Montana Democrats look to retake critical lost ground

Eight Republican presidential candidates traded barbs on Wednesday at their first debate of the 2024 election as they jockeyed for position behind the absent front-runner, Donald Trump.

Were it not for a handful of Democratic state lawmakers, the death penalty might have been a thing of the past in Montana.

“I caught a lot of heat for that,” recalls Tom Jacobson, sitting on the back porch of his Cascade home watching the Missouri River as it creeps past cottonwood groves and hay fields on its way to Great Falls. The former legislator was one of three moderate Democrats who voted against the 2015 bill to abolish capital punishment. It died on a tie vote in the House, the last time the Legislature came remotely close to tossing out the state’s death penalty.

Fellow Democrats were livid. But Jacobson, who until last year was one of just two Great Falls lawmakers representing his party, said he’d vote the same way today.

“Vote your conscience, vote your constituents and then vote your caucus,” Jacobson says, paraphrasing a maxim among politicians. “... For me, it was more about, what would my constituents want?”

Sen. Tom Jacobson, D-Great Falls, addresses the Senate on April 29, 2021.

That’s the 40,000-voter question for the Montana Democratic Party, which over the last decade went from holding seven legislative seats in Great Falls and surrounding Cascade County to holding zero today.

The 2024 elections are still more than a year away, but already national attention is focusing on Montana, where Democrat Jon Tester’s reelection bid will be one of several expected to determine control of the U.S. Senate. And one constant of the state’s recent political history is that no Democrat has won a statewide federal office without winning Cascade County.

But the last time a Democrat won over the increasingly red county was in 2018, when Tester captured 51% of the 35,000 voters who turned out. In 2020, Democrat Steve Bullock, then termed out of the governor's office, took just 44% of Cascade County in his failed attempt to unseat Republican U.S. Sen. Steve Daines. That contest, during a presidential election year, brought out an additional 5,000 voters. Joe Biden failed to break 40%.

Hailing from neighboring Chouteau County, Tester has consistently been able to attract “crossover” Republican voters who have eluded other Democratic candidates. But in recent years, Montanans have increasingly strayed from their historical tendency to split tickets.

Sen. Jon Tester inside his tractor on his farm in Big Sandy in August 2018.

“People are much more intensely partisan than they used to be, and I think that really plays out in places like Great Falls,” Jessi Bennion, a political science professor at Montana State University, said. “We’re certainly going to see that tested with Tester with the race in 2024.”

Tester campaign manager Shelbi Dantic declined an interview request, but wrote in an emailed statement: “Jon Tester won Cascade County in all three of his U.S. Senate campaigns because the folks there are his neighbors, and know his record of fighting for their community — from standing up for our veterans to ensuring Malmstrom has the resources it needs to keep America safe.”

In 2014, Montana Democrats won five state House seats and one Senate seat in the Great Falls area, with one holdover Democrat already in the Senate (state senators serve four-year terms). Fast forward to 2020, and not a single legislative Democrat on the ballot won in Cascade County. Same in 2022.

The party has similarly lost legislative ground in Yellowstone County, which includes Billings and is more demographically similar to Great Falls than the college towns of Missoula and Bozeman. But the erosion of Democratic influence over the course of the decade has been more incremental there. The party currently holds four Billings-area legislative seats, compared with seven seats after the 2014 election.

Earlier this month, the Montana Democratic Party chose Great Falls for the first stop in its “Legislative Listening Tour.” About 50 people crowded into the basement of the city’s public library to hear from Senate Minority Leader Pat Flowers, of Belgrade, and Democratic Rep. Mary Caferro, of Helena, who both pitched a focus on issues like affordable housing, child care and “tax fairness” when knocking doors and talking to voters.

“Those resonated across the board — it doesn’t matter what party you’re in,” Flowers told the audience. “And if we’re making a commitment at the door that those are the things that we’re going to fight for, we know they’re important to you. They’re important to us. That can transcend party lines, and it should.”

Of the attendees who spoke up to ask questions or talk strategy, many were former elected Democrats or local members of the party. Former Great Falls Mayor Randy Gray noted the decline of local union membership in Great Falls, a trend seen elsewhere across the state.

“The elimination of unions was a major event in my lifetime in this town, and it is still dogging us,” Gray said. “But there’s opportunities for new doors opening in the future, and we just have to keep that in mind.”

Seated next to Gray, Chris Christiaens, who served as a Democrat in the Legislature for nearly two decades, suggested it comes down to candidates needing to get their faces in front of voters. His last term ended in 2002.

“It’s working doors, and the more time you work the doors and the more people understand your actions, and give you the chance to ask questions, you will win,” Christiaens said. “I went through my district every election a minimum of three times for every single house.”

Jasmine Taylor, who ran unsuccessfully against Great Falls Republican Rep. Lola Sheldon Galloway in 2020, challenged the state party to do more to support local legislative candidates.

“I think what we’ve experienced, especially in Cascade County, is that there hasn’t been support here, that the party has supported the safe seats and that’s where they invested their time, their money and their resources,” Taylor said. “... I know that this last election, we have candidates in this room that knocked their district two or three times, and they still lost.”

And not everyone was on board with Flowers’s and Caferro’s focus on kitchen-table issues. David Saslav noted that “advocacy for the unhoused” did not appear on Flowers’ list — nor did climate change or LGBTQ issues.

