MT-Sen 2024 Megathread: Unbeatable Titan Tester

[GALeftist]

I think Tester actually retires in 2024.

Lean R

According to Politico he feels "very positively about [his] chances." I'm like 75% sure he'll bite.

[Spectator]

One thought I had was that Tester, Brown and even Manchin’s best chance is if Trump loses a bitter primary and then starts a third party with his own slate of candidates. Wouldn’t be out of character.

[Unbeatable Titan Susan Collins]

One thought I had was that Tester, Brown and even Manchin’s best chance is if Trump loses a bitter primary and then starts a third party with his own slate of candidates. Wouldn’t be out of character.

Its quite hard to set up a party. No guarantee that an aborted Trump Party (which he would only start after losing the nomination) gets on the ballot for president much less can get a whole slate of candidates. 

[brucejoel99]

We never left:

https://twitter.com/specialpuppy1/status/1592312699656220672

[2016]

Tester isn't going to survive this time.

In 2020 Democrats ran a popular Incumbent Democratic Governor in Steve Bullock against Steve Daines and he still lost by 10 Percentage Points.

Remember: Bullock was amongst the most popular Governors at that time because of his COVID Response and was specifically recruited for that Race by Schumer and he lost.

[Spectator]

Tester isn't going to survive this time.

In 2020 Democrats ran a popular Incumbent Democratic Governor in Steve Bullock against Steve Daines and he still lost by 10 Percentage Points.

Remember: Bullock was amongst the most popular Governors at that time because of his COVID Response and was specifically recruited for that Race by Schumer and he lost.

Sounds eerily similar to the hubris and overconfidence I heard two weeks ago.

[Arizona Iced Tea]

Tester will be harder to defeat than Manchin or Brown. WV is just too red, and by Ohio being a big state (7th largest!) it reduces the local affect of candidates. Tester has an opening similar to Collins where Montana isn't very red, and he can appeal to people since he's been in office for 18 years now.

[Hope For A New Era]

Tester is definitely the one I'm least worried about. He seems like the Democratic Party's Susan Collins.


Manchin and Brown concern me. I think Brown can do it, but I worry about the decline in ticket-splitting. This election has made me a little less worried, but not much. Tim Ryan, with how good of a candidate he was "should" have lost by less. Maybe DeWine increased Vance's margin? That's what we have to hope for, I think.

As for Manchin, honestly, flip a coin. I could see anything from him winning by more than he did in 2018 to losing by 20 points.

Either way, Dems need to go all-in on Texas. Possibly Florida, depending on how things look, but the next two years need to be spent trying to get the party in order there.

Outside opportunities might be Missouri and Indiana, but we'll have to wait and see on those. I highly doubt they'll be truly competitive, but at least running good candidates wouldn't hurt.

Do you think there's a potentially strong candidate in Nebraska? Maybe the D from the special election last summer? In the Senate special there, the R candidate will presumably be an appointee. That might translate to weakness? Maybe?

omg imagine if bacon is appointed to the vacancy

I'm kind of grasping at straws here, I admit. This is a scary map.

[Ljube]

Tester is no moderate.
He is not Susan Collins who votes with Biden 70%.

Tester votes 91% with Biden. He will go the way of Mark Pryor.

[Ljube]

One thought I had was that Tester, Brown and even Manchin’s best chance is if Trump loses a bitter primary and then starts a third party with his own slate of candidates. Wouldn’t be out of character.

It's not going to be a bitter primary.
It will be bitter, but for Trump, because he will lose all 4 early states, and then lose all Super Tuesday states and drop out.

He is a born loser.

[oldtimer]

Tester's biggest problem is that 2024 is a Presidential year and in those years the White College Vote goes down in vote share quite a bit.

[brucejoel99]

Tester isn't going to survive this time.

In 2020 Democrats ran a popular Incumbent Democratic Governor in Steve Bullock against Steve Daines and he still lost by 10 Percentage Points.

Remember: Bullock was amongst the most popular Governors at that time because of his COVID Response and was specifically recruited for that Race by Schumer and he lost.

Sounds eerily similar to the hubris and overconfidence I heard two weeks ago.

Equivocating '24 to '20 at the outset is a false equivalency, too, given Daines' incumbency in his own seat at the time & whether Tester can survive because of it: if 10K-20K Daines 2020 voters flip to Tester in 2024, he's easily making it much closer than Bullock did, let alone still in range to ultimately even win.

[ProgressiveModerate]

I think the ultimate outcome of this race will in large part have to do with how localized Tester keeps things. Despite all the outside spending, Susan Collins did a very good job of this in 2020. I can pretty much guarantee Rs will nominate someone who tries to nationalize it and basically has 0 crossover appeal, so how Tester defines himself is important.

