19 May 2019 — 1719 mdt
Democrats should lay off Steve Bullock — he doesn’t want
to be a Senator, and Steve Daines likely can’t be defeated
Many Democrats are exasperated with Steve Bullock for his decision to run for President, an office they believe he has little chance of winning, and not for the U.S. Senate seat now occupied by Republican Steve Daines, an office they believe Bullock can win. Some Democrats, Wilmot Collins not among them, are waiting for Bullock to come to his senses and run for the Senate.
Respectfully, it’s time for these Democrats to come their own senses and to face the facts. Bullock sees himself as an executive, as a man-in-charge decision maker, not as a legislator. And he believes he’s outgrown Montana, that he now belongs on the national stage. Were he to run for the Senate, he’d be a reluctant candidate, an unhappy candidate, and consequently a weak candidate.
Moreover, it’s not likely that Steve Daines can be defeated. President Trump’s net approval in Montana is diminishing, but it’s still above water. Equally important, as Flathead Memo reported Friday, Trump’s remains approximately 10–15 percent more popular in Montana than in the nation as a whole. In 2012, Montanans split their tickets, opting for Republican Mitt Romney for President, and incumbent Democrat Jon Tester for the U.S. Senate. But as Ed Kilgore notes at the Daily Intelligencer, the era of ticket splitting may have ended in 2016:
The conventional wisdom in some circles is that Democratic Senate hopes have been betrayed by potentially strong candidates (e.g., Texas’s Beto O’Rourke, Montana’s Steve Bullock, and Georgia’s Stacey Abrams) selfishly deciding to pursue other offices and other goals. Aside from how you feel about the proposition that these people owe the Democratic Party a year or so of tough, miserable campaign work and then six years in a job they may not even want, the candidate-driven look at 2020 Senate races may be missing something more fundamental. In the last presidential election year, split-ticket voting in Senate races basically vanished. That’s right: In 2016, all 34 races were won by the party that won the state in question in the presidential contest. That’s never happened before. As Harry Enten pointed out, there wasn’t much variation in the pattern of votes:
Republican Senate candidates generally outperformed Trump, but the average difference between the Republican Senate candidate’s margin and Trump’s margin was just 1 percentage point.
If the era of ticket splitting is over, then Democrats cannot defeat Daines by fielding a strong candidate who runs a strong campaign. To win, they must also field a Presidential candidate who carries Montana. The odds that both conditions will be met are vanishingly small. Trump pays attention to rural Americans, making them feel important. Urban Democrats disdain rural Americans, whom they deplore as embarrassing hicks.
If Daines needs a boost next year, Trump will hold rallies in Great Falls and Billings in October, raising the spirits of beleaguered farmers and small town churchgoers. If the Democrats nominate another identity politics candidate, and/or run another identity politics campaign, and the odds that they will are high, Trump and Daines will win Montana in a waltz.
The best way for Democrats to beat Daines? Nominate Bullock for President, hope he wins Montana, and that his coattails drag the Democratic candidate for the Senate across the finish line ahead of Daines.