BOZEMAN, Mont. —A small collection of the older women of Bozeman, Montana, are deep into their water aerobics class at the Holiday Inn’s indoor pool on a recent cold and gusty Wednesday when the governor strolls by.

About 10 feet from the pool area, Steve Bullock steps into the hotel’s ballroom, a low-ceilinged space packed with round tables and a few dozen of the state’s county commissioners. Wearing a lightly wrinkled navy blazer, a blue shirt, light gray pants and slightly muddied brown leather shoes, Bullock lumbers toward the head table, shaking hands and grasping shoulders.


Ignoring a mild cold, the 51-year-old Democrat sits and quietly surveys the crowd, which is packed with conservatives skeptical of his pitch to balance the state budget with targeted cuts or small tax increases. A few minutes later, Bullock rises to make his case, ripping through an impressive array of economic statistics about Montana under his tenure—an unemployment rate near historic lows, a record number of jobs, growing personal income, a surprising boomlet in manufacturing. Then comes the hard part: He’ll need to cut spending or find a way to raise revenues, and he could use their help. He plows on for 20 more minutes, then surprises the room by asking for questions.

What follows is the kind of understated, unglamorous, all-politics-is-local performance that explains why nearly six in 10 voters approve of Bullock’s performance as governor in a state that’s voted for the Democratic nominee just twice in the past 17 presidential elections. But, as Bullock stands in the heart of the 185th-largest media market in the country (out of 210), it also shows why 55 percent of registered voters report never having heard of him. Many Democratic insiders think Bullock could be just what the party needs in a presidential candidate in 2020—he’s the only red-state lawmaker seriously in the 2020 conversation. But he’s also almost completely unknown outside of Montana’s ribbon-cuttings, airwaves and hotel ballrooms.

Here in Bozeman, one commissioner asks Bullock to let representatives of local government have “a place at the table” in his budget considerations. “I thought I was in the auto lobby conference,” Bullock responds in a booming voice, smiling. “I am sitting down with local government right now to take any questions!” Another pushes him to cut from the state’s human rights bureau, and after Bullock gamely insists, “Boy, this is fun!,” another urges the governor to help protect a local mine in his county. He stays at the microphone until the crowd—not fully convinced, but warmer than half an hour earlier—runs out of questions, then remains at the head table to help announce the winners of that day’s raffle, reading out a long list of names and distributing gift baskets, local college football tickets, water bottles and, the grand prize, a cooler.

This is the Steve Bullock his admirers want you to see: a skilled practitioner of the art of persuasion, at a time when few in American politics still have the patience or the muscle memory. And even if he doesn’t end up running for president or if Democrats show no interest in nominating a little-known charmer from a small, conservative state, they’d better listen to a man who’s won statewide races three times and remains one of the most popular governors in the country, five years into the job—all while expanding Medicaid, tightening regulations on “dark money” and raising the minimum wage in a state with fewer self-identified Democrats than almost any other.

“He’s proven you can do these solid things and get reelected in a state that went solidly for Donald Trump, and probably still will today,” says Democratic pollster Celinda Lake, a Montana native who now works in Washington.

“He’s the real deal,” adds Donna Brazile, the former Democratic National Committee chair who managed Al Gore’s presidential campaign. “He has the right pedigree and the right personality to give 2020 a real consideration.”

Bullock is playing coy about the growing chorus encouraging him to run, the way presidential hopefuls do when the first primaries are still 27 months away. “In some ways I feel humbled by it, but I wouldn’t do anything beyond the borders of Montana if I didn’t think I had something to add to that conversation: that we do need to be coming to different places. We need to be talking about shared values,” the governor tells me a few hours after leaving the county commissioners at the Holiday Inn.

And the better-known potential contenders are making a lot more noise. That same day, across the country, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders’ office was negotiating the details of a prime-time health care debate on CNN that would position him as the party’s leading voice on the subject. California Senator Kamala Harris was trying to rally Americans against Republicans’ latest attempts to dismantle the Affordable Care Act. Former Vice President Joe Biden was announcing plans to campaign for the Democrat in Alabama’s high-profile special Senate election.

