MT-NYT/Siena: Daines +3 | Rosendale +4

[MT Treasurer]

This race is going to be close. Good poll for Daines and Rosendale, surprisingly bad poll for Gianforte. But if Daines is really running along with Trump he should be fine.

Nothing surprisingly bad about it for Gianforte, honestly. He was never going to win by more than 4-5 points or outperform Daines by more than 2-3 and the undecideds in that race always leaned Democratic.

[MT Treasurer]

Unless they ended up somewhere near West Yellowstone/Yellowstone National Park, my guess is that their sample is heavily skewed toward Billings' urban core (the outskirts and outlying communities are more Republican) because there’s no feasible path for a Republican to win the "East" by 29 points while losing Yellowstone County (much less while losing Yellowstone County by 20 points), period. It’s obviously off, but I’m one to believe that paying too much attention to subsamples is a fool's errand, especially when the overall result is believable as it is in this case.

Unless there are legions of bipartisan Tester/Daines or neoliberal Biden/Daines voters in Missoula/Bozeman/Helena, there’s no way Daines wins statewide if he doesn’t carry Yellowstone by at least 5 points (and that’s being very generous to him and assuming he can reduce the Democratic margin in Missoula/Gallatin by 5+ points, which isn’t implausible but no guarantee, especially in the case of Missoula). If I were Daines, I’d be very nervous about anything less than 7-point win out of Yellowstone County. Rosendale lost statewide by 3.5 and won Yellowstone by the same margin, and it’s not like he had unique appeal to the county or anything (if anything, his result was a R underperformance).

[MT Treasurer]

House
Rosendale 50% (+9)
Williams 46% (+2)

The shrill neoliberal elitist bump is even stronger than the bipartisan bill bump

[MT Treasurer]

What’s the origin of this meme?

IceSpear's (and my) reaction to some very interesting post-2018 analysis devoted to the reasons behind Tester/Gianforte split-ticket voting, which attributed Kathleen Williams' inability to reach said split-ticket voters to some very interesting factors such as her ‘scripted’ campaign and some random statements/votes on gun control during her time in the legislature which notably astute swing voters in Cascade and Yellowstone County are obviously very familiar with, even though her position on this and any other issue is virtually indistinguishable from the records of Tester and Bullock. FTR, I don’t think she’ll underperform Bullock by more than 2-3 points this year, but if she does end up losing while he wins, I certainly don’t think ‘ideology’ will have anything to do with it.