A Balancing Effort Between Democratic Candidates in Montana’s Gubernatorial Candidate Race and the Legacy of Gary Buchanan

In the race for the Second Congressional District of Montana, 14 Democrats voted in the primary election, a stretch of eastern badlands and prairie nearly the size of Connecticut. Maybe that is what the point is.

Ms. Bradley invited Mr. Racicot to the Capitol to talk about the 1992 gubernatorial race. Gary Buchanan, an independent, was endorsed by the Democrats in the contest for the House seat in the eastern district and he is running against Montana’s current at-large Representative, Matt Rosendale. The Bradley-Racicot endorsement was a singular milestone in Montana politics, as if the C.E.O.s of Pepsi and Coke called a truce to sell some Dr. Pepper.

President Biden’s plea to rational Republicans and independents to vote for Democrats in the midterms, as a ploy to root out authoritarian Republican extremists, could persuade the already persuadable. He lost in a lot of the nation’s 3000 or so counties, even though he won the popular and electoral votes in 2020. The Democratic Party has been vilified in many parts of the world because it’s the only party that can govern in a republic. There is a lot of dirt between light bulbs, in eastern Montana, where defending pluralist democracy might require a task force. Realistic Democrats allying with Republican defectors and the unaffiliated to elect civic-minded independents could look like the bipartisan coalition backing Mr. Buchanan and an experiment south of here in Utah.

Montanan Affair: The Infighting Between Moderate Democrat and Democratic Candidates in a State Filled with Misaligned Budgets

She says it boiled down to a few things — the high cost of housing and juggling school and work. She felt that her mental well-being had declined.

When you’re struggling with that, then throwing on the challenges of serving, it becomes a lot, according to the young Republican.

Stromswold, who established herself as an independent voice in the Montana GOP early in her first term, says she was pressured by other lawmakers and politicos outside of the state Capitol to fall in line and vote with her caucus. She was ostracized because she didn’t.

It all became too much and Stromswold announced her resignation earlier this year. “I’m big on principles more than anything. “If you’re going to say that it’s my body, it’s my body, my body, it’s my body, choice with everything, then that’s what you should say,” she says.

“I think it makes it more difficult to make policy for the greater good and to focus on what Montanans really need,” Stromswold says. “I think it becomes a lot of political statement legislation.”

The number of states under one party’s control is at an all-time high and the number of split legislatures, where the two chambers are held by different parties, remains near a historic low.

In Oregon last year, a group of retired moderate Democrats formed a PAC to help fund campaigns for other moderate Democrats who are becoming harder and harder to find in the state.

Colorado, a state that has grown the power of Democrats in recent years, is where Moderate Republicans took a hit. Colin will tell Colorado Public Radio about the negative policy outcomes if a sane and relevant opposition party isn’t in place.

David Bedey was booed for suggesting that Montana’s elections are secure, despite being a well-known moderate conservative. The party also adopted a platform requesting a record to be kept of Republican lawmakers’ votes and how often they deviated from the majority.

Jessi Bennion, a political scientist at Montana State University said the GOP tightening its grip is not exclusive to Montana or Republicans.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/03/21/1164335984/moderates-republicans-gop-democrats-parties-montana-extreme-politics

Is Jon Tester the last stronghold of the Democrats in Montana? The case for a Democratic senator who’s not going to party over principle

It’s not the way to preserve a democracy to separate people into groups and put them together against one another.

“More and more, both parties are calling for ideological conformity,” Bennion says. There is not a lot of room for a pro-life Democrat in the current political landscape, as we saw 20 years ago.

They’re targeting Jon Tester’s seat as the last stronghold of the Democrats in Montana. Tester has been identified nationally as a vulnerable seat Republicans hope to pick up in order to flip the Senate. Racicot could try to stand in their way.

Racicot says he’s not going to party over principle. If a person in his own party serves all of the interests of the people of Montana well, that is a happy coincidence, but they aren’t always right.

It’s not clear if long-time political leaders like Tester and Racicot still have the pull they once did in Montana, which is growing deeper and deeper red.