Steve Daines Dangerous Move in Montana

Sen. Steve Daines (R-MT)

A few months ago, Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez got into serious hot water for calling out Rep. Chuy Garcia for essentially eliminating a primary away from his constituents, retiring at the last second so that his Chief of Staff Patty Garcia (no relation) would be able to take his place without having to go through a primary.  Many Democrats at the time criticized Perez, saying that it was not fair to attack Garcia and claiming that Garcia being a "strong progressive Latino leader" meant that he was impervious to criticism from Perez (a moderate).  You will note at the time that I didn't approve of this (and wrote so here), agreeing wholeheartedly with Perez.  I said this was wrong, and no public figure is impervious to criticism, and Garcia had essentially stolen a seat away from the people, depriving them of a real choice.  This was wrong...but I also knew that Republicans were going to take the Democrats insane hypocrisy on the matter and use it to their advantage, which is what they did this week in an escalated version of what Garcia did in the state of Montana.

For those who haven't heard, in the Montana US Senate race, Republican Sen. Steve Daines (soon to finish up his second term), became the 10th US Senator this cycle to call it quits.  However, Daines did so in as unceremonious way as possible.  While people like Dick Durbin or Thom Tillis garnered major headlines and conversations about their careers when they retired, Daines didn't have that moment, and instead retired at the literal last second, on the final day of filing for major party ballot access, and did so in conjunction with both the Trump White House and his now-likely successor, US Attorney Kurt Alme.

This is bad for a variety of reasons, and so I'm going to illustrate them all right now.  For starters, Garcia and Daines now doing this sets up a super dangerous precedent, because it now feels like it will be duplicated since it was successful twice and no part of the party is really going to be above it (and so I suspect this happens more so until there are rules to prevent it, which will be hard to enforce).  It is unlikely that the voters in these constituencies punish Patty Garcia or Alme, as they are of the party that was likely to win these seats anyway, so in safely blue or red seats, there's little incentive to care that this has happened.  It's not the only time they've done this (Dan Lipinski famously had the same thing happen years ago with his father), and though Lipinski did eventually succumb to a primary challenger, it was years after the switch, and more had to do with his view on abortion than the swap.  As a general rule, if you don't make a politician in the US pay a political price for doing something bad, they'll keep doing it.  So this continues to upend the primary process (and why Democrats had no business letting this slide when Chuy Garcia did it).

But Montana is worse for a couple of reasons, none of which have to do with the party label.  For starters, this is for a six-year term (unlike Garcia's with two), and for a significantly more powerful role.  Being a US Senator makes you one of the most powerful people in America, and by proxy, in the world.  Alme has never held elected office in Montana, and was literally hand-selected by a backroom committee process involving President Trump and Sen. Daines.  Partially, this was done not just to let Daines pick his successor, but also to ensure that there was no MAGA extremist in the primary.  Had this been an open party, considering the rightward shift of the GOP in the Rocky Mountain states in recent years, it's unlikely that someone of Alme's relatively mild MAGA brand would've won-we would've been looking for someone like a Lauren Boebert instead.

The worst part of this, though, is that (and Daines has said this publicly now), this was done to prevent the Democrats from running a better candidate.  The Democrats are currently in a terrible situation in Montana.  They have a moderate independent running with Sen. Jon Tester's endorsement (Seth Bodnar), but also a Democratic Primary with candidates, the frontrunner being State Rep. Reilly Neill, and there's no way you can win with both in the race.  This didn't really matter in a situation where they were running against Daines.  Both would've lost to him, even in a blue year, so the fact that they're running and splitting the vote becomes a big "who cares?" when Daines is going to clear 50% anyway.  But in an open seat situation, the blue wave calculus here gets different-the possibility of a situation like Texas (where a MAGA extremist might open up the race) would've made this contest different.

So as Daines said, the real target here wasn't just to get Alme the seat, but also to keep three Democrats (former Sen. Jon Tester, as well as former Govs. Steve Bullock & Brian Schweitzer) out of the race.  Tester quickly rebutted this saying "I don't believe that, as none of us were running.  He fucked his own party."  But given Chuck Schumer's near perfect record this cycle of recruiting the candidates he wanted, it's hard not to believe one of them would've been heavily courted by Schumer and brought into the race.  All three men lost high-profile races the last time they ran for the US Senate, and similar to Sherrod Brown, Janet Mills, & Roy Cooper, despite their age, they might've been talked into one last race to solidify their legacies and go out a congressional winner.  The blue wave would've made that possible, and while they were nowhere near a guarantee to win, against them, Bodnar surely wouldn't have run and Neill would've dropped out because she would've lost the primary.  This race would've moved into the same echelon that Alaska, Texas, & Iowa sit right now-theoretically competitive, even if the Republicans are still favored.  And so Daines' decision was essentially to rob both parties of a chance at this seat, a truly heinous and undemocratic act, that thanks to the bulk of the Democratic Party's tacit endorsement of Chuy Garcia, they have little leg to stand upon and criticize.