An Independent Fight in Montana's Senate Race

University of Montana President Seth Bodnar with
Sen. Jon Tester (D-MT)

During a wave, one of your jobs is to have warm, qualified bodies lying around in potentially competitive races on the off-chance the wave truly takes off, and you need to take advantage of as many contests as possible.  One of the Senate races I've been looking at that until a week or so ago, didn't really have one yet was Montana.  Montana's history as a red state is complicated by the fact that, for most of the 21st Century, it had one or in some cases two US Senators from the Democratic party, specifically Jon Tester & Max Baucus.  Baucus retired in 2014, but Tester was able to win not just election in 2006, but also reelection in 2012 & 2018, before losing in 2024 amidst the third Trump POTUS election.  This past week, while the Democrats do have several candidates, including Lt. Col. Alani Bankhead and State Rep. Reilly Neill, the attention was put on University of Montana President Seth Bodnar.  Bodnar's campaign looks to have the endorsement of Tester himself, according to the newspaper the Missoulian, and his announcement is forthcoming.

It has not been uncommon in recent years for Democrats to forego a nominee in a congressional race in favor of an independent, frequently with varying results.  People like Al Gross, Greg Orman, Dan Osborn, Evan McMullin, & Cara Mund have all attempted this in recent years, and in the case of the first four, did so with a better performance than would normally be expected of a Democrat in those seats.  But what I found surprising was the backlash to this decision online.  Former Biden White House advisor Neera Tanden appeared deeply critical of the announcement, stating "I have an idea-let's try to fix the party's brand so Dems can win in Montana again" in response to an article that contained some tough quotes from Tester, the biggest being "Every race I ran as Montana Senator and US Senator it was about distancing myself from the Democratic Party...during my last two races the Democratic Party was poison in my attempts to get reelected."

Tester is not alone in this criticism.  Indeed, one of his former colleagues, Joe Manchin (who chose not to run for reelection alongside Tester in 2024, but based on his public statements clearly wanted to run but didn't see a path to a win) called the Democratic brand "toxic" as he was leaving office.  Usually when these comments come up from men like Tester & Manchin, I dismiss them out-of-hand: their states just became too blue, and that happens to both parties.  In the late 2000's and into the 2010's, we saw Colorado & Virginia transform from being reliably redstates to being pretty consistently blue ones.  Incumbent senators like George Allen & Cory Gardner both lost reelection in a similar way to Tester-running against the party, but realizing that wasn't enough.

But I think the question here is an intriguing one, mostly because Republicans don't do this, and because (so far) this hasn't really worked in terms of an actual, high-profile win.  Tester would be right in assuming the Democratic label is toxic in Montana-I would trust him more than I would someone like Tanden on what Big Sky Country wants from a successful leader.  But I also don't see a path for Bodnar, and don't entirely understand how much better he'll do running as an Independent, particularly given that there's a lot of Democrats already running (i.e. we'll have a nominee, which was not the case in most of the other races I've name-checked).  The only real example of a left-leaning Independent winning a race against a Democrat for Congress in recent years is Maine in 2012, but here's the deal-that was specific to Angus King being the nominee.  Had we just had a normal Democrat vs. Republican race there, the Democrat still would've won-the big question was whether or not Olympia Snowe would retire; when she did, it became inevitable that we'd flip the seat.  King was just so famous that it was more about choosing not to split the vote than worrying about him being the only person who could win the race head-to-head.  There is no evidence (to date) that someone like Bodnar could win, and one wonders if we are screwing ourselves over by having a plausible third-party candidate in a race that we're only going to take if there's a wave (in which case vote-splitting might still cost us).

I also think, to a degree, that Tanden has a point-we have to stop just abandoning the Democratic label in states like Montana.  Tanden is not a gadfly who is insisting a "true progressive" could win here-she knows that Tester is right that you need a different kind of Democrat to win this race, and she stated when asked for more on her tweet that you might have to pick someone whose social issues don't match the national party's (i.e. you'd have to pick a moderate or moderate-to-conservative to run).  Tester's feedback is also worthy though-Tester was that kind of a candidate, and he still lost in 2024.  One could argue (and I will) that Tester would be in a much different race had he had to run in 2026 rather than 2024, and it's worth asking if he might be headed to another term if he'd lucked into a different cycle.  But he's not wrong-the Democratic Party label nearly cost him his reelection in 2018, and did cost him in 2024.

So what's the answer?  The answer is-we don't have it yet.  But I tend to lean toward Tanden on this.  Until some candidate (maybe Osborn, maybe Bodnar) proves to me that they can actually pull off this trick of getting voters convinced they aren't a Democrat in disguise (which they are, even if they're a moderate one) and actually win rather than just out-performing, I'd prefer to have these candidates run as Democrats to prove that the party can have as wide of an expanse as possible.  I'm okay with them running as moderates (perhaps even moderates I don't agree with on all major issues), but I think they should be Democrats.  The reality is that the next leader of the Democratic Party is going to be who shapes the party, and we don't have that nominee right now (people like Barack Obama, Kamala Harris, Gavin Newsom, & Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are all filling the gap, but none of them have the party-shaping apparatus that a presidential candidate can have yet), and in the meantime we're kind of just the "not Trump" party.  We're not going to fix this problem before 2028.  However, given the near certainty that Bodnar won't clear the field here, I wish he was running as a moderate, "different kind" of Democrat under the party label, so that we can start rebuilding local parties, which ultimately is the only way we're going to have senators like Jon Tester & Joe Manchin again (and yes, we definitely want to have senators like them again if we have any hope of having a Senate majority in the next decade).