Once able to win on the prairie, the Democratic Party sees the Senate race in Montana as a final test of whether it can still be successful in heavily rural states that have turned deep red.
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Democrats see the Montana race involving Senator Jon Tester, a third-generation farmer with deep roots in the state, as a test of whether they can still bridge the yawning urban-rural divide.
When Senator Max Baucus, a Democrat and political fixture in Montana, was re-elected to a sixth term in 2008, all of the statewide offices down the ballot — governor, attorney general, secretary of state, state auditor and school superintendent — were won by fellow Democrats. A sole Republican took the state’s single seat in the House of Representatives.
Things are much different today.
“If Tester loses, all those will be Republicans,” Mr. Baucus said, referring to Senator Jon Tester, a Democrat who is battling to hold on to his seat there in one of the country’s most pivotal contests, “That’s a dramatic shift.”
It is not just Montana. Other states on the Great Plains — once bastions of progressive prairie populism — have experienced stark partisan upheaval in their congressional delegations over the past two decades, shifting almost completely out of reach for Democrats.
Just 20 years ago, two Democratic senators represented both North Dakota and South Dakota — including the party’s Senate leader. Each state also boasted a Democratic House member. Nebraska had a Democratic senator and only a few years earlier had two. Today, those states are represented in Congress entirely by Republicans.
“It is a constituency I don’t even recognize in some cases,” said Byron Dorgan, a former Democratic senator from North Dakota who retired in 2010 after three terms in the Senate and 11 statewide election wins. “The people elected me for 30 years to the House and Senate, and I don’t think that constituency would have ever considered someone like Donald Trump to be elevated to the White House.”
While Democrats have been able to offset the loss of those once competitive seats by tightening their grip on Senate seats in Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico and Arizona — where they are fighting to hold a seat this year — the prospect of being locked out on the Great Plains presents a significant long-term obstacle for Democrats in securing and preserving congressional majorities.
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