In 1970, I was a young aide to Senator Warren G. Magnuson (D-WA), a high-ranking member of the Appropriations Committee, when Senator Mike Mansfield (D-MT), the Senate’s Majority Leader, walked into Magnuson’s office. I rose to leave, but Mansfield graciously motioned for me to stay.
Mansfield had a simple request. “Maggie,” he said, “I wonder if you can help me out. Unemployment is bad in Montana this year, I’m running for re-election, and I’m hoping you’ll get some money to accelerate construction of I-90. Not more money in total, you understand. Just more money to provide extra jobs this summer.”
“Why sure, Mike,” replied Magnuson. “If that’s what you want. But as far as I can tell, I-90 is just the way that people who start out as your constituents end up as my constituents.”
Magnuson’s quip was accurate at the time, and it’s remained accurate throughout the half-century since. But this election year, its accuracy may prove particularly painful.
Opportunities west and east along I-90 have continued to drain Montana of its young people, who generally lean Democratic. Montana’s extraordinary attractions and large tracts of available land have drawn in wealthy Americans from all over the United States. The in-migrants are mostly Republicans, and – it seems – MAGA Republicans at that. These offsetting outflows and inflows spell trouble for three-term Democratic Senator Jon Tester, facing an uphill struggle to hold onto Mansfield’s former seat.
Nearly 50 years after that Mansfield moment in Magnuson’s office, in 2017, I was doorbelling in Missoula for Democrat Ron Quist in Montana’s special congressional election. At one door, I was surprised and delighted that the homeowner turned out to be Mike Mansfield’s niece. As gracious as her uncle, she invited me in to see her memorabilia of him. (I told her the I-90 story, of course, and she laughed.)
The ground floor of her lovely home was festooned with mementoes of Mansfield, who became U.S. Ambassador to Japan after the Senate. His proud niece showed me the vast collection, including a scrapbook with a picture of Mansfield and Magnuson together (presumably not discussing I-90). But as a proud Republican, she would be voting for Greg Gianforte, she said, not Ron Quist, in the special election.
(This was days before zillionaire Gianforte famously body-slammed a reporter, escaped criminal prosecution through favoritism, won the election, and went on to be shunned by his fellow House Republicans for what, as recently as 2017, was considered a shameful act. Today, Gianforte is the governor of Montana, where he has championed all sorts of voter suppression and abortion-limiting legislation, only to be stymied in part by Montana’s fiercely independent courts. Gianforte has also distinguished himself by having shot both a wolf and a cougar that strayed from Yellowstone National Park; the cougar was treed by dogs and held there for hours until the governor could arrive and, sportsmanlike, shoot it out of the tree. Gianforte is favored for re-election.)
In 2018, I worked in Billings as a voter-security lawyer in Tester’s re-election campaign. Billings’s lack of prosperity was painful to see. Storefronts were empty on many downtown blocks. Traffic was thin and parking places abundant. Radio ads promised used cars even if the buyer was unemployed and had bad credit.
And then there were the focus groups, which hit me hard. People said they didn’t want their kids to go to college because they would come home and criticize their parents’ values (of course, a great many wouldn’t come home at all). And several participants worried that migrant “caravans” approaching the Mexican border – as Trump and Fox screamed incessantly – would result in Guatemalans breaking into isolated Montana cabins in winter and squatting there until the owners showed up in summertime.
The New York Times recently carried a big article on Tester’s challenging battle for re-election this year. The Times noted that Tester is the only Democrat still holding a statewide position in Montana, Idaho, and the Dakotas. Montana will vote overwhelmingly for Trump this year, as in 2016 and 2020. And today’s voters, as Tester says, are increasingly “retreating to their corners.” (i.e., voting straight party-line tickets.)
Tester has always been elected by ticket splitters, as were other past Montanans, including Mansfield and Sens. Lee Metcalf and Max Baucus. So too were Sen. Frank Church and Governor Cecil Andrus in Idaho, and former Sens. Brian Dorgan, Tom Daschle, and Heidi Heitkamp in the Dakotas. The shift away from electing Democrats in these states, though depressing, isn’t entirely a mystery.
Former U.S. Representative Norm Dicks (D-WA) once remarked that the worst mistake Democrats ever made was agreeing to eliminate Congressional “earmarks” in appropriations bills. There’s some truth in that (and Democrats have reversed that mistake). Think of Mansfield going to Magnuson to get funds for construction projects in Montana.
But other factors have also contributed, a confluence that’s now a powerful river flowing against Democrats in many states, including Montana. Better economic opportunities elsewhere are a key reason, especially for people with four-year college degrees. Many have migrated away from rural and small-town America and concentrated in about 20 major metropolitan areas.
There’s a sense, too, in which many rural Americans have long felt aggrieved and perhaps a bit bewildered as modernization and urbanization have re-shaped the nation. The GOP has successfully exploited this. The notion that “urban elites” and “coastal elites” look down their noses at less populous regions has been relentlessly reinforced by Fox News, right-wing radio, the growing monopolization of information by Rupert Murdoch and Sinclair News, and Republican advertising. It’s not urban Democrats who rail against rural America, however. On the contrary, rural areas have been heavily subsidized by “blue” states, generally without complaint.
Ever since the New Deal, Democrats have traditionally used healthy Congressional majorities (with and without earmarks) to bring electricity, dams, irrigation, crop subsidies, roads, flat-rate postal service, schools, airports, health services and facilities, and now modern benefits such as broadband service to rural America. For a long time, this heavy Democratic investment in population-thin rural American was accomplished with at least grudging and often enthusiastic support from the minority Republicans in Congress.
But in recent years, these benefits to rural America have most often been achieved in the teeth of Republican opposition. And because Republicans have often gained Congressional majorities, help for rural America is even more difficult today, most recently on matters such as broadband extension, health services, infrastructure, and the massive investment in rural America currently taking place under the Inflation Reduction Act – which every Republican in Congress voted against.
So, let’s face it, Democrats have failed in messaging to rural Americans about the actual benefits Democrats have consistently helped achieve. But that’s just the start of Democratic failures in messaging.
We Democrats have also contributed to the Fox-fueled notion that we care more about disadvantaged people than about rural Americans and the working class. It’s true, of course, that we do care about the disadvantaged – people of color, women, immigrants, and refugees, for example.
But somehow, Democrats have failed to convey that we don’t care only about the disadvantaged among us. It should be obvious that we care about rural and working-class Americans too. Just look at the Democratic accomplishments listed above, which aren’t only for the benefit of the downtrodden and discriminated against in America, but for average Joes and Janes.
In addition, Democrats have found no way to counter the torrent of phony and ginned-up “social issues” now flooding the nation. Just today, I learned of a Montana businessman who won’t vote for Tester or any Democrat because Tim Walz allegedly “wants to put tampons in boys’ bathrooms.”
Finally, of course, and very touchily, there is the matter of race and racism. When President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, he famously told Magnuson (author of the Public Accommodations section of that Act) that “we’ve handed the South to the Republicans for a generation.” But it’s been three generations now. What happened?
The late Democratic Florida governor and senator Robert Graham, when running for president some years ago, explained it. He said Southern racism had morphed (under pressure of social acceptability) into machismo. “So now people in the South think anyone who votes for a Democrat is a wuss,” he observed. He was right. And not just in the South.
Today, in 2024, machismo alone is no longer the problem (although many male voters do seem irritated by Democrats trying to advance equality for women). Now we see varieties of racism resurfacing in forms to which Trump and various others (Fox News, for example) have once again given social permission. And lo, unto any Democrat who points this out.
So Jon Tester faces a big test in Montana this year. He may fail it, despite having a zillionaire right-wing opponent whom Tester can fairly characterize as a carpetbagger, forced birther, and admitted liar. Mike Mansfield would’ve knocked this guy right out of the ring.
If Tester does fail, it will be hard not to wonder how far we all – Democrats and Republicans, urban and rural – have strayed from the traditionally straight American path of E pluribis unum. And whether, like the narrator of Dante’s Inferno, we’ll awake to find ourselves in a dark wood.
Eric (Ric) Redman is a Seattle-based energy and climate sector professional, and the author of The Dance of Legislation, as well as two recent works of detective fiction, Bones of Hilo and Death in Hilo, featuring Hawaiian police detective Kawika Wong.
Your own comment is a perfect example of why many people, including Democrats like me, lose respect for the Democratic Party. You write, sneeringly:
‘ Democrats have found no way to counter the torrent of phony and ginned-up “social issues” now flooding the nation. Just today, I learned of a Montana businessman who won’t vote for Tester or any Democrat because Tim Walz allegedly “wants to put tampons in boys’ bathrooms.” ‘
If there was one single issue in which (from Biden on down) the Democrats have created their own monster is adherence to “gender identity” without discussion or debate. And you identified it perfectly.
It’s not just a “ginned-up” social issue, but a genuine & real legitimate one and the fact that you don’t even see it is a perfect example of why Democrats are losing because of those issues. You are a smart guy, Eric Redman, but you oughta look into this gender identity a little bit more because I don’t think that you possibly could make fun of it if you had educated yourself. It’s a real genuine discussion which deserves robust and candid conversation which Democrats are incapable of doing. (of course so are Republicans, but I expect better from Democrats.)
I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.
And frankly because of the local Seattle Democratic blindness on gender, I choose to remain anonymous because frankly it’s just not worth discussing here. It’s like discussing Trump with Maga people… Just not worth it. (And yeah I have.)
Hi How D Neighbor,
What evidence do you have that trans people’s gender identity is a “genuine & real legitimate” issue, and not “just a ‘ginned up’ social issue”?
Are trans people responsible for ANYTHING that is (or voters claim is) a problem in this country or abroad? Crime, homelessness, housing affordability, immigration, abortion, the economy, inflation, gas prices, wealth inequality, taxes, climate change, healthcare, race relations, drugs, guns, any of the foreign conflicts?
Are gangs of trans people carjacking and smash & grabbing? Are trans people swarming the borders and taking American jobs? Are they in charge of economic policy?
What exactly are trans people doing that’s a legitimate issue? Simply existing? Asking you to use the pronouns they want to be identified by? Using a bathroom you don’t think they should? Are these really the pressing concerns of our times?
JAE,
If you’re sincerely issued about learning about gender issues
— which is a big subject —
then start reading people like Jesse Singal.
He’s on Twitter.
@jessesingal
Smart, balanced, knowledgeable.
There are lots more, but Jesse strikes me as pretty rational
Another person to listen to is Brianna Wu.
She is a trans woman — M-to-F.
You can also find her on Twitter.
@BriannaWu
Smart. Surprising perspective.
And really there are dozens and hundreds more of really smart people who have thought a lot about gender and then sex too.
They can offer perspectives far better than I can, but I am telling you for sure that gender identity is not the open and shut issue that some would sneeringly say is so.
Way to avoid answering for yourself when you have no answer. Trans people are every bit as entitled, under equal treatment before the law, to be as free from discrimination as you are. Go ahead and hide behind self-imagined “influencers.” You aren’t fooling anybody.
Please clarify – you believe them, Walz “wants to put tampons in boys’ bathrooms”?
Or, actually, he doesn’t, so that really was ginned up – a lie – but since it’s related to a concern you have about gender policy, then Americans can be excused for accepting lies like that aimed at “Democrats from Biden on down”, I guess including Tester, while looking forward to a “robust and candid discussion” of the matter?
What’s really pathetic about this is not the relative validity of any of the factions’ views on this matter, it’s the sort of obsessive interest in things like this that is reflected in this response. The article is long, and touches on a variety of things that are of real tangible importance to the country’s future and particularly in the red states, but what matters? Bathrooms, apparently.
My point is that Eric Redman was sneering at a very real and genuine issue and he’s a perfect example of why a lot of people think Democrats are fucked.
I didn’t raise “tampons”… Eric did and I responded to the only real anecdote in his essay…..and he doesn’t understand the issue or he’s pretending not to understand it, which is more likely since he’s obviously a smart guy. He’s just using it to sneer.
The notion that Tim Walz wants to put tampons in boys’ restrooms is false. Or, as we should say, it’s a lie.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/08/16/politics/fact-check-trump-walz-minnesota-schools-tampons
I don’t think Tim Walz advocates putting tampons in boys’ bathrooms, does he? That’s an example of a ginned-up issue. It starts with a genuine discomfort that many ppl have about gender identity matters, and then invents an extreme case this is phony. That’s what I meant. I realize Dems are on the back foot, politically at least, on transgender matters. It comes from embracing tolerance, care for others, and mercy, etc., and perhaps not alway knowing where to draw the line in terms of how the general public feels — and can be whipped up top feel.
I’m with the discomfort crowd myself, but there’s such an adversarial climate around this. Because you think a lie about Walz isn’t a good reason for Tester to lose election, that sounds like you’re taking Their Side – what in Project 2025 they call “transgender ideology.” If you don’t think people are genocidal NAZIs for opposing some transgender policy, then you don’t believe in science etc. Neither faction seems very trustworthy. For me, the anecdote about the guy who won’t vote for Tester because of a lie about Walz pretty much sums up what one side is about, and it isn’t saving the children.
There you go again, Eric Redman.
Please look into the vast “gender critical” conversation from the liberal-left. Skepticism of Democrats’ conventional-thinking on gender is by no means right-wing only.
That’s part of the lie — yes, lie — from the Democratic establishment.
Let me put it as gently as I can:
you are either intentionally falsifying gender politics to say it’s only Republican-based or simply so far out of touch as to be irrelevant.
Do the 2 sides use the same reasoning? NO!
But they come to roughly the same conclusion.
Look, let’s stick to the facts here. It is a lie (started by Trump) that Walz wants to put tampons in boys’ bathrooms. To say you won’t vote for a Democrat because of a lie told about a Democrat is a crappy reason for not voting for the Democrat. It’s a phony and ginned-up issue. If you said “I’m not voting for a Democrat because I think they’re wrong about matters concerning trans ppl” then at least you’d have a reason that’s not a lie. I wasn’t sneering at someone falling for a lie. I was throwing up my hands in helplessness and despair.
We are such a polarized society, instead of fighting partisan battles, we leave to find like-minded people.
Thus, Blue States and Red States are becoming one party rule.
An election doesn’t go someone’s way, so they pick up their ball and go away.
Hello Eric – Thank you for your thoughtful piece, especially with examples of local politics in Montana.
Remember reading years ago that Adlai Stevenson said ‘Democrats are making more Republicans’ (not literally, but then again…) and that was in the 1950s.
I grew up in eastern Washington, went to college in Spokane. An area where Democrats could get elected beyond today’s safe Democratic Third legislative district, like my hometown of the Tri-Cities and the Spokane Valley (before it became a city). In fact, I ran fresh out of high school for the legislature from Pasco in 1978 along with incumbent Rep. Charles Kilbury (D-16th District), Pasco. That’s when the Republicans successfully used the Big Lie: Kilbury raises your taxes in newspaper and broadcast ads, even though Kilbury was chair of the agriculture committee and responded well to constituents’ needs. But the scare tactic of he’s ‘taxing you’ without factoring in benefits won the day.
By 1980, religious forces backed Reagan and a marked shift occurred in the GOP where social issues became paramount and continues today. Remember ‘debating’ a Spokane mother as editor of the college newspaper over banning school books in 1981. Even then, changing society and social issues were winning over voters.
Even though it was the Democrats who backed cheap hydro-electric power into homes, businesses, and industry from federal dams like Grand Coulee and Bonneville, as well as development and continuation of Hanford and the nuclear industry. Voters began switch their voting allegiances from the Democrats to the Republicans after a drumbeat campaign: Democrats are trying to take away your guns, attack religion, and tax you beyond your means (and don’t get me started on ‘Tampon Tim’ in 2024 as the newest social issue attack…).
Seems what is once true will be true again again: voters since the Great Depression, later with recessions (late 1950s, ‘Reagan Recession’ of 1982′, etc.) and the 2008 financial housing crisis, voters time after time will turn to the Democrats for help. But forget about all of the programs that make their life better: health care, education, housing, vets benefits, etc.. Too many voters ‘buy’ the Republican-packaged spin or con proposals and the boogeyman with their ‘they’re-coming-after-your (fill in the blank)’ so you better vote Republican. Lincoln was right about fooling people. Except only by 2024 far too many voters want to be continually fooled.
Thank you, Scott. I agree. I don’t know about you, but if the national election comes out wrong this time, namely an electoral college majority goes for Trump (he won’t win the popular vote), then personally I am likely to awaken in Dante’s dark wood myself. Specifically, I think I would conclude, “Well, for whatever combination of reasons and explanations, this is just where we are now as a nation, and what we’ve come to — a hinge moment that means our democracy, and very likely our form and/or structure of government, will have been changed permanently by the voters, none of whom could ever pretend they didn’t know what they were voting for.” I would feel that I’m simply forced to accept that conclusion. I guess we will know a lot more in a little more than two weeks. I am still hopeful!