20 August 2018 — 1645 mdt

Bullets, ballots, and Bullock

Sen. Steve Daines received good news over the weekend. Gov. Steve Bullock won’t be running against him in 2020. That’s because Bullock announced, in a backhanded way, that he’s running for president.

Appearing on CNN’s State of the Union, reports the Washington Post, Bullock said he would support a ban on assault weapons, the AR-15 genre of semiautomatic military style rifles that are designed for killing people and have been employed in some of the nation’s most horrific mass shootings.

Bullock, a hunter and gun owner, also supports universal background checks and restrictions on high capacity magazines.

These are not positions on firearms policy that lead to victory in statewide elections in Montana or in most rural and/or western states. But they are positions that voters in Democratic presidential primaries will require of candidates.

By supporting an assault weapons ban, and by visiting the state fair in Iowa, and heading for New Hampshire this week, Bullock is informally declaring both his candidacy for president, and his retirement from statewide elective office in Montana. And should his presidential ambitions not be realized, he’s positioning himself as a potential member of a Democratic cabinet, possibly as attorney general, or as secretary of agriculture or the interior.

Bullock’s success in a red state, and his age (early fifties), make him a logical choice to compete for the white working class voters who supported Obama but defected to Trump in 2016. His support for gun control weakens his attractiveness to that constituency, but probably not enough to negate his appeal to a group that Hillary Clinton dismissed as deplorable bigots and homophobes.

Should Bullock formally throw his hat in the ring, he needs to find a way to expand his party’s appeal to the countryside if he hopes to reside at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. In 2008, Barack Obama won 28 percent of the approximately 3,100 counties in the United States. In 2012, he still won an absolute popular majority and electoral majority, but his share of counties won declined to 22 percent. In 2016, Hillary Clinton carried just 487 counties, slightly less than 16 percent of the total. That’s why she won the popular vote, but lost the electoral vote. If the Democratic Party continues contracting into urban enclaves, it never will win another presidential election.

Nominating another identity politics candidate will ensure another Democratic defeat at the hands of Donald Trump. Because Bullock’s found a way to win in reddish tinged Montana, he has a foot in the Blue Dogs’ house. That may hurt him with the most doctrinaire of the Democratic Socialists. But he’s not an identity politics practitioner — and that will help him with the working classes in the upper Midwest that Hillary disdained and discarded because she believed their votes weren’t needed. Bullock knows better.

But Bullock also needs to know better than to spend the next ten weeks campaigning for president instead of stumping through Montana on behalf of Democratic candidates for the legislature, and for I-185. His claim as a consensus builder who can appeal to and work with everyone will not be strengthened if he gets steamrollered by a Republican dominated legislature next year, or if I-185 is defeated by the massive anti-I-185 campaign the tobacco industry is mounting.