Corruption That Shook Capitol Isn't Rattling Elections

But in strongly Republican areas, scandal-driven change is far from a sure thing. In a special election to fill the California congressional seat vacated by Randy "Duke" Cunningham (R), now in prison after he admitted taking bribes from defense contractors, a well-funded Republican beat a Democratic challenger in June.

"Democrats ran on a corruption message in a district where a sitting member went to jail, and they didn't win, so how the heck are they going to use that message somewhere else?" asked Carl Forti, spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee.

With Burns, though, the taint is not left over from someone else: He pressured the Interior Department to award a $3 million grant to a wealthy Indian tribe that was an Abramoff client, according to news accounts. A former top Burns aide worked with Abramoff's firm, and Abramoff himself told Vanity Fair that he and his clients received "every appropriation we wanted" from a subcommittee chaired by Burns. The senator is apparently not under investigation, but he did accept $150,000 in campaign donations from Abramoff, his lobbying team and his clients -- donations that Burns later returned.

Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), who is leading the Democrats' campaign committee in the Senate, acknowledged that the corruption issue is just one bullet, and hardly a silver one. Ethical controversies such as those Burns has weathered in Montana, he said, send a message to voters: "He's gotten too comfortable, we need a change." The general backlash is what endangers incumbents, "rather than corruption itself," said Schumer.

"Making Abramoff stick as a campaign issue is going to be hard for Democrats with a well-known Republican incumbent, but with Sen. Burns, who has such a direct link, it is pretty powerful stuff," said Fred Yang, a Washington-based Democratic pollster whose firm has worked on Montana races for decades.

Montana is a critical piece in the Democratic strategy to gain the six seats necessary to take control of the Senate. And the scandal, it seems, has shaped every aspect of the race here, beginning half a year before Democrats even had a candidate. Statewide television ads, paid for by the Democratic Party, pounded away last fall at Burns's ties to Abramoff. In the senator's first television ad of the 2006 campaign, he had to play defense, declaring that the lobbyist "never influenced me."

The Abramoff issue even seems to have dictated who would run against Burns. Tester said in an interview that the scandal was responsible, in part, for his easy primary victory in June over a better-known, better-financed rival, two-term state Auditor John Morrison. The Billings Gazette disclosed last spring that Morrison had an affair with a woman who later married a man investigated by Morrison's office.

The scandal apparently spooked Democrats longing for a candidate who could rail righteously about Abramoff without having to defend what was in his own closet.

"I think voters went into that primary saying to themselves, 'Who is the best candidate to beat Burns?'" said Tester, 50, a farmer and former schoolteacher from Big Sandy, population 703.

Tester, who has criticized the conduct of the Iraq war and promised health insurance for every family, has tried to introduce himself to voters statewide as the kind of real Montanan that he says Burns (a former auctioneer, football referee and radio announcer) no longer is.

Tester's campaign flaunts his authentic big-country look: NFL lineman shoulders, a belly that's headed south and a flattop haircut. His left hand is particularly authentic, missing three fingers that were gnawed off by a meat grinder when he was 9. "Still have that same grinder," Tester said, when asked about the hand.

"I don't look like the other senators," Tester boasts in a TV ad. "But isn't it time the Senate looked a little bit more like Montana?"