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As the national Democratic Party races left, and as its lawmakers compete to scream the loudest about the damage being done under President Donald Trump, Bullock sees the world differently. He hasn’t made a practice of rushing to the closest national television camera or preening for headlines to become the face of the “resistance,” though he disapproves of Trump as much as the next lefty. When he does pop into the national discussion, it’s been to insist to his fellow Democrats in no uncertain terms that they need to do a better job of reaching out to voters who disagree with them, or risk electoral oblivion.

All available evidence suggests that riled-up Democratic voters are looking for fire, not genial good governance. And the Democratic Party has never nominated a Westerner. But Bullock looks like he’s marching toward 2020 anyway.

Bullock is the only potential White House hopeful aside from Sanders who has been traveling around the country with a specific set of suggestions for improving the party. In July, he raised eyebrows in Washington when he filed federal papers to register a political group, Big Sky Values, that will allow him to raise money from donors and travel to campaign and spend for other candidates. Two days later, he announced the hire of veteran strategist Tom Lopach as his chief of staff, a move widely read as another step toward a campaign given Lopach’s extensive ties to national-level donors and party operatives from his time working with the Senate Democrats’ campaign arm and both Senators Ted Kennedy and Jon Tester. Bullock is also increasing his national footprint at just the right time—he’s set to lead the National Governors Association next year—and Democrats in Iowa say his allies have been calling operatives there, though he has no plans to visit anytime soon.

“If there’s something—constructively—that I can add, and that extends beyond just the party, but to the direction that this country’s going, as a father of a 15-, 13- and 10-year-old, damn it, I’d better figure out a way to do it,” he tells me.



He does have some good progressive views but comes across as a Montana good ol’ boy,” says a Republican operative. “He would be a really good general election candidate.”



One national-level Republican operative who has reviewed the GOP’s previous research on Bullock told me the party sees no obvious way to take him on, aside from the purely partisan appeal that hasn’t worked against him so far. A former D.C. lawyer, Bullock was elected to his first statewide office, attorney general, in 2008, when John McCain carried Montana by 2 points. Four years later, he became governor as Mitt Romney won the state by 13. He was reelected last November by 4 points, while Donald Trump won Montana by 21. Bullock likes to remind people that 20 percent of voters picked both of them.

“He does have some good progressive views but comes across as a Montana good ol’ boy,” says the Republican operative, who asked for anonymity to avoid being seen complimenting a Democrat. “He would be a really good general election candidate.”

But first, he’ll need to figure out how to make his own party pay attention.



***

Bullock is fond of pointing out that as recently as 2010, it was possible to pull out a map of North America, draw a straight line through the middle of the country, from Canada to Mexico, and leave ink only on states with Democratic governors. The last decade has not treated landlocked Democrats kindly, however, and the map of middle America now looks like an ever-deeper sea of red. Barack Obama pulled in nearly half of the rural vote in 2008, according to exit polls, but Hillary Clinton won barely one-third last November.

The story isn’t much different in Helena, Montana’s tiny capital, where Republicans grabbed three statewide offices from Democratic incumbents last year. Bullock now faces a state legislature that’s 60 percent Republican. So to get anything passed during Montana’s rapid-fire legislative sessions, which run for just 90 days every two years, he’s had to work across the aisle. Montana Republicans were wary of Bullock at first—as attorney general, he became known for his crusades against “dark money”—but many soon welcomed his relatively light touch and penchant for back-slapping compared to his bombastic predecessor, fellow Democrat Brian Schweitzer.

A much more careful politician than Schweitzer (who was weighing a run for president in 2014 until he suggested to a reporter that then-U.S. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor was gay), Bullock has worked hand-in-hand with a faction of moderate Republicans in Helena to push through some of his signature legislative achievements. That includes 2015’s Medicaid expansion, a bill forcing dark-money groups into more disclosure of their political spending, and increases in funding for public education.