He needs to find crossover support. While it may be possible one day, Missoula, Helena, and Bozeman are only going to get you halfway there.

[Amenhotep Bakari-Sellers]

It's 2 yrs from now

[Hope For A New Era]

I thought I'd add that if Tester wins, I suspect his map and margin will look very similar to this year's referendum there.

[TML]

Remember that since 2014, the only Democrats who won statewide races in MT were those running for re-election to their existing offices (Bullock in 2016, Tester in 2018), while those who were running for offices they hadn’t yet occupied all fell short. If this trend continues, it should favor Tester if he decides to run again; if he steps aside, Republicans would probably be clearly favored to win this seat.

[TML]

I thought I'd add that if Tester wins, I suspect his map and margin will look very similar to this year's referendum there.

If you're referring to the abortion referendum (number 131), then I think there will be significant deviations between that map and a typical winning Democratic map in MT nowadays. Both Bullock in 2016 and Tester in 2018 won the following counties:

Big Horn
Blaine
Cascade
Deer Lodge
Gallatin
Glacier
Hill
Lake
Lewis and Clark
Missoula
Park
Roosevelt
Silver Bow

Now, of the above counties, Big Horn, Blaine, Cascade, Lake, and Roosevelt voted Yes on referendum 131, while Carbon, Jefferson, Treasure, and Yellowstone Counties voted No on referendum 131 but voted for Republican candidates in the 2016 gubernatorial and 2018 senatorial contests. Note that Big Horn, Blaine, and Roosevelt Counties all have substantial Native American populations which make them lean D in most elections.

In terms of what a Tester victory map will probably look like, I mentioned elsewhere on this forum that these are the key county benchmarks for a Democratic statewide victory:

Cascade: R+1-3
Flathead: R+14-16
Gallatin: D+21-22
Lake: D+1-2
Lewis and Clark: D+13-16
Missoula: D+38-41
Ravalli: R+20-22
Silver Bow: D+36-41
Yellowstone: R+7-8

These numbers are the partisan lean of these counties relative to statewide results for key 2020 statewide races, not their actual 2020 results; a Tester victory will mean not underperforming these benchmarks by any significant amount (Lewis and Clark County is especially important - on Election Night 2020, it was early returns from this county that told me Bullock was off to a bad start in his race against Daines).

[Heir of Camelot]

The reason Bullock got slaughtered I believe is Montana has a Libertarian streak and the lockdowns were very anathema to that. Plus the fact that they happened about 3-4 months before Covid even got here. Everything gets here a little later, so by the time Covid was here everyone had lockdown fatigue and ended up getting it anyway. The Repubs were able to affectively pin that frustration on Bullock and Trump got large swaths of low propensity voting hicks to the polls that aren't likely to be roused again.

Tester is a force of nature, he's like your favorite uncle. He's an incredibly dynamic individual and a total folk hero. He is able to affect a wild alchemy traditionally where 8-10% of Republican women secretly vote for him (and don't tell pollsters or even their husbands).

If he can't win Montana for Dems then no one can and it's lost for a generation and that would make me very sad because it means the Montana that I love is gone and it will be ruled by carpetbagger rich assholes from out of state who just want to slaughter all the wolves so they can make it a game hunting destination for rich pricks and the state and it's people will suffer and we well enter a dark age of poverty, alcoholism and meth addiction of which we might never recover.

[ProgressiveModerate]

I don't mean this in the wrong way, but Tester is a really big guy and he's approaching 70; does anyone know like how his health is? I think it's particularly important because if Tester wants to win re-election, it will almost surely involve an extremely involved ground campaign on his part talking to voters.

Tester is facing a tough re-election, but I don't think it's impossible to win. I tend to not like comparing Senate races, but I could see a window where this plays out a bit like ME-Sen 2020 where Dems got a bit overconfident in their nominee whereas Susan Collins did a good job at staying connected to the needs of her state. Dems nationalized the race to the point where Gideon was painted in a very negative lite. Except now ofc the tables are reversed.

Any winning coalition on Tester's part will probably look a bit different than 2018. In 2018, he ran really far ahead of federal partisanship in rural areas, especially in these western communities and these working class communities that have been shifting away from Dems. Obviously he'll still need to outperform Biden in these areas to have any shot, but he'll probably need to win these traditionally more conservative cities like Billings outright. It's physically hard for him to do much better than Biden in the cores of places like Missoula and Bozeman, but how he does on the outskirts will also be key.

[2016]

According to an Article published by "The Hill" Tester hasn't even decided whether to seek Re-Election in 2024. He will decide over the Holidays.

[ProgressiveModerate]

According to an Article published by "The Hill" Tester hasn't even decided whether to seek Re-Election in 2024. He will decide over the Holidays.

