Montana's latest congressional candidate calls the incumbent an "embarrassment." Democrats concede several legislative seats. A handful of Republicans continue to push for a special session. Rep. Rosendale and Sen. Tester want you to be able to fly without a mask. And Attorney General Austin Knudsen chastises Direct TV for dropping a channel that promotes conspiracy theories.
Campaign Beat is Montana Public Radio's weekly political analysis program. It's hosted by Sally Mauk and features Lee Newspapers State News Bureau Chief Holly Michels and Rob Saldin of the University of Montana’s Mansfield Center and Political Science Department.
Sally Mauk Rob, the race for Montana's Eastern Congressional District got even more interesting this week when Billings financial adviser Gary Buchanan entered the race as an independent. And there are now 10 candidates hoping to unseat incumbent Matt Rosendale. This is, I believe, Buchanan's first try at an elected office, but he has served in both Democratic and Republican administrations. He says he got into the race in large part because "Rosendale is Montana's biggest embarrassment."
Rob Saldin Right, Sally. You know this campaign for the Eastern District, it's definitely shaping up to be more intriguing than I would have expected. You know, this is a solid Republican district. It really should be one of those that the GOP can just put on cruise control and not worry about. But all of a sudden, there are some indications of weakness on Rosendale's part. For one thing, three other Republicans filed papers to run against him in the primary. Now, I expect Rosendale will still win the nomination with ease, but primary challenges to incumbents are just one of those red flags that indicate potential trouble. And then, as as you note, Gary Buchanan jumped in this week and launched his campaign with a blistering op-ed that takes Rosendale to task on basically every front, from his votes against supporting Ukraine and against honoring the Capitol Police after January 6th to what Buchanan characterized as Rosendale general amorality, his negativity. Buchanan calls him vile, cowardly, a conspiracy theorist and an embarrassment, so he's certainly not pulling his punches.
Sally Mauk He is not. Do you think, Rob, that this independent candidacy hurts or helps either the Democratic or Republican nominee. Who stands to benefit the most?
Rob Saldin Well, I think it's too early to tell, Sally, but just in terms of making a run as an independent, that's a real uphill climb. There's a reason, after all, why everyone tends to affiliate with a party if they want to launch a campaign. Just for one thing, when you run as a Democrat or you run as a Republican, the party basically takes care of a lot of the basic blocking and tackling aspects of a campaign. They'll, for instance, give candidates a list of people to hire to do communications and advertising and fundraising and polling and all those sorts of things. But because virtually all of those professionals who staffed campaigns are party people, if you're running as an independent, you don't get that all dropped in your lap and you've got to cobble it all together on your own. So the real challenge for independents isn't so much the message. Buchanan's clearly got one. And there's always some appetite out there for a political outsider, but the difficulty is overcoming all the inertia in our system that pushes towards two parties. And I guess in terms of who this helps or hurts, I do think it's too early to tell. But for those looking to unseat Rosendale, the obvious thing here you have to worry about is splitting the anti Rosendale vote. The nightmare scenario, obviously, for those folks looking to oust Rosendale is that Rosendale maybe only gets 40 percent of the vote, but he still wins because Buchanan and the Democratic candidate split the other 60 percent.
Sally Mauk Holly, candidates have also finished filing for the Legislature, and one thing noticeable right away is how many mainly Republican seats are uncontested.
Holly Michels Yeah, that was pretty noteworthy this cycle. All 100 seats in the State House are up for election and 24 seats in the Senate. In the days leading up to the filing deadline, there looked to be a pretty fair amount of seats where Democrats were not challenging Republican candidates, either incumbents or not. And we did see a group of Democrats over the final few days jump in. I talked with some of those people who said part of the reason they joined was concerns that those races were going unchallenged. But after filing deadline, we still saw 24 races where the Republican candidate has already won the seat since they were the only one to file. There's two seats where Democrats are in that similar position. And then there's another eight seats where the only candidates are Republican. So, safe to say that's a GOP seat after the primary. So, all in, that's about a quarter of the races for State Legislature this year, where Democrats are contesting seats.
You know, after the filing deadline, Democratic legislators, candidates and party officials held a press conference where they were asked why they weren't challenging every seat, and the point person for the Democratic Party on the state legislative races said that they do have an uphill challenge in a lot of the districts they're not running candidates in, and so they wanted to focus more on finding candidates in districts where maybe it's a candidate who's run before and has won or outperformed other Democrats and would have the best chance of trying to flip those seats back.
We also asked those candidates what they feel is at stake for Democrats in this election, and it was pretty clear that you're giving up more seats, which could lead to a Republican supermajority, which the GOP is pretty close to holding in the State Legislature. That's on a lot of Democrats' minds, so I think that's part of why they're focusing on races where they feel they have a shot.
Sally Mauk Rob, some of the Republican primaries are going to be interesting to watch as they feature moderate versus conservative Republicans, and those outcomes could determine the nature of the next Legislature, which is more than likely to remain dominated by the Republican Party.
Rob Saldin That's right, Sally. You know, one of the big stories over the last decade or so has been the internal division within the Montana Republican Party between the relatively moderate members and the more conservative members. And like you, I suspect that same dynamic could very well be at play in some of these GOP primaries this cycle. You know, there are several districts up in the Flathead, for instance, where as Holly was saying, you've got no Democrats running, but you've got contested Republican primaries and absolutely, you know, looking forward to next January, as Holly mentions, with Republicans potentially having supermajorities in both legislative chambers, the outcome of some of these primaries really could have a significant influence on what next year's session looks like.
Sally Mauk Holly, some Republican legislators are again calling for a special session to create a committee to look into so-called election fraud. An earlier effort to do this failed. Why did they think this one won't?
Holly Michels I'm curious how much success this will have or not. Like you said, this previous effort failed. What we're seeing now is if you get a group of 10 legislators together and ask the secretary of state to poll the Legislature on holding a special session, the secretary of state has to send out that poll. So 10 Republicans came together, sent a letter asking for this. We saw, like you said, this has failed before. It's a pretty good indication that the support isn't there from enough Republicans. And like Rob was saying, with division within the GOP in some of those contested primaries, this poll could kind of be something I think might show up in elections. In those primaries where a Republican may be further to the right could say, you know, look, my opponent, the sitting legislature doesn't think we need to look at election integrity. So I think, you know, the timing of this is interesting. But like you said, probably pretty unlikely we'll see a special session come out of it.
Sally Mauk And Holly, Governor Gianforte said this week that Montana's COVID response is shifting from the pandemic to an endemic phase. Montana's COVID numbers are way down. But what does this new phase of response mean, exactly?
Holly Michels So, like you said, the administration, in making this choice, was looking at two main metrics: case counts and hospitalizations. Both of those are pretty dramatically down from the Omicron surge. The change is moving from treating this like a pandemic to an endemic, which means it's something more like the flu, an illness that we expect to be around for a while. So managing it more like that versus a public health emergency.
And one of the more obvious things that people might see is a change in how COVID cases are reported. The administration said they might be considering looking at a weekly report versus the daily ones that people have come to expect. I think another pretty notable change here, looking at vaccinations, the administration said they would shift toward more of a mainstream approach to getting a vaccine. Could look a little bit more like a flu shot that you get every year versus these mass vaccination clinics that we've seen. The administration said part of making this decision, they don't see any new variants on the horizon that might cause a surge. But since we reported this, we have seen spikes in parts of Asia and Europe, and that's been something before that's been a precursor to cases rising in the US and eventually here. Montana's in an interesting position because as a state, we saw a lot of public health measures like face mask use pretty dramatically rolled back more than a year ago. It will be a change. But I think also for a lot of folks, life in Montana over the last year has looked a lot more like, you know, 2019 and a pre-pandemic world. Even as we have gone through two pretty major surges in cases, hospitalizations and deaths over that time.
Sally Mauk Over 3,000 deaths to be exact.
Meanwhile, Rob, Congressman Rosendale has joined a lawsuit against the CDC, claiming they don't have authority to mandate mask wearing on airplanes. And Senator Jon Tester has voted to repeal that CDC rule requiring masks on planes and on other public transportation.
Rob Saldin Right. Tester was one of eight Senate Democrats voting for that, along with every Republican, except for Mitt Romney, and that really wasn't much of a surprise, I don't think. Tester often finds himself in the company of that small group of moderate Democrats on votes like this. He always emphasizes the importance of vaccines and whatnot, but he's also resisted some of the mandates. You know, back in December, for instance, he was one of just two Democrats who voted to repeal the vaccine mandate on large employers. Rosendale, meanwhile, joined 17 other congressional Republicans in a lawsuit against the CDC. His fellow plaintiffs on that one included a lot of the folks he often finds himself with, including Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert, Paul Gosar and so on. It's very much in keeping with what seems to have been Rosendale's top priority concerning the pandemic, which has been to emphasize freedom and push back on public health efforts to reduce the spread of this disease that's now killed nearly a million Americans.
Sally Mauk Lastly, Holly, Montana's Attorney General Austin Knudsen has joined other Republican AGs around the country, opposing DirectTV's effort to cancel the One America News or OAN channel, to stop carrying that channel. OAN, we should point out, is not a news channel, but a propaganda conspiracy promoting TV channel, and I'm guessing very few Montanans know about or watch OAN, so why is our AG getting involved in this?
Holly Michels So, this letter from Republican attorneys general, in it they issued a strong warning to DirectTV, wanting them to reverse the company's decision. Like you said, OAN's very pro-Trump channel that spread a lot of conspiracy theories about things like COVID-19 and false claims about fraud the 2020 election. In their letter, the AGs wrote about what they called viewpoint discrimination, and were claiming that DirectTV still carries what they were saying is the legacy media. They're saying it's liberal. The letter didn't go as far as threatening a lawsuit, but they criticized the move is what the AGs are calling and unwise business decision. It closes with saying that dropping the channel would cause DirecTV to lose millions of dollars and have people cancel their services. We did see a call from former President Trump for people to cancel their subscriptions, and like you said, this channel has had some problems. Two years ago YouTube actually suspended it, citing a violation of misinformation about COVID policy, but it is still available on a fair amount of other platforms.
Sally Mauk Rob, You have to wonder if Mr. Knudsen is ignoring issues that actually might be a more direct concern to Montanans to pursue these headline grabbing efforts.
Rob Saldin Yeah, you know, it certainly doesn't seem like the type of thing the Attorney General's Office would typically insert itself into, Sally. I'm kind of reminded of something that Yuval Levin from the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank, emphasizes. And that is increasingly across our society we see people using their positions within institutions as stages on which they can perform as a means of raising their own personal profile. And that's, of course, in contrast to a more traditional role of institutional insiders in which they are shaped and molded by the institutions that they're entrusted with. And the way Knudsen approaches his job just seems very much like an example of what Levin is pointing to. And the AG position, it does offer Knudsen the platform to build his own brand, and I think he's been fairly effective at using it for that purpose.
Sally Mauk Rob and Holly, we're out of time this week. Thank you so much. Have a good weekend.
Campaign Beat is Montana Public Radio's weekly political analysis program. It's hosted by Sally Mauk and features Lee Newspapers State News Bureau Chief Holly Michels and Rob Saldin of the University of Montana’s Mansfield Center and Political Science Department.