Senate Minority Leader Pat Flowers, D-Belgrade, speaks during a press conference ahead of the start of the legislative session on Jan. 2, 2023, in the state Capitol.

“And I would say those are probably three of my top five,” the local Democrat said. “So I’m thinking that we need to be looking at a wider tent, not a smaller tent.”

“Those would be on my list, also, if I were compiling my own,” Flowers responded. “It’s a difficult line to walk, to keep the message simple and pointed and resonating with a broad population, and still keep the tent open and wide.”

The chair of the Cascade County Democrats, Helena Lovick, says there are disagreements within the party over whether to emphasize kitchen table issues versus what she calls a "looming crisis" of climate change, or the loss of reproductive rights for women. She encourages candidates to "speak from your heart" and connect with voters on whatever issues they care about.

"Talk to them from a place of compassion about whatever it is that fires you up," Lovick says.

She sees hope for Democrats in 2024, but acknowledges they lost significant ground over the last decade. The Great Falls' population is older than other urban areas in the state, she notes, and its residents tend to be the "blue collar" types who drifted away from the party as union membership declined. But top of her list is the erosion of local coverage in the city’s daily newspaper. She says local Democrats have struggled to adapt to the rise of social media as a political messaging tool.

The Milwaukee Railway Depot along the Missouri River in Great Falls.

"I think the way we can reach persuadable voters is really by pointing out the record of what Republicans have been doing in our state," Lovick says. She points to the affordable housing crisis and proposals to undercut union membership as examples that would resonate with Great Falls voters.

Jacobson and former Sen. Carlie Boland were the last two Great Falls Democrats to serve in the 2021 session. Republicans flipped both of those seats in 2022, completing their takeover of Cascade County’s legislative delegation.

He lost his reelection bid by about 400 votes to a political newcomer, while Cascade County Republican Wendy McKamey decisively won to flip the other formerly Democratic Senate seat. Asked why he couldn’t pull off another win last year, Jacobson shrugs and peers across the river before offering a handful of theories: The decline of unions, who historically supported Democrats; the decline of traditional media; the ever-growing influence of national partisan issues in local politics.

Plus, it was an especially bad year for Democrats across the state. Four years earlier he’d pulled 58% of the vote to defeat the son of Republican U.S. Rep. Matt Rosendale, the same year Rosendale lost the U.S. Senate race to Tester.

“I’d hit the doors and it would be Biden this, Biden that … but I want to talk about things that actually impact Great Falls,” he says, adding that in 2018, his campaign signs would sometimes share real estate with yard signs supporting Trump’s candidacy two years earlier. “I think it goes back to people getting more and more entrenched in their tribe.”

That’s been reflected in recent election results, with less variation between top-of-the-ticket races, like Trump-versus-Biden, and the partisans at the local level. Great Falls Republican state Sen. Steve Fitzpatrick sees the increased polarization of U.S. politics as helping to drive that trend. It's one thing he and Lovick agree on.

“It seems we live in our own separate worlds anymore, and we don’t talk to anybody,” the Senate Majority leader says, seated in his office at a Great Falls law firm. “I mean, we’re very isolated.”

Sen. Steve Fitzpatrick, R-Great Falls, speaks during the 2023 session.

But he also thinks local Democrats like Jacobson have been hamstrung by the national party’s focus.

“When I think of the Democratic Party platform, I think, what are they gonna talk about?” Fitzpatrick says. “They’re gonna talk about gay rights, they’re gonna talk about climate change, they’re gonna talk about race, right? … I just don’t think that resonates with the typical Great Falls, Cascade County voter.”

Jacobson said he hasn’t ruled out a legislative run in 2024. That’s when the new legislative district map goes into effect, following the decennial reapportionment process that wrapped up earlier this year.

The new map will be less hostile to Democrats than the old one. The six Great Falls House districts are blockier, and although they all lean Republican, history suggests the right Democrats could pick up some of them. Bullock narrowly won two of the districts in his 2020 bid for U.S. Senate. He was within 1% in two others. Tester won them all in 2018.

And Democrats and Republicans both expect having Tester on the ballot will boost down-ballot candidates next year. Fitzpatrick remembers barely winning his district in 2012, when both Tester and former Gov. Steve Bullock were running. Both Democrats have typically outperformed their party, picking up enough votes from Republican voters to eke out wins in close contests.

“They had staff everywhere, they were driving the vote out,” Fitzpatrick said. “... It was all just a surge of people that they’d registered and driven out to the ballots. I mean, I remember pulling up the voter list, and I just remember having a panic attack, like where did all these people come from?”

Jacobson offers up another anecdote, in which he knocks on a door and homeowner wants to talk Second Amendment issues. As a pro-gun Democrat, he chats the voter up about his own arsenal, but then warns the guy, “You’re probably going to get a postcard from the NRA, saying ‘Tom Jacobson got an F grade.’”

So he pulls out the National Rifle Association questionnaire, and walks through the “no” votes that earned him the ire of the firearms advocacy group. Voting against arming teachers, allowing guns in bars, allowing guns in other public places. But he says the pro-gun voter would agree with those votes.

“Then I’d say, ‘Well, I guess you’d get an F from the NRA too,’” Jacobson says. At the most hyper-local level, on the threshold of a voter’s door, there’s room for nuance. He shrugs again. “But the message is, ‘Democrats want to take your guns away.’”

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