A14 TUESDAY, JULY 28, 2020
YBOZEMAN, Mont. — In the deeply po-
larized election of 2016, every state that
supported President Trump backed Re-
publican senators — and each state that
Hillary Clinton carried voted for a Demo-
cratic Senate candidate.
But four years later, Democratic hopes
for gaining a clear Senate majority de-
pend in part on winning in conservative-
leaning states where Mr. Trump may
also prevail, even as he sags in the polls.
In states like Alaska, Iowa, Georgia and
here in Montana, Democrats are hoping
their Senate candidates can outperform
Joseph R. Biden Jr., their presumptive
nominee.
That’s the dynamic Gov. Steve Bullock
is counting on in Montana, where ticket-
splitting is as much a way of life as fly-
fishing.
Montanans have supported Republi-
can presidential candidates, with one ex-
ception, for over a half-century. In that
same period, though, they have elected a
series of Democratic governors and sen-
ators. Senator Steve Daines, whom Mr.
Bullock is challenging, was the first Re-
publican elected to the Senate seat that
he holds in over a century.
Yet as he faces off against Mr. Bullock,
whose popularity has risen as he leads
the state’s coronavirus response, Mr.
Daines is counting on Montanans to act a
little more like voters everywhere else
and stick with one party as they make
their way down the ballot.
The race here will measure the politi-
cal impact of the pandemic — many gov-
ernors have grown in stature for their
handling of the virus, and Mr. Bullock is
the only sitting governor running for the
Senate. It will also test Montana’s icono-
clastic identity in a time of encroaching
red-and-blue homogeneity.
But for Democrats, going on the offen-
sive in a red-leaning state in an age of po-
larization is no easy task. By nominating
the more moderate Mr. Biden, they hope
they can at least lose more closely, if not
win outright, in states where Mrs. Clin-
ton was thrashed and her party’s Senate
candidates went down with her.
“The reason he was so strong in ’16 is
because you could go up and down here
— Democrats and Republicans would
both tell you they hate Hillary,” Jon Test-
er, a Democrat who is Montana’s senior
senator, said of Mr. Trump over an after-
noon beer in Great Falls.
Even as Mrs. Clinton lost Montana
overwhelmingly, though, Mr. Bullock
still managed to get re-elected as gover-
nor.
A Helena-reared lawyer who made a
foray for president last year, Mr. Bullock
has won statewide office three times,
first as attorney general before he be-
came governor.
“Montanans know me,” he said in an
interview, explaining how he’d overcome
Republican claims that he’d abet liberal
voices in Washington. “I’ve worked with
Republicans to get things done.”
Winning a federal race, in which the is-
sues are more national in scope, is diffi-
cult enough for a Democrat in a red state.
But Mr. Bullock made that task harder by
leaving Montana for half of 2019 to run
for president, drifting to the left on some
issues and repeatedly insisting he would
not fall back to seek the Senate seat.
Without prompting last week, though,
he noted that he had stood up to Presi-
dent Barack Obama’s administration on
environmental policies he thought were
harmful to Montana’s agriculture and en-
ergy sectors.
Such talk was notably absent from his
White House bid, when he sought the
Democratic nomination by edging to the
left on gun control and deeming Mr.
Trump a “lying con man from New York
with orange hair and a golden toilet.”
Asked if his ridicule of Mr. Trump was
over the line, he suggested some regret.
“By Washington standards, not at all,”
Mr. Bullock explained. “By my typical
standards, stronger than things that I
would typically say.”
Navigating Mr. Trump is a delicate is-
sue for Montana Democrats, who must
energize their liberal base without alien-
ating the state’s ticket-splitters. Mr. Test-
er aired ads in his 2018 re-election cam-
paign trumpeting his work with the pres-
ident, which helped blunt the impact of
Mr. Trump’s four trips to the state that
year.
Few G.O.P. senators have so happily
linked themselves to Mr. Trump as Mr.
Daines, a chemical engineer by training
who represented Montana as its lone
congressman before winning his Senate
seat in 2014.
In an interview in his Bozeman cam-
paign office, he said he was eager for the
president to return to the state and re-
vealed that Mr. Trump had “asked to
come, too.”
However, just as Mr. Bullock’s ill-fated
bid for president has complicated his at-
tempt to run again in Montana, the coro-
navirus has created headwinds for Mr.
Daines.
Mr. Trump’s standing here has fallen,
as it has elsewhere, because of his inef-
fective response to the outbreak. Some
Republican polling this summer sug-
gests he is leading Mr. Biden only by sin-
gle digits in Montana.
Asked to assess the president’s per-
formance on the pandemic, Mr. Daines
largely sidestepped the question, stating
that he supported letting states and lo-
calities “have primacy.”
Further muddling matters for Mr.
Daines: Any effort by him to embrace
the national Republican strategy of pin-
ning the blame on China for the virus’s
spread in America is complicated by his
years of work for Procter & Gamble in
China. Democrats are already airing
commercials highlighting the senator’s
work in the country.
More than anything, though, the
health crisis has created challenges for
Mr. Daines by delaying the parry-and-
thrust of the campaign, allowing Mr.
Bullock to enjoy what his opponent
called a “rally around the flag” bounce.
Mr. Daines acknowledged that his role
was more of constituent service special-
ist than candidate — and that the virus
was foremost on the minds of voters.
“These are third-generation business
owners that are crying on the phone to
me, saying: ‘Steve, I’m losing every-
thing,’ ” he recalled. “And so in that mo-
ment you’re not thinking so much about,
‘Well, Steve Bullock got an F on guns and
I got an A+.’ It’s not the discussion.”That was easy enough to see as the
two officials made their way across this
sprawling state, where the metric for a
candidate’s sweat equity is in tires
changed, not shoes replaced.
In the Flathead region, near Glacier
National Park, Mr. Bullock visited a food
bank.As he toured a nearby timber facili-
ty, the governor was joined by an em-
ployee, a Trump voter now dejected by
the country’s state of affairs, whose step-
mother had contracted the virus.
Closer to Great Falls, Mr. Daines was
similarly confronted with fallout from
the pandemic.
He visited a small agricultural equip-
ment dealer who thanked him for the
paycheck protection loan that he had re-
ceived through Congress. “It was a big
help,” said the dealer, Steven Raska, ex-
plaining that he had been able to pay a
few employees for over two months with
the money.
Demonstrating his clout with the
Trump administration, Mr. Daines also
convened a round-table event for ranch-
ers and farmers that featured BillNorthey, a top administrator at the De-
partment of Agriculture. The growers
gave both men an earful about how the
virus had upended their livelihoods.
“Covid could not have hit the sheep in-
dustry at a worse time,” said Leah John-
son, who runs the Montana Wool Grow-
ers Association.
With the virus spiking in the state, Mr.
Bullock finally issued a mask mandate
on July 15 for any county with four or
more active cases.
Former Senator Max Baucus, a Demo-
crat who represented the state in Con-
gress for nearly 40 years, said the pan-
demic had initially lifted Mr. Bullock.
“But the trouble with Covid is you can’t
get out and shake hands, and that would
help him compare himself to Daines,”
said Mr. Baucus, explaining that he had
overcome Montana’s national Republi-
can leaning by cultivating individual vot-
ers. “My main approach to the state was:
people, people, people.”
The uncertainty surrounding the vi-
rus, and Montana’s heterodox political
nature, were on display Thursday inBozeman. A few dozen protesters in
Trump gear hoisted signs and marched
down the city’s commercial center in op-
position to the mask order.
They passed a number of storefronts
that even before the mandate had asked
customers to wear masks — a reflection
of the changing nature of Bozeman.
There’s now a Lululemon, sitting across
the street from a coffee shop plastered
with anti-racism signs that could have
been pulled from the most liberal college
campus (“De-Prioritize White Com-
fort”).
Few places have as strong a sense of
place as Montana, where politicians rou-
tinely invoke how many generations
their families go back in the state. This
focus on rootedness and the state’s
sparse population have helped perpetu-
ate its independent streak as races re-
main more about the individual.
“We have six people per square mile
and three times as many cows as people,
so that makes for a lot of reliance,” said
Marc Racicot, a former Republican gov-
ernor. “The social connection is a little
richer and not so contaminated with only
electronic communications.”
Yet even as it treasures its status as
“The Last, Best Place,” one of its slogans,
Montana, which has about one million
people, is being reshaped by transplants.
And nowhere more so than Bozeman, a
community cherished for its proximity to
Yellowstone Park that locals now call
“Bozeangeles.”
Traditionally, Democrats won state-
wide by winning or breaking even in the
county surrounding Billings, the popula-
tion center of Montana’s Republican-
dominated east. That’s changing,
though, because of the rising population
in Gallatin County, which includes Boze-
man and is the fastest-growing jurisdic-
tion in the state.
Mr. Tester’s trajectory in Gallatin
County tells the story of Montana’s trans-
formation: Over three elections, Mr.
Tester has gone from winning 49 percent
to 51.5 percent to 59.4 percent there.
Once rooted in labor, the Democratic
coalition here increasingly reflects the
national party, with its twin pillars of up-
scale whites and working-class minor-
ities (Native Americans in the case of
Montana).
“These urban spaces are growing dra-
matically, and these spaces are becom-
ing the heart of the Democratic base
here,” said David Parker, a Montana
State University professor who wrote a
book on the 2012 Senate race.
At the same time, though, Republicans
are winning their heavily rural base by
even larger margins today: Even Mr.
Tester, a descendant of homesteaders
who is the only working farmer in the
Senate, has seen his support sag in
sparsely populated counties since he
first ran in 2006.
It adds up to a shrinking pool of per-
suadable voters.
“It’s not quite like what it was,” Mr.
Racicot acknowledged, before hinting at
why so many people want to move to
Montana. “But it’s a lot closer to that
ideal than the rest of the nation.”Democratic Senate Edge Could Hinge on Ticket-Splitting Montana
Testing the Length
Of Trump’s Coattails
From top, Gov. Steve Bullock, a
Democrat running for Senate in
Montana, meeting with volunteers
at a food bank in Columbia Falls
this month. President Trump, who
handily won Montana in 2016,
visited the state four times in 2018
in an unsuccessful effort to help
unseat Senator Jon Tester, a Dem-
ocrat. Senator Steve Daines, the
incumbent Republican and Mr.
Bullock’s opponent, has linked his
fortunes to the president.NICK COTE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESBy JONATHAN MARTINDOUG MILLS/THE NEW YORK TIMESANNA MONEYMAKER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES