The 2020 field is full of legislators who have been part of Washington, and in the minority for most of their years there. To Bullock, that’s the essence of the problem. “Not doing a damn thing works for a lot of people. And it works really well for a lot of the interests that support the Republican Party. When government can’t work, [Republicans are] winning,” Bullock told me. “D.C. is now set up to have grand speeches, but not actually get anything done.”

Montana is a place where even the speaker of the statehouse lists his cell number on the government website. Before I flew out, it wasn’t hard to track down a few Republicans directly to see what they made of Bullock talking up his record on the new health-care laws, building up pre-K programs, and creating some of the nation’s tightest state-level restrictions on dark money, including rules that say all unofficial spending must end 90 days before an election. Bullock himself was a top target of the libertarian billionaire Koch brothers in 2016—more money was spent against him than any other candidate in Montana history.

Among the state’s GOP leadership, there’s frustration with the members who have worked with Bullock, common complaints of renegade “RINO” Republicans (Republicans in name only) who gave him his victories. State House Majority Leader Brad Tschida told me their behavior reminded him of an expression he heard used about some jocks back when he was a high-school administrator: “He looks like Tarzan, but plays like Jane.” On top of that, Tschida complains, it’s those Republicans who are taking the lead, not Bullock. “They create ideas for him rather than him saying, ‘Here’s what I want to get done,’” he says.

Tschida has more animosity toward Bullock than most other people, though his feelings of being sold out aren’t unique. “When [Bullock] says it’s a bipartisan way,” says Scott Sales, the president of the state Senate, “it isn’t like it’s the lion’s share of Republicans that have enabled him to claim that bipartisan way.” Then again, realistically, no Democrat would sign bills that a majority of Republicans support; Bullock’s boast isn’t that he’s cast a spell to convert everyone who disagrees with him, but that he has run the state and scored several progressive victories by getting enough Republicans in his corner. Of the other governors already in the presidential race, John Hickenlooper had some Republicans work with him on bills in Colorado, though he had Democratic control of one or both chambers of the legislature for his entire time in office, and Jay Inslee has been on a rapid run of progressive legislation in Washington in the past few months, since getting Democratic control of the state Senate.

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“I’m not so naive to say, ‘Okay, we got this done in Montana—it’s going to be easy in Washington,’” Bullock told me. But he has a suggestion for how to start: new federal campaign-finance laws to fight the world that’s sprung up since the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, pushing members of Congress to put bills on the floor once they come through the committee process and not just at the whims of the leadership, and end the filibuster in the Senate to make more people answerable for their votes. All of that, of course, would be up to the Senate, which is a job that Bullock has forcefully rejected considering.