My hope for release from the waking nightmare of our political world was waning as I went to bed on Tuesday night. Although I live in Massachusetts (which re-elected its intrepid Democratic senator) by way of Michigan (which elected a Democratic governor), I was keeping an anxious watch on the tight race in Montana, where it looked as though the incumbent Democratic senator Jon Tester might lose.

Yes, Montana. It is hard for most people on the eastern side of the Mississippi to believe that I have ties to the place. Once, when I was mailing a package from Ann Arbor to Whitefish, the postal clerk, a black man with whom I often joked, insisted that I had made a mistake on the address. “You don’t know anybody in Montana,” he said. I told him the package was for my sister-in-law, and that I did, in fact, know her. “Well, you’ve never been there,” he teased.

I have been there. I have lived in, visited and driven through Montana’s cities, towns and reservations for more than 25 years. I have researched and published on African-American history in the state. My husband is a Montana native, in both meanings of the phrase, and I have Native American as well as white relatives there. We all love Senator Tester, who is from a ranching family in Big Sandy (down the highway from my husband’s home reservation), because he is an old-school, boots on the dusty ground Democrat; because he wanted to hire my sister-in-law (a different one) as his liaison to Native communities; because he castigated Donald Trump’s policy of separating immigrant families; and because he was willing to vote his conscience against Brett Kavanaugh. And Mr. Tester was under attack.