Democrats Need Jon Tester to Defy the Odds Again

Good evening! Tonight, my colleague Mike Baker , who covers the West, has a dispatch from the state that might have the country’s most important Senate race: Montana. Then, I look at how Democrats are spending elsewhere on the map. — Jess Bidgood

At the local Democratic Party headquarters in Great Falls, Mont., floor-to-ceiling windows are plastered with signs promoting candidates for the November election. But there is a notable exception: Vice President Kamala Harris, the party’s presidential nominee, is not featured on the placards.

I noticed the omission while walking last week along the streets of Great Falls, a northern Great Plains city on the banks of the cascading Missouri River, where I was talking to voters and business owners about recent political upheaval. Great Falls was a Democratic stronghold in Montana for decades, thanks to a coalition of union laborers, charitable Catholics and farmers who cared for conservation. But here, it was as if Harris didn’t exist.

Keeping distance from national Democrats is part of a do-or-die strategy in Montana for what is shaping up to be the nation’s most important U.S. Senate race. If the Democrats want to sustain the slimmest of majorities in the Senate, they desperately need Senator Jon Tester of Montana to win a fourth term.

Tester has defied the odds before, far outperforming Democratic standard-bearers in past elections. But Montana is changing, no longer defined by its purple, ticket-splitting ways. In places like Great Falls and elsewhere, Republicans have swept into power in recent years, leaving Tester as Montana’s last statewide-elected Democrat.

The shift has been abrupt: In 2008, Barack Obama lost the state by fewer than 3 percentage points. Four years ago, Joe