Will Kamala Harris cost Tester, Democrats the US Senate?
Thomas F. Harrison
(CN) — Swapping Kamala Harris for Joe Biden could enable the Democratic Party to keep control of the White House this fall, many Democrats believe — but it might also be the very thing that costs them the U.S. Senate.
The battle for the Senate is razor-close this year. Republicans hold 49 seats and are favored to keep all of them, as well as picking up a 50th with the retirement of Democrat Joe Manchin in ruby-red West Virginia. If Harris wins the presidency, Republicans would need to flip just one additional seat to control the upper chamber.
Two months ago, when Biden was still the apparent nominee, polls showed that other seats were unlikely to change hands. But since Harris took over, there has been a dramatic change in Montana, with Republican challenger Tim Sheehy suddenly grabbing the lead from Democratic incumbent Jon Tester.
Ironically, while Harris’ new-age California style is faring better in the presidential swing states than Biden’s elderly working-class appeal, it appears to have had the opposite effect in the country’s most critical Senate race — which could end up being the very thing that keeps a President Harris from enacting a legislative agenda.
Prior to the Biden/Harris switch, Tester was consistently leading his Republican opponent by 2 to 9 points in the polls. But afterward, Sheehy quickly gained the upper hand — he now leads by 5 points in the RealClearPolitics average, with the two most recent polls showing him even further ahead.
“There’s no specific evidence” that the Harris swap directly upended the Montana race, said Jeremy Johnson, a political science professor at Carroll College in Helena, Montana — but on the other hand, “there’s also no other good explanation” for the dramatic shift in the polls that occurred at exactly that time, he noted.
And there are plenty of reasons to suspect that Montanans are more put off by a Harris-led Democratic Party than one helmed by Biden.
Tester is a centrist Democrat who has already won three terms in the Senate in a heavily Republican state, a feat he accomplished by combining a folksy working-class background, moderate political views and a willingness to reach across the aisle — hallmarks of Biden’s own Senate career.
Tester positions himself as a bipartisan populist who supports the Second Amendment and veterans’ issues, said Christopher Muste, a political scientist at the University of Montana.
Harris, on the other hand, was this century’s second-most liberal U.S. Senator after Elizabeth Warren, according to the UCLA Voteview project. Her views on green energy and social issues don’t play well in a heavily agricultural state with a significant coal industry.
And then there’s the fact that she’s from California. Large numbers of Californians began moving to Montana during the pandemic, prompting a significant backlash as natives blamed the newcomers for skyrocketing home prices, congestion and a loss of access to public lands. “Don’t California my Montana” bumper stickers began popping up all over the state.
Across Montana, “there’s a resentment of Californians,” Johnson said.
Kiersten Iwai agreed.
“There’s so much resentment,” said the executive director of Forward Montana, a youth-oriented civic engagement group. “You can just see that by people’s bumper stickers, and by talking with people.”
But the clearest evidence that the Biden/Harris swap is dragging Tester down is also the simplest: Tester, who endorsed Biden for reelection, has pointedly said he won't endorse Harris — and he didn’t even attend the Democratic national convention that nominated her.
“Folks have wanted to nationalize this race, and this isn’t about national politics,” Tester explained when asked about his refusal to endorse Harris — despite the fact that he readily endorsed Biden just months earlier. “This is about Montana. It’s about making sure we have a Montanan back in Washington D.C., representing Montana values.”
But despite Tester’s claims, the race has already been nationalized, with money pouring in from all over the country. The critical contest is expected to shatter state records and trigger some $200 million in campaign spending in a state with a population of just over 1 million.
Sheehy, the Republican, has been working hard to tie Tester to Democrats in Washington. Tester has supported the Biden-Harris agenda “95% of the time,” Sheehy claimed in a debate, including a bill passed in April to provide $95 billion in Ukraine aid.
Sheehy added that unlike Tester, he supports “cheap gas, safe streets, boys are boys, girls are girls.”
The Sheehy attacks have prompted Tester to try to distance himself from Harris’ policies. He recently ran ads touting his work with Republicans to close the border and defend gun rights.
The question is whether, in an increasingly hyperpartisan national environment, Tester’s brand of iconoclastic state-based populism can survive.
“It used to be that local and state issues mattered a lot more, so you could have Democrats in Montana carve out their unique personal brand that was sufficiently detached from the impressions that people have of the national party,” said Robert Saldin, a political science professor at the University of Montana, in an interview with The New Republic.
“That’s just a lot harder now than it used to be, because in the minds of voters, state and local considerations just don’t register as high as they once did,” he said.
If Montana politics have become increasingly nationalized, that’s largely because Montana itself has become nationalized in recent years. The pandemic prompted tens of thousands of new residents to swarm in from other states, with an astonishing 3.72 people moving into the state in 2020 for every one who left.
The massive influx had slowed a bit by 2023, with only 1.87 new residents for every person who left, but that still ranked Montana third in the country for net in-state migration.
“It was so much more than we could prepare for,” Iwai said. “The infrastructure and the resources and the services just aren’t there to support so many people. Open fields are now suburban developments with traffic. It’s a very visible, visceral change.”
As a result of the flood of newcomers, only a little over half of the state’s residents were born there, according to the latest Census figures. And the second largest chunk of residents is from California.
Many of the Golden State expats used the ability to work remotely as a ticket to a more relaxed lifestyle and an escape from high taxes, crime, regulations and an exorbitant cost of living. But they have prompted deep-seated frustration among native Montanans and a stereotype of well-paid Silicon Valley tech workers bidding up local real estate prices.
“People are upset about wealth inequality,” Iwai said. “Local businesses just can’t compete with out-of-state wages.”
From 2020 to 2022, the average home price in Montana skyrocketed 50%, far above the national average. And in 2023, property tax bills jumped 21% year-over-year.
Since the pandemic, Montana has seen the largest increase in the country in the amount of income needed to afford a typical home — more than 77%, according to an analysis by Bankrate. Residents now need to make more than $130,000 a year to afford an average monthly mortgage payment — even though the state’s median household income is less than $68,000.
Some 30% of Montanans under age 35 have considered leaving the state in the last year due to housing costs, a survey released in July showed.
Tester is trying to capitalize on the resentment by emphasizing his Montana farming roots and painting Sheehy, a former Navy SEAL and wealthy entrepreneur from Minnesota, as a carpetbagger. But such a strategy risks offending the nearly half of the electorate who also moved to Montana from elsewhere.
Two of Tester’s three narrow Senate wins occurred in low-turnout off-year elections and the other was in 2012, a solid Democratic year. This time, Tester is struggling to distance himself from the presidential contest, but “in a presidential year it’s hard to keep a Senate race separate,” Iwai noted.