As RedState reported earlier, there are a handful of Senate races to closely watch between now and November, with eight, in particular, to focus on for their potential to switch control of the U.S. Senate from Democrat hands to Republican.
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Among them is Montana, where Democrat Sen. Jon Tester is in the fight of his political life against GOP nominee Tim Sheehy, a former Navy SEAL and veteran of Afghanistan and Iraq who has the endorsement of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump in a state that delivered for the former POTUS easily in 2020.
Since June, polling in the race has shown Sheehy ahead of Tester with a RealClearPolitics lead average of just over five points as of this writing.
The most recent one, however, conducted for AARP by the Fabrizio Ward/David Binder Research bipartisan polling group, is perhaps the most concerning one for Tester to date, showing him down 8 points to Sheehy in a four-way race and down 6 points in a two-way:
Propelling Sheehy’s lead is the popularity of former President Donald Trump, who leads Vice President Kamala Harris in the state, 56 to 41 percent. Trump leads among independent voters by 9 points. Tester holds a narrow lead with independent voters in the Senate match up.
“Trump is running ahead of Sheehy with almost every age and partisan group, but Tester is not overperforming Harris by enough to overcome the large gap at the top of the ticket,” the bipartisan polling team of Fabrizio Ward and David Binder Research concluded in their memo. They also warned that: “Tester and Harris have both nearly maxed out their vote share among Democrats.”
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To put a finer point on how huge this race is, if Sheehy were to defeat Tester, it would make it near-impossible for Democrats to keep control of the Senate:
Whichever party wins Montana is likely to control the Senate in 2025, as most signs suggest at this point.
- With West Virginia all but certain to flip Republican, Democrats have to win the eight other competitive seats to keep the Senate at a 50-50 margin — and hope to have a VP Tim Walz as tie-breaker.
- Polling is tight in several other battleground states, including Pennsylvania and Ohio, but Montana appears to be the most perilous for Democrats.
Complicating things for Tester even more is his Joe Biden baggage.
In the summer of 2023, as questions and concerns about Biden’s cognitive health were growing, Tester went on record defending Biden, claiming that the times they were around each other Biden was “absolutely 100 percent with it”:
“Joe Biden, when I’ve been around him – and it’s not every day – but when I’ve been around him, when I’ve seen him on the news, he’s absolutely 100 percent with it. And, uh, uh, he’s got his — recall, his … cognitive ability, whatever you want to call it – I’m not a doc, I’m a dairy farmer, but he’s fine and he’s doing a good job. I think folks are making a bigger deal out of it than it is.”
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Sheehy, of course, responded accordingly at the time:
As I’ve said before, if voters in Big Sky Country are just as sick of having their intelligence insulted about what’s happening to this country as the rest of us in other states are, Tester may find that his fourth run for Senate will be anything but “fine” in November.
Flashback: Montana Democrat Provides Exhibit A on How Climate Change Fanaticism Is Bad for the Soul