All eyes on Montana: How Sen. Tester’s last stand will make or break Democrat’s hold on the Senate

The U.S. Senate race in Montana will almost certainly decide who controls the chamber in 2025. It may also mark the beginning of the end of split-ticket voting in a presidential year, when every election becomes intimately tied to the fight at the top of the ticket.
Since 2006, Montana Sen. Jon Tester, a Democrat, has narrowly survived three Senate races in his solidly Republican state by outperforming Democratic presidential candidates by up to 20 percentage points.
He is attempting to do so again this year by disassociating himself from the campaign of Vice President Kamala Harris, who trails former President Donald Trump by roughly 20 percentage points in the state, polls show. But it might not be enough.
“I would certainly say that Jon Tester is the most vulnerable Democrat out there in the country,” said Chuck Denowh, a Republican consultant in Montana who worked on the 2020 campaigns of Montana Sen. Steve Daines and Rep. Matt Rosendale. “His strategy is to distance himself, and pretend to be something that he hasn’t been for the last six years, but I think the voters here get it.”
Denowh, as well as Pepper Peteresen, a longtime Montana political consultant who led the state’s marijuana legalization initiative in 2020, believe the outcome of Montana’s Senate race will depend on which candidate appears most “authentic” in their connection to local, not national, concerns.
But the importance of candidate characteristics like authenticity appears to have decreased in recent years as a polarized national political environment gives greater value to the party ID next to candidates’ names.
Two decades ago, 70% of Senate candidates (24 out of 33 seats up for election) outperformed the presidential nominee of their own party by more than 10 percentage points. By 2020, only three Senate candidates did — a decrease of around 90%.
If this national trend plays out in Montana, where Tester has up until now been an “anomaly among Democrats nationally,” Petersen said, the Democratic incumbent could “absolutely” fall victim to forces outside of his control.
Amid an unfavorable Senate map for Democrats, Tester’s seat is seen as the toughest to hold on to in November. The former state lawmaker, and “only working farmer” in the Senate, trails his Republican opponent, Tim Sheehy, a former Navy SEAL and aerospace entrepreneur, by five points in the Real Clear Politics polling average. Tester has outraised and outspent Sheehy three to one.
To keep Senate control, Democrats must win the White House and retain all of their seats up for election, besides West Virginia, where a Republican is expected to replace centrist Sen. Joe Manchin, a Democrat-turned-independent who is not running for reelection. Senate elections in swing states like Arizona, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, all lean toward the Democratic candidate in recent polling.
Tester and Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown are the only Democratic senators with “toss up” seats, according to The Cook Political Report. Brown leads polling in his race by an average of five percentage points against Republican Bernie Moreno. Ohio and Montana are two of the three most expensive Senate races in the country this cycle, with over $300 million in campaign ad buys in Ohio and over $205 million in Montana.
With the nation’s eyes on Montana, Tester has said he is trying to separate his race from the partisanship of national politics. Tester was one of the few Democrats in Congress to skip the Democratic National Convention where Harris received the party’s nomination for president. And Tester has decided not to endorse Harris — despite his previous endorsement of Biden — because he didn’t want to “nationalize” his race, he said.
“This isn’t about national politics. This is about Montana,” he said at a recent press conference.
Ads show Tester working on his family farm and displaying his left hand, which is missing three fingers that were cut off in a meat grinder accident when he was a child. It’s a farmer’s pragmatic approach that led him to work with Trump on legislation when he was in office and that helped him secure wins like decreased insulin drug prices for some Montanans as part of the trillion dollar Inflation Reduction Act, Tester claims.
Sheehy has also filmed a number of ads with hunters, farmers and conservationists to prove his country conservative credentials. But even as the Montana Senate race heats up into a competition over who is more in tune with “Montana values,” Sheehy has questioned whether Tester’s rural bonafides outweigh the influence of 18 years as a sitting senator.
“That’s the quintessential question that’s going to decide this election in ‘24, right there,” Petersen said.
Sheehy, who moved to Montana in 2014 to start a firefighting pilot business, has pointed to Tester’s role in supporting Harris’ election to the Senate as chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee in 2015 as a sign that his silence on her presidential candidacy is purely political.
Employing a Trump-style epithet against Tester, “two-faced Tester,” Sheehy has drawn attention to the fact that Tester has voted with the Biden-Harris administration over 90% of the time — though this is actually a lower percentage than any of Tester’s Senate colleagues with the exception of Manchin.
Sheehy has taken the opposite approach to Tester in some ways, making an explicit attempt to tie his candidacy to the presidential race, appearing with Trump at a Bozeman rally earlier this month and trying to make the Montana Senate race a referendum on the country’s biggest problems. Sheehy was endorsed by Trump early on in his primary campaign — reportedly at the request of Daines — and has attempted to paint Tester as a “rubber stamp” for Biden-Harris policies.
“If Donald Trump gets to the White House and doesn’t have a Senate, he’s not going to get things done,” Sheehy said at the rally. “You need to deliver him a Senate by retiring Jon Tester.”
Tester is a skilled communicator when it comes to “touting his roots in agriculture and in rural Montana,” Denowh said. “But that’s the old Jon Tester. That’s not the guy that we have anymore. He’s now more of a D.C. politician than he is a Montana politician.”
Montana has, like the rest of the country, been hit hard by the pressures of inflation and immigration, according to Denowh, giving teeth to Sheehy’s arguments that Montana needs to elect a Trump-supporting political outsider.
However, Tester’s “secret sauce” is his ability to seem in touch with Montanans despite his long time in office, Petersen countered.
“People can smell authenticity in Montana. And Tim Sheehy is a great guy … but I have to say, he just doesn’t ooze that authenticity that Jon Tester does,” Petersen said. “And I think that ultimately will be the determinant of this race.”