“Governor Schweitzer was more of a strong-arm-type politician that really worked the legislature over, twisted arms. I will compliment Governor Bullock: He’s much more likable, he isn’t a bare-knuckle-type politician,” says Scott Sales—the Bozeman Republican who serves as the state Senate president—while taking a break in the middle of a weeks-long elk hunting trip.

In Bullock’s telling, the personal touch that he applies by flying around the nearly 150,000-square-mile state on the state’s six-seat propeller plane to meet with fellow legislators and local officials is necessary. If he doesn’t show up, he can’t build a governing coalition to preserve his priorities in a capitol dominated by lawmakers who would otherwise make his life miserable.

“The only way I can get progressive things done is working with Republicans,” Bullock told me. “Even if it were otherwise, the prescription for the governing part of it—just because you have the power to do it by one vote doesn’t mean that’s necessarily the way to exercise it.”

At a ceremony just outside of Yellowstone National Park, Montana Gov. Steve Bullock speaks to a crowd there to mark the enactment of two conservation agreements. Seated to the right are Democratic Sen. Jon Tester, Republican Sen. Steve Daines, and Republican Congressman Greg Gianforte. | AP

Bullock is legally obliged to balance the state’s budget, an exercise that routinely lays bare some of the widest ideological gaps in fiscally conservative Montana. This year, he’s facing a shortfall for very Montana reasons: lower than expected energy prices and a historically expensive wildfire season. That’s why he found himself trying to charm the roomful of county commissioners in Bozeman into seeing the conundrum from his perspective, and it’s why he’s been rounding up groups of independent-minded Republican mayors to talk through their priorities in between his series of meetings with the editorial boards from the state’s big newspapers.

But his job would be significantly easier if he were surrounded by more Democrats, both locally and throughout the country, where the party is down to just 15 governors, an all-time low. So that’s the kind of get-on-a-plane-and-go-there campaigning he’s now trying to persuade the rest of his party to do.

The push started in May, when he published an op-ed in the New York Times scolding his colleagues: “Show up and make your argument. People will appreciate it, even if they are not inclined to vote for you. As a Democrat in a red state, I often spend days among crowds where there are almost no Democratic voters in sight. I listen to them, work with them and try to persuade them,” he wrote, accusing failed presidential candidates Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and Gore of speaking “the native tongue of Washington” fluently but missing input from real voters.

Party leaders like Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren started reaching out to him to hear more after that op-ed landed, Bullock told me, and when he flew to Washington for a conference hosted by the liberal Center for American Progress think tank less than two weeks later, he was treated as a bona fide presidential contender.

“Anybody who won on Election Day in a state Trump won by 20 has something to say that Democrats need to be listening to,” said CAP President Neera Tanden. “We don’t need to win in states like Montana, but winning in states like Montana should be instructive to progressives everywhere when it comes to beating Trump.”



Anybody who won on Election Day in a state Trump won by 20 has something to say that Democrats need to be listening to,” said Neera Tanden.



At the conference, held in the basement of D.C.’s Four Seasons hotel, Bullock went further, telling the crowd made up of former Clinton aides and donors that during their campaign, “there was little attention paid to places where it might be difficult to win. There was little talk about trying to persuade people, about offering voters a reason to vote for a Democrat for president. If that was my strategy in Montana, I would have been kicked out a long time ago.”

Bullock told me that in the months since then, he’s spoken with DNC Chairman Tom Perez to receive assurances that the party is serious about reaching out to states beyond the 15 or so that matter most in presidential elections. It’s a tough demand to be making at a time when the party is hurting for money and while its loudest voters are so focused on foiling the Trump agenda on Capitol Hill. The idea of spending time and resources trying to reach new voters is also anathema to an influential group of operatives within the party who believe Democrats’ recent run of losses has come in large part because of a lack of enthusiasm among base voters in cities and suburbs.

