Sen. Tester faces formidable challenge in Montana reelection campaign

BIG SANDY, Mont. — After three days on the road talking to voters, Jon Tester finally made it home. He rumbled down seven miles of dirt road and pulled up to his wheat farm. He untied his tie, changed into jeans and climbed into his tractor.

Then Tester flipped on the radio. Even here, at peace on his wind-swept homestead — 48 miles from the closest McDonald’s and a world removed from Washington — Tester couldn’t escape his day job.

Loading...

Comments

• Weigh In
• Corrections?

More on this Story

• The Fix: Will 2012 be another wave election?
• Tommy Thompson's health-care problem
• Get the latest at PostPolitics

“Why does Senator Tester side with the big banks and not us?” a man asked over harrowing music in a radio ad.

Listening inside his tractor’s cockpit, the Democratic senator muttered a barnyard expletive and said, “It’s already started.”

What’s started in Montana is a high-stakes 2012 race that will test the staying power of rural Western Democrats in the Obama era and help determine which party will lead the U.S. Senate.

Tester is among the class of Democratic majority-makers: centrists who, in 2006, rode a wave of dissatisfaction with President George W. Bush and a backlash over the Iraq war to win seats in previously Republican territory, propelling their party to majority status in both houses of Congress.

In 2012, toss-up contests in a trio of states — Missouri, Montana and Virginia — could decide whether Democrats, who this cycle have to defend more than twice as many seats as Republicans, can maintain their 53 to 47 Senate majority.

“These three states will probably determine the control of the United States Senate,” said Stuart Rothenberg, a nonpartisan political analyst. “It’s that simple.”

In all three, the races, so far, have been shaped by the Democratic candidates’ connections to President Obama. In the fiscal debate, Tester and others are seizing opportunities to establish distance.

In 2006, Tester said he would carry to Congress the pragmatism he learned while tending to his family farm. Now, after having voted to pass much of Obama’s ambitious agenda — chiefly, the health-care overhaul that is unpopular here — the 6-foot, 300-pound hulk of a senator is at risk of becoming an endangered species.

Tester faces a formidable challenge from Rep. Denny Rehberg (R), who, as Montana’s only congressman, has won election statewide six times.

Like Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) and Timothy M. Kaine, a Democratic candidate for Senate in Virginia, Tester is emphasizing the narrative that brought him early political success — in his case, an “I’m just a dirt farmer” biography — to demonstrate that he’s a different kind of Democrat than the one who occupies the White House.

“I’m from Montana, and I look at things from a rural perspective. Barack is from Chicago and doesn’t look at things from that perspective,” Tester said over the chimes of a cuckoo clock in an interview at a dinette table in his house, which sits on 1,800 acres of Big Sandy plains that his grandparents settled a century ago.

“Washington, D.C., can be a bit artificial, but this ain’t artificial. And when you start thinking it is artificial, the combine and the tractor let you know. They don’t give a damn. They’ll break down when they want to break down, and they don’t care if you’re a senator or not.”