Ranch hand David Diener is looking forward to election season being over and an end to the deluge of political advertisements that has washed across Montana, a crucial battleground for control of the US Senate.
“I am sick to death of hearing them for the past year,” said Diener, a 34-year-old living in the city of Big Timber. He plans to vote for Republican Tim Sheehy but has some advice for the candidates: “Just shut the hell up about it.”
A vast state covering a landmass bigger than Germany and home to ranchlands, wilderness and big skies, Montana has been catapulted into the national limelight by a knife-edge Senate race that has become the most expensive per vote in US history.
Republicans and Democrats see the seat currently held by Democrat Jon Tester as pivotal to a majority in the 100-member Senate. The two parties have spent more than $270mn — almost $350 per registered voter — on a flood of campaign ads since last year, according to AdImpact.
Regardless of whether Kamala Harris or Donald Trump wins the White House, Senate control will matter — and not just to Americans.
The chamber has the power to enact legislation with sweeping national and international consequences, affecting everything from US military support for Ukraine and Israel to the American economy and climate, as well as the appointment of cabinet officials and judges.
“It’s an existential election,” said Marc Racicot, a former Republican governor of Montana who is so disillusioned with Trump’s leadership of his party that he is backing the Democrat Tester.
“I’m not one to sell Chicken Little hats and go around screaming that the sky is falling. But . . . we’re playing with fire here,” said Racicot, 76. “What happens in Ukraine is influenced by the Senate . . . taxes, foreign policy, education, healthcare — they’re all on the precipice of danger and failure.”
While Tester is ahead on fundraising, polls give Sheehy the upper hand in the race. The latest RealClearPolling average of polls puts the Republican challenger up by 7 percentage points.
If polling is accurate and Republicans hold all their Senate seats and flip West Virginia, where Democrat Joe Manchin is retiring, a win in Montana would hand them the crucial 51st seat for the majority.
For a state little known to many outsiders beyond the rugged beauty of Yellowstone National Park, this congressional calculus has made it the focus of both the national political spotlight and a torrent of campaign donations looking to sway the result.
“We have never seen political ads run this insane,” said Emma Fry, a 21-year-old political science and criminology student at Montana State University in Bozeman. “They are absolutely everywhere. They are on every channel you pull up.”
Cash is also pouring into Senate battles in more densely populated Ohio and Pennsylvania, where Republicans are hoping to muscle out Sherrod Brown and Bob Casey. Like Tester, both Democratic candidates have sought to distance themselves from President Joe Biden and Harris, who are generally unpopular in the US midwest.
Tester’s dwindling prospects in Montana have prompted criticism that Democrats should instