Tester maintains polling lead, Breckenridge sows confusion

It’s Halloween — and Libertarian Rick Breckenridge’s treat, or some would say, trick, is proving it’s possible to have one’s cake and eat it, too. He claims, as best I can determine, that he remains a candidate (he can’t be removed from the ballot), but endorses Matt Rosendale, the Republican state auditor challenging Sen. Jon Tester’s bid for a third term in the U.S. Senate.

More on Breckenridge in a moment. First, the polling numbers.

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New Gravis poll has Williams and Gianforte tied 48–48

Note. Yesterday’s post rewritten, with new plots.

A Gravis poll released today, and conducted 24–26 October, reports Democrat Kathleen Williams is tied with Rep. Greg Gianforte at 48 percent each, with three percent undecided. The 782 likely voters sample has a 3.5 percent margin of error. Gravis made live calls to landlines, and used an online panel for cell phone. “The results are weighted by voting demographics.”

Both a straight average of the September and October polls, and of FiveThirtyEight’s adjusted values for these polls, put Williams approximately three points behind Gianforte.

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Guns, bombs, and President Trump’s rhetoric

Keep in mind this number: 328,880,000. That’s the current population of the United States. Within it, there’s considerable variation, including a handful of murderous lunatics, two of whom made themselves known this week.

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Stand down notice

Flathead Memo now rates Tester v. Rosendale
U.S. Senate election as leans Democratic

Let’s start with the seven polls conducted from 6 September through 13 October. Tester leads by an average of 4.7 points, 48.0 to 43.3 percent. Although the lead is narrow, Tester leads in six of the seven polls, and ties with Rosendale in the other. Rosendale isn’t closing the gap, and time is running out.

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MSU Billings poll reports 9-point lead for Tester

The Montana Poll, produced by academics at Montana State University’s Billings campus, reports Sen. Jon Tester is leading his Republican challenger, state auditor Matt Rosendale, 47 to 38 percent, with 12 percent undecided. Libertarian Rick Breckenridge was favored by three percent.

In the election for the U.S. House, Rep. Greg Gianforte led Democratic challenger Kathleen Williams 44 to 41 percent with 12 percent undecided. Libertarian Elinor Swanson was favored by three percent.

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MTN-MSU poll, already old, is being released too slowly

This evening, the poll’s results on the U.S. House election were released. Not to my surprise, Gianforte is leading Williams by 7.5 points. The crosstabs will be available tomorrow morning.

The schedule posted at MSU’s HELPlabs indicates findings on the ballot measures will be released Thursday, and more information will be released Friday. This dribbling out of the results is standard news media marketing practice, designed to draw a big audience every night for a week. The Lee Newspapers used to do the same thing with their election year polls, which usually were conducted by Mason-Dixon.

This is too slow. Election month concludes the evening of 6 November. The poll was open 15 September to 6 October. Processing required two weeks. That’s moving fast enough if the poll is for sniffing out the acceptance of a new perfume. But it’s too slow for an election.

At least the MSU poll’s methodology seems sound. On balance, the poll is a credit to MSU and counters the embarrassment caused by the Big Sky Poll out of the ever shrinking University of Montana.

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MSU-MTN poll reports Tester has a 3-point lead on Rosendale

Updated. Sen. Jon Tester is leading his Republican opponent, state auditor Matt Rosendale, among registered voters by 3.1 points according to a poll conducted by Montana State University and released last night. The results:

Here’s the poll plotted on the template Flathead Memo will use for the rest of the election:

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DeTweeting

Effective immediately, I’m suspending all activity on Twitter until after the election. Civility has been declining, and I’ve had to block too many people I thought were decent souls for their mean-spirited snark and personal attacks. It’s been getting worse, most of it’s been coming from so-called progressives, and I’ve had enough. —James Conner

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It’s finger crossing time for Democrats

Today’s New York Times story on the tightening U.S. Senate election in Montana coincides with Montana State University Professor David Parker’s Twitter announcement that the results of MSU’s poll of the Senate race will be announced at 2100 MDT tonight on CW TV stations.

The poll’s findings on the U.S. House election will be reported tomorrow evening.

The last publicly available poll, by Public Policy Polling, was released and conducted in late September. The University of Montana’s Big Sky Poll, conducted in the last half of August and released in early October, was an outlier and should be ignored (there’s actually a good case the poll should be withdrawn).