Bullock’s pitch also risks being drowned out by the broader, and more volatile, ideological war raging within Democratic ranks over whether the way to win is to tack aggressively to the left, like Sanders and Warren, or to reach back to the center on economic issues, like Biden. Bullock has studiously refused to insert himself into that discussion, even though it’s a clear way to rise in the consciousness of influential activists and operatives within the party.

In fact, few things frustrate Bullock allies more than when progressive Sanders-aligned Democrats assume he’s a centrist just because he comes from a red state. Montana has a proud history of so-called Prairie Populist Democrats—Great Falls native Mike Mansfield was the longest-serving U.S. Senate majority leader ever—but Bullock faced significant scrutiny from fellow in-state party members when he first started running here because he was considered too liberal. Raised in Helena, Bullock returned home to work in the government following his graduation from Columbia Law School in 1994, but he moved back east to Washington for a job in private practice and a teaching gig at George Washington University Law School after falling short in his first run for Montana attorney general, in 2000. His re-emergence on the state’s political scene came when he ran a 2006 campaign to raise the minimum wage to $6.15—the measure won by 46 points. Two years later, he won the attorney general job, making his name as a campaign finance warrior by defending Montana’s ban on corporate expenditures all the way to the Supreme Court. (He lost the case, 5-4.)

But Bullock is understandably queasy about being labeled a capital-P Progressive. He walked the line during his 2016 reelection campaign: Although one of his campaign ads, narrated by his daughter, was about the need to guarantee equal pay for women, a liberal priority that many conservatives oppose and which is rarely a top-line campaign topic for Democrats in tight races, he also ran ads calling himself a fiscal conservative while slamming his wealthy opponent’s proposed sales tax.

When we spoke, Bullock was in the middle of the same delicate two-step—call it The Dance of the Red-State Democrat. At the time, Republican Senators Lindsey Graham and Bill Cassidy appeared close to passing an austere Obamacare repeal bill that terrified Democrats, and just days earlier Sanders had unveiled his proposal for “Medicare for All” to much liberal fanfare, including co-sponsorships from a handful of fellow 2020 hopefuls in the Senate. A number of skeptical Democrats had criticized Sanders’ push, however, arguing that the party should be focused on preserving the ACA’s gains before trying to build something new. Bullock was one of them.

But when I ask about the substance of Sanders’ push for a universal Medicare system, he grows philosophical.



Getting Democrats together is like organizing a firing squad in a circle,” he says, looking pained.



“Divorce process and substance, and I think that we all know we spend way too much on health care. When we look at how the middle class hasn’t gotten ahead for the most part, look at how health care costs have been going up—maybe that could have gone to, actually, wages. We all know we’re probably the only industrialized nation that doesn’t provide health care. There’s a lot of ways to get there,” he says. He then, unprompted, turns to the idea of liberal purity tests, amid talk among Sanders’ supporters of punishing Democrats who opposed Medicare for All.

“I think of the late ’80s, when [former congressman] Mo Udall said getting Democrats together is like organizing a firing squad in a circle,” he says, looking pained. “We’re going to make a litmus test on that in August of 2017? I think, in some ways, Democrats are repeating their same mistakes.”



***

One day before Bullock met with the county commissioners, FiveThirtyEight held a mock Democratic presidential primary draft, in which the data-driven website’s reporters and editors ranked the pols they think are most likely to win 2020’s Democratic contest. The first few picks were predictable: Warren went first, Sanders was second, and Biden was third, followed by Harris and New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand. Each choice was greeted with a few lines of excited chatter from the staff, sizing up their prospects. Bullock didn’t make the rankings until the 14th pick, which forecaster Nate Silver immediately dismissed as “too high” before his colleagues moved on to the next slot—actor Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson—with little discussion of Bullock at all.

Sitting at the Rocking R bar in downtown Bozeman the next day with his jacket off and sleeves rolled up, Bullock answers slowly when I ask about the talk that he might take a shot at the White House in 2020. It’s an idea that’s gaining some traction: His name often comes up in the “so who else is running?” phase of conversations among chatterers back in Washington, and at one point a few hours earlier, I heard two wizened Montanans whispering approvingly about his ambitions at the back of a crowd watching Bullock cut the ribbon for a new affordable housing complex in town.