Good point. Tester retiring would be a pretty big deal since it’d further close an already narrow Senate path. Conventional wisdom as of now would tell me Dems easiest path is holding all their senate seats in Biden states + winning 2 of OH, TX, and MT. Montana being off the table gives them basically 1 realistic path unless there’s a *HUGE* surprise in Indiana, Florida, or Missouri.

[TML]

I don't mean this in the wrong way, but Tester is a really big guy and he's approaching 70; does anyone know like how his health is? I think it's particularly important because if Tester wants to win re-election, it will almost surely involve an extremely involved ground campaign on his part talking to voters.

Tester is facing a tough re-election, but I don't think it's impossible to win. I tend to not like comparing Senate races, but I could see a window where this plays out a bit like ME-Sen 2020 where Dems got a bit overconfident in their nominee whereas Susan Collins did a good job at staying connected to the needs of her state. Dems nationalized the race to the point where Gideon was painted in a very negative lite. Except now ofc the tables are reversed.

Any winning coalition on Tester's part will probably look a bit different than 2018. In 2018, he ran really far ahead of federal partisanship in rural areas, especially in these western communities and these working class communities that have been shifting away from Dems. Obviously he'll still need to outperform Biden in these areas to have any shot, but he'll probably need to win these traditionally more conservative cities like Billings outright. It's physically hard for him to do much better than Biden in the cores of places like Missoula and Bozeman, but how he does on the outskirts will also be key.

In terms of Tester's physical build, photos indicate that he's had a big build since before he first ran for federal office. It didn't prevent him from successfully campaigning for reelection twice. I do agree with the notion that if Tester were to bow out, Republicans would be clear favorites to take this seat (as I mentioned earlier, the last time a non-incumbent Democrat won a statewide election in MT was back in 2012, and since then the only Democrats to win any statewide elections in MT were those who were running for reelection to their existing offices).

I do think that Tester's last race in 2018 was similar to Maine's 2020 Senate race in many respects - both races involved incumbents who successfully localized their respective races against attempts to nationalize them by their opponents and their respective opposing parties, and both incumbents won by continually emphasizing the positive contributions they've made to their respective home states and attacking their respective opponents as out-of-touch elitist carpetbaggers (since they were both born and raised in other states). In fact, exit polls from those contests indicated that the favorability ratings for the incumbents ended up above that of their challengers.

In terms of Tester's potential winning coalition, I mentioned earlier in the thread the key benchmarks he needs to hit, based on the 2020 election results for the top four statewide elections in MT (President, Senate, House, and Governor). I agree that some areas will probably trend rightward (e.g. Anaconda, Butte, Great Falls, etc.), but other areas will probably trend leftward (e.g. Bozeman, Helena, Missoula, etc.). Nonetheless, the nine most populous counties (Yellowstone, Gallatin, Missoula, Flathead, Cascade, Lewis and Clark, Ravalli, Silver Bow, and Lake) are most critical for any candidate running for statewide office, and in recent statewide elections, pretty much every winning candidate outperformed all of the benchmarks for these counties. In terms of Billings, it should be noted that according to data from DRA, both Bullock in 2016 and Tester in 2018 were able to win the city proper, but the outer parts of Yellowstone are strongly Republican and are almost always enough to give Republicans the overall edge in the county overall. As I mentioned before, under current political conditions Democrats don't have to win Yellowstone County outright in order to win statewide races in MT - they just have to avoid losing it by more than 7-8 points. If I had to guess right now, I would say that out of the counties he won in 2018, the only county he could potentially lose while still winning statewide would be Cascade County (since this county went from D-leaning in 2016/18 to R-leaning in 2020, relative to statewide results).

[Amenhotep Bakari-Sellers]

According to an Article published by "The Hill" Tester hasn't even decided whether to seek Re-Election in 2024. He will decide over the Holidays.

He has retired yet don't be so confident

[Sir Mohamed]

What might be critical for Tester is whether there's a libertarian candidate on the ballot and how strong that one is. Libertarians usually take more votes from the GOP, and having such pulling a few points away them would help Tester. Perhaps he can squeak by with another 48-47%.

If I were a MT GOPer, I'd try to use their trifecta in the state to make it hard for any 3rd party candidate to gain ballot access.

[Amenhotep Bakari-Sellers]

What might be critical for Tester is whether there's a libertarian candidate on the ballot and how strong that one is. Libertarians usually take more votes from the GOP, and having such pulling a few points away them would help Tester. Perhaps he can squeak by with another 48-47%.

If I were a MT GOPer, I'd try to use their trifecta in the state to make it hard for any 3rd party candidate to gain ballot access.

Tester has a 48/39 favs he isn't losing


https://morningconsult.com/senator-rankings/