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Trump’s net approval in Montana remains above water

Nationwide, President Trump’s net approval rating is approximately ten points underwater, but in Montana his net approval remains positive in the low to mid-single digits range. That augurs well for Matt Rosendale and Greg Gianforte, but serves as a headwind for Jon Tester and Kathleen Williams.

Here are the monthly averages for Montana and the United States for registered voters. The Montana data are from Morning Consult. The national data are from Nate Silver’s fivethirtyeight.com.

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Trump’s net approval rating has salience for Matt Rosendale and Greg Gianforte. To the extent they, with the help of the Republican Party and third party organizations on the right, can make the election a referendum on Trump, they improve their chances of winning.

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President Trump praises Rep. Gianforte’s bodyslamming skills

Donald Trump descended to a new low yesterday when, speaking at a Republican rally in Missoula, he praised Greg Gianforte for grabbing Guardian reporter Ben Jacobs by the neck, slamming him to the floor, and punching him, on the eve of Montana’s special congressional election in 2014.

Gianforte pleaded guilty to assault, but won the election.

It’s nothing to be proud of — but Trump told the the audience of MAGA-hatted Montanans that the violent crime made Gianforte his kind of guy.

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A recall election is not the remedy for MT SecST Stapleton’s blunders

Corey Stapleton began his tenure as Montana’s Secretary of State by launching a jihad against an enemy that existed almost entirely in his mind, and only in his mind: voter fraud. After Montana’s county clerks and elections administrators set him straight on that, he segued into a well intentioned, but not adroitly administered, campaign to promote the correct casting of absentee ballots.

This fall Stapleton had the bad fortune to preside over the distribution of a flawed voter information pamphlet. Due to what probably was a proofreading blunder, some of the ballot measure language in the VIP omitted strikethrus and underlines, requiring sending out a correction in an addendum that cost $265,000 to produce and mail. It wasn’t, insofar as I can determine, misconduct. It was just a massive screw-up, embarrassing to Stapleton, exasperating to the voters, and expensive for the taxpayers.

Now there are calls for his resignation, and if he refuses to resign, to remove him through a recall election.

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Progressives will gather, rally, march, and vote,
to protest Trump's hanger speech in Missoula

President Trump is scheduled to speak to Republicans at 1830 MDT tomorrow at the Minuteman hanger at the Missoula airport. Air Force One, the Boeing 747 that still sports the livery chosen by John F. Kennedy, will serve as the backdrop. It’s a photo op reminiscent of George W. Bush’s notorious “Mission Accomplished” photo op on the USS Abraham Lincoln in 2003.

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Computer crash stand down

Our main desktop computer crashed this morning, several times. We’re therefore standing down while we identify and correct the problem. Please check back again this evening. Thanks for reading Flathead Memo. —James Conner

Is Randy Brodehl a Fahrenheit 451 fireman?

No. Not literally. The firemen in Ray Bradbury’s dystopian novel burned books, but Brodhel, as a member and chief of Kalispell’s fire department, extinguished fires. If he encountered a burning book, he doused the flames.

Figuratively, however, the truth is more complicated. As a state representative, Brodehl (R-Kalispell/Evergreen) was one of three authors of the arguments in the 2018 Voter Information Pamphlet against approving Legislative Referendum 128, the ballot measure renewing the six-mil university levy that provides approximately $20 million a year for academics, including library resources.

In other words, Brodehl favors burning down a pillar of the funding for Montana’s university system.

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Montana’s Democrats and progressives should not hold
anti-Trump protests when he campaigns in Missoula on 18 October

President Trump will be in Missoula on 18 October to campaign for Matt Rosendale, who is challenging the re-election of Sen. Jon Tester.

Why Missoula? Two reasons, I suspect. First, it’s a good location for ginning up the GOP base in deep red Ravalli and Flathead Counties. Second, it’s the most liberal locale in Montana, home of a major university and a cluster of leftist activists who will conduct a protest at the blink of an eye.

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Please — don’t vote this early

Absentee ballots will be mailed to many Montana voters tomorrow. Early voting started Tuesday.

My best advice to you: don’t vote this early. Set your absentee ballot aside and neither mark it nor mail it until the last week before the 6 November election.

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The Big Sky Poll was conducted in August —
but its results weren’t released until yesterday

The Big Sky Poll is a teaching project administered by two University of Montana professors and executed with student labor. From 13 through 31 August the poll interviewed 618 registered voters in Montana. The sample for the U.S. Senate and House horserace questions was 466, and has a margin of error of 4.5 percent. The sample was weighted by geography and gender.

The poll reported Sen. Jon Tester was leading his Republican opponent, Matt Rosendale by 24 points, 56 to 32 percent, with two percent preferring Libertarian Rick Breckenridge and nine percent undecided. I consider that 24-point lead highly improbable.

That was approximately six weeks ago. Since then, as displayed in the graph below, five professional polls have been conducted. None reports such a whopping lead for Tester.

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The 2004 Montana tobacco tax increase ballot measure

In 2004, Montanans voted by an almost two to one margin to increase tobacco taxes to discourage smoking and to pay for various good things. The for and against I-149 arguments in the 2004 Voter Information Pamphlet were quite similar to the arguments for and against I-185 in the 2018 Voter Information Pamphlet.

Only two small counties, Garfield and Golden Valley, voted against the 2004 tobacco tax increase. Support for I-149 was highest in the largest counties, and probably was positively correlated with both educational attainment and income.

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Download data

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What Democrats must do now that Kavanaugh is on the court, &
There’s a significant possibility Initiative 185 may fail

How Democrats can recover from being steamrollered on SCOTUS. Brett Kavanaugh is now Justice Kavanaugh. He won’t be removed from the U.S. Supreme Court through impeachment, and the wounds to his reputation may never fully heal. Democrats can offset Kavanaugh’s and Gorsouch’s impact on the court by adding at least two new justices to the court — but to do that, Democrats must win the White House and working majorities in both houses of Congress. Therefore, it’s time for outraged progressives to stash the “Kava-No!” signs, knock off the rallies and dumbass sit-ins, and bust their behinds getting Democrats, no matter how flawed, elected. There’s no other way of getting even, or getting justice.

Initiative 185 may be in significant trouble. During 6–16 September, AARP (the American Association for Retired Persons) polled Montanans on I-185, which would extend expanded Medicaid and raise taxes on tobacco products. The result: 47 percent for I-185, 41 percent against, 11 percent undecided. The poll sampled 950 likely voters. The nominal margin of error is ≈ 3.2 percent, voters 50 and older were oversampled (724), making the MOE trickier to calculate. Assume wide error bars.

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Did Missoula’s cops help leftist lawbreakers exercise a heckler’s veto?

Frustrated by the impending confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court, and apparently mad as hell at the whole damn world, members of Missoula Rises and the Western Montana Chapter of Democratic Socialists of America conducted a nonviolent sit-in at the office of the Republican Party in Missoula yesterday. Their strategic objective? None. They just wanted to make life unpleasant for the people who worked there.

Seven of the protesters were arrested for criminal trespass, a misdemeanor, which apparently was their soul satisfying objective (in some circles, having been arrested at a protest is flaunted as proof of moral superiority and proudly worn as a badge of honor).

Then, the Missoulian’s Seaborn Larson reports, something strange happened:

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Kavanaugh confirmation brawl is helping Republicans
nationalize the Montana senate election

Montanans now know how their senators will vote on the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court. Sen. Jon Tester will vote against the nomination. Sen. Steve Daines will vote for the nomination, as long as the vote does not occur when he’s scheduled to be in Montana, walking his daughter down the aisle at her marriage ceremony.

And we know how Matt Rosendale would vote were he a senator. He’d vote for the person President Trump nominated. Rosendale, and the Republican Party, consider the vote not as an exercise of advise and consent, but as an exercise of party loyalty — and not just an exercise of party loyalty, but an exercise of personal loyalty to Donald Trump himself.

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Recent polls show Tester with small but steady lead

An average of six polls conducted from mid-August to last week shows Sen. Jon Tester leading his Republican challenger, Matt Rosendale, 47.3 to 44.8 percent. The latest poll, by Public Policy Polling, reports Tester leading by six points, 49 to 45 percent. The poll sampled 594 likely voters. The sampling margin of error is four percent, and the probability that Tester has a ballot lead is 84 percent.

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I’m still rating Tester v. Rosendale as a toss-up, but if more polls report leads for Tester, even very small leads, I’ll probably change my rating to leans Democratic.

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Stand down notice

Exigencies not related to blogging are in the saddle and riding my schedule. Ergo, no blogging until tomorrow. — James Conner