“It’s pretty dang early,” the governor says cautiously, pointing out (correctly) that early 2016 GOP front-runners like Chris Christie and Scott Walker aren’t exactly working from the Oval Office these days.

Bullock on the sidelines of the Montana–Montana State football game, November 2014. | AP

Of course, that’s not anything close to a denial, especially when the Democratic Party’s presidential circus in 2020 may end up making Republicans’ 17-person free-for-all last year look like restraint. With many national party leaders and lawmakers now privately operating under the assumption that Trump can’t possibly win a second term, upward of 40 Democrats have already entered the presidential conversation in some form, most of them clamoring to get noticed for their anti-Trump screeds. A few, including Warren and Biden, have already started to build operations that could turn into campaign teams. One, Maryland Congressman John Delaney, is already running. So, as Bullock is starting to discover as his name bounces around national circles more frequently, the attention is intensifying.

“Most of the folks that I either get to represent, or more folks out there, are more focused on what’s going to happen next month with my day care or my job than they are this. I think it’s a natural inclination of people to be asking those questions, but I think it’s pretty darn early to be handicapping who’s where,” he says, leaning into his beer to overcome the sound of the pool tables and the late-’90s power pop blaring from the bar speakers.

There’s little question that Bullock, with his low name recognition and can’t-we-all-just-get-along demeanor, would start out as a long shot in a primary where voters will be baying for Trump’s blood. He’s also a big question mark among many of the activists and donors he would need on his side to make it past the Iowa caucuses. Harold Schaitberger, the influential chief of the International Association of Firefighters union, is a typical example—he told me he and Bullock are close political allies but that he hadn’t heard any talk of the governor’s national ambitions. Some of Bullock’s top political consultants even have other clients who may run for president. And when I asked one top New Hampshire Democrat and another major party donor what they thought of his prospects, both immediately responded, “Who?”

Sometimes his relative anonymity spills out into the open: When Bullock went on MSNBC recently to talk about health care, the network labeled him a Republican in the chyron.

To many Trump-era pontificators, the assumption that a little-known but likable red-state governor could compete for the top prize is a classic case of Washington insider-ism and unfounded Bill Clinton nostalgia. Skeptics also note that Bullock would face an uphill climb with the base voters who tend to turn out in primary elections. After lily-white Iowa and New Hampshire, the Democratic primary playing fields look dramatically different from Montana, which is roughly 3 percent Hispanic and 0.5 percent African-American. Nevada, for instance, is nearly one-third Latino, and South Carolina—which comes fourth in the primary calendar—is more than a quarter black.

“He’s practical, pragmatic, a workhorse, not a show horse,” says Max Baucus, who spent 36 years in the U.S. Senate representing the state, and who still speaks with Bullock. But, he notes, “Montana does not reflect the country demographically. And similarly, the Democratic Party in Montana does not reflect the party nationally.”

Another veteran party strategist who’s crossed paths with the governor in recent years is blunter.

“Are black people in Detroit going to vote for Bullock?” he asks. “I just don’t get it.”



***

The day after the county commissioners meeting in Bozeman, Page 1 of the Helena Independent Record was plastered with a banner headline describing a divide between Montana’s senators—Tester, the Democrat, and Republican Steve Daines—over the GOP’s health care bill. Two days earlier, Bullock had joined a bipartisan letter signed by 10 governors condemning the Graham-Cassidy bill, and he had testified about health care in Washington earlier in the month. But his name was mentioned only once in the story, in the seventh paragraph.

Therein lies Bullock’s problem as he considers how to circulate his advice for Democrats, and then possibly run for president. His insistence on keeping his head down and staying out of the national scrum means he hardly gets a mention even in his hometown paper, on the dominant news of the day.

Some of Bullock’s closest political allies are sympathetic to the notion that Montanans wouldn’t like it if Bullock suddenly started traveling to early-voting states or popping up at donor conferences across the country. But they’ve taken to wondering whether he needs some sort of defining fight or issue to break through. If he doesn’t have one, they worry, he’ll never be able to force his party out of its comfort zone, let alone launch a plausible presidential campaign.

“If the party is unable to find someone like a Bullock, or one of the ‘red state Democrats’ who are interested in running, the Democratic Party will have a hard time picking up the votes it needs for 2020 and beyond,” warns Brazile.

“I’m happy at home when Trump’s not doing good for Montana to point out he’s not doing good for Montana,” Bullock says when I ask whether he ever feels the need to be more fiery in response to the White House. “Yeah, I guess I don’t know. Maybe I’d raise my visibility substantially if I was out yelling about President Trump. I don’t know that would advance anything that I hope to get done in Montana or around the country that much more.”

Bullock relays that one member of a Montana paper’s editorial board recently told him that he needed to start picking fights. I tell Bullock I’d heard the same suggestion.

“What’s going to be more effective in saving health care?” he responds. “Me standing up each and every day, or me being part of working to get people that are different—but actually share enough of the same values—to say, ‘Don’t rip Medicaid away from 80,000 Montanans'?”

He brings up the Trump administration’s recent decision to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program protecting young undocumented immigrants. He spoke out publicly against the move when it happened, but he also privately confronted John Kelly, Trump’s chief of staff, about the program’s survival when the retired general was serving as the Homeland Security secretary earlier this year.

That’s the kind of run-in other presidential hopefuls might put in a dramatic campaign ad, rather than reveal casually in an interview months after the fact. But for now, Bullock’s advisers are happy with the course they’re on. With the next presidential election more than three years away, and the political ground shifting dramatically by the hour, they’re confident there’s no hurry for him to raise his profile quite yet. And if he does decide to run, their bet is that a lane will open up for someone who is more deliberate about offering examples of his accomplishments rather than rushing to condemn the White House in ever flashier ways.

“The normal thinking is the people who win are the people who go furthest left, who scream the loudest,” says Nick Baldick, Bullock’s top national political adviser. But “it’s not going to be the person who gets there first,” says Baldick, who worked on both of Bill Clinton’s presidential campaigns and Gore’s bid before managing John Edwards’ 2004 campaign. “It’s going to be the person who has the best message and the clearest lane.”

“We need folks who are going to lead the resistance and lead the fight, and I’m grateful for those folks. But we also need people who are going to sit down and bring people to the table,” says EMILY’s List president Stephanie Schriock, a Montana native who first met Bullock in 2006 when he was running the minimum wage campaign and she was managing Tester’s first Senate campaign.

Bullock knows that avoiding the temptation to make a name for himself by screaming about Trump is a risky bet he could easily lose — but he’s not ready to jettison the core of his appeal back home.

“I don’t wake up and say, ‘How can I inject myself into the dysfunction of Washington, D.C.?’” he says at the bar in Bozeman. “My first responsibility is to some of the things you’ve been seeing today. I was just reelected and my responsibility is to govern. I actually, in some respects, have probably turned down more opportunities to do appearances than I’ve accepted.”

About 40 minutes into our conversation, as we speak about how Montana is now surrounded by states with GOP governors, Bullock looks up and sees Mike Hope, the owner of the bar, who walks up to say hello.

Hope, a Republican, had become friendly with Bullock in recent years after the governor sat down with him following a minimum-wage hike that Hope had initially criticized.

“Bozeman’s booming right now, I’ve never seen anything like this,” he tells the governor. “The sheer number of people, we’ve got some good jobs. It’s under your watch, Steve, take some credit!”

After chatting briefly, Hope eyes my notebook and recorder. “Steve Bullock for president!” he says, unprompted.

“I’ll give you a donation,” he continues, laughing and now looking at Bullock. “I’ll be honest with you. I’m a Republican and I’ve supported him. He’s unique, and Montana’s unique. The rest of the country could learn — we’ve got idiots on both sides, but the rest of the country could learn, we do a lot of stuff bipartisan here.”

“I think that’s right,” Bullock replies.