Jacobs shortly before the incident on Wednesday when he was “body-slammed” by Republican candidate Greg Gianforte, who was later charged with misdemeanor assault.

The special election on Thursday for Montana’s congressional seat was seemingly crafted to be a metaphor for something, but no one can quite agree on what it is.

The race will mark the first special election in a competitive district held since Donald Trump took office, and has drawn national attention as a result. It is being held on Thursday to fill the seat of former congressman Ryan Zinke, who resigned after being confirmed as Trump’s secretary of the interior. It also marks the first election since the House passed its version of healthcare reform earlier in May and might be seen as a test of voter discontent with that legislation as well.

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The two candidates present a fundamental contrast. Democrat Rob Quist is a lifelong Montanan and folk-singing political neophyte, while Republican Greg Gianforte is a transplanted tech millionaire who mounted a failed gubernatorial campaign in 2016.

A loss for the Republicans and Gianforte in the special election would be particularly troubling for the party given that the GOP is clinging to a slight lead in a state that elected Donald Trump by a 20-point margin in 2016.

Millions of dollars in out-of-state money flooding in have created an environment of omnipresent television commercials every time a Montanan turns on the television. Spending in the race has reached $17m as the race has narrowed.

One Gianforte supporter, Mark Stepanich, blamed the amount of money spent by Democrats for how tight the race was shaping. He told the Guardian that he thought “outside money from [Bernie] Sanders and [Nancy] Pelosi” was responsible for how tight it was, though campaign finance reports indicate there has been four times as much outside money spent on Gianforte’s behalf than on Quist’s.

Turnout is expected to exceed the midterm election in 2014. Already, more than a third of registered voters have cast absentee ballots.

Despite being nearly 90% white, Montana is a politically diverse state. It includes Democratic strongholds in the college town Missoula and the heavily Irish blue-collar mining town Butte, as well as vast deep red parts of the eastern Montana plains where Republicans regularly get more than two-thirds of the vote. Although Trump won easily in 2016, the state has a history of split ticket voting. It re-elected an incumbent Democratic governor that year against Gianforte and has had only three Republican senators in the past century.

Quist, a 69-year-old who doesn’t radiate a sophisticated grasp of policy, invariably appears in a cowboy hat, and adjusts his neckware from a formal tie to a jaunty sash depending on the occasion. One Democratic operative marveled at how well-known Quist was from his decades of touring the state as a musician and playing county fairs and high school proms.

The first-time candidate has campaigned across the state with Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, whom he has praised as “the ultimate warrior for the people”. Despite Montana’s Republican lean at the presidential level, it has a strong prairie populist streak and has repeatedly elected Democrats to state and federal office.

Quist, though, is clearly uncomfortable discussing policy outside of broad outlines. He goes out of his way at campaign events to spend time performing, often with his daughter, rather than giving a stump speech. When Quist does speak, he tries to hit his talking points about protecting the state’s public lands and attacking the House Republican healthcare reform bill, the American Health Care Act (AHCA).

However, he occasionally veers off message and betrays his inexperience. Speaking to volunteers in Great Falls, Quist celebrated that traditional Republican voters in Fort Benton, Montana, were voting Libertarian and at a rally later that night, he railed against the Koch brothers, while betraying no evidence that he was aware that he had mispronounced their name as “cock”; it is pronounced “coke”. As a result, Quist’s handlers are doing their utmost to keep him away from potentially difficult questions, and he avoided several reporters, including one from the Guardian, after an event on Monday.

In contrast, Gianforte is a self-made millionaire who moved to Bozeman, where he started a successful software company that earned him a fortune valued at up to $315m. Gianforte, who lost his 2016 bid for governor despite Trump overwhelmingly winning the state, stays relentlessly on message on the stump. His answers on topics like healthcare reform and his past support for Donald Trump contain a range of nuance exclusive to the speech of politicians and lawyers.

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Gianforte is eager to embrace Trump, from whom he distanced himself in 2016. He regularly talks about “making America great again” and “draining the swamp”. At a campaign event in Great Falls on Tuesday, he even read a letterthat he said a seven-year-old girl had given him, which started: “Dear Mr Gianforte, I like Donald Trump too.” Gianforte has also faced difficulty trying to reach a position on the AHCA. Although, he has been noncommittal about the legislation in a state where it is deeply unpopular, Gianforte embraced it in an early May conference call with Washington lobbyists, as first reported by the New York Times.

Gianforte also can come across as stiff and wooden on the stump. For all his invocation of the “Montana way of life”, it’s easy to see why Democrats constantly brand him as a “New Jersey millionaire” even though he merely went to college and graduate school in the Garden State.

Play Video 0:41 Republican Greg Gianforte 'body slams' Guardian reporter in Montana – audio

At his event in Great Falls on Tuesday, Gianforte was wearing a giant cowboy belt buckle that was emblazoned with the name of his former software company “Right Now”, with the slogan “10 years of service”. And when he talked about his times hiking and camping outdoors, he referenced doing so with the family of a close friend and former employee, the state’s Republican senator Steve Daines. Afterwards, when Gianforte was about to do a local television interview, he awkwardly asked attendees to stand behind him for the shot, saying: “Who wants to be an extra?”

Gianforte still seems surprised that the race has gotten so close. He told voters several times in his stump speech on Tuesday that “this race is closer than it should be”. In a radio interview afterwards, his voice filled with audible contempt over the fact that Quist brought in Sanders as a surrogate. Gianforte described Sanders as a“self-proclaimed socialist, wants to redistribute wealth” before adding disdainfully: “Those aren’t American values.”

In contrast, Gianforte has appeared on the stump with Donald Trump Jr and vice-president Mike Pence.

One Washington-based Democratic strategist sounded a pessimistic note about the race, noting that it was always expected to be “an uphill battle”. But there was consolation that even if Quist underperformed, Republicans had been forced to pump millions of dollars into the race.

However, a Republican operative involved in the race warned “it’s going to be tight and it’s been tightening”. Although there was still a strong belief that Gianforte would pull it off, there was a sense that it would be close. The Republican operative also said that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) score, released on Wednesday, for the Republican healthcare bill was unlikely to make much of an impact on the race. “I don’t think it makes a difference. A lot of the folks have already voted by mail.” According to the CBO’s assessment, 23 million Americans would lose their healthcare coverage if the bill became law. Instead, the Republican argued that healthcare “was not an issue” in the race and that local factors like public lands and the candidate’s personal background were far more prominent.