All Montana’s U.S. House of Representatives’ candidates want your vote — one asks directly
Keila Szpaller
(Daily Montanan) Certainly, Ryan Zinke and John Lamb want your vote.
They’ve registered with the Montana Secretary of State, Republican Zinke is raising a boatload of money and clawed his way through the primary, and Libertarian Lamb is making his case to voters.
Democrat Monica Tranel wants your vote too, of course — and in public forums, she specifically asks for it.
Last week, the three candidates running to represent Montana’s new western district in the U.S. House of Representatives debated in Butte, and Tranel, a Missoula lawyer, appealed directly to the audience, as she’s done before.
“Please vote for me on November 8, and I will work for you, and I will make you proud to have me in Congress as your representative, something we’ve not had for a long time,” Tranel said.
Jeremy Johnson, political analyst at Helena’s Carroll College, said he doesn’t know of any science around speaking directly to voters, and there’s no perfect approach or way to tell if voters will even absorb the request. However, he said Tranel generally interacts with “directness and frankness,” and her straightforward call for a vote fits with her persona.
“The best advice you can even give a candidate is to play to their own strengths in terms of presentation and style, and I think she’s doing it,” said Johnson, political science department chair.
Christina Barsky, faculty in the Department of Public Administration and Policy at the University of Montana, said Tranel believes in a representative democracy, and her appeal to the voter is a way of humanizing herself in the campaign.
“It’s an opportunity for her to directly engage with the voter,” Barsky said.
As part of his own strategy, Zinke, a former congressman and U.S. Secretary of the Interior, attacks Tranel as someone who will march lockstep with Democrat and favorite GOP foil Nancy Pelosi, U.S. Speaker of the House.
Lee Banville, a professor and director of the School of Journalism at UM, said Tranel’s blunt request to voters is partly an appeal for them to look at her personal background rather than at her party. He said she’s reminding people individuals are core to the way democracies run.
“She’s trying to make this race about her versus Ryan Zinke, (about) her qualifications,” Banville said. “So she’s directly asking people to not think about, ‘Is this going to empower Nancy Pelosi?’ She wants people to think, ‘Who is a better representative for Montana, me or Ryan Zinke?’”
That’s in contrast to Zinke, who isn’t popular among conservative Republicans right now, Banville said. Zinke wants to remind people that if they’re conservative, they should still cast their vote for the GOP candidate, not for the Libertarian.
“‘Just make sure you still vote Republican,’” he said is Zinke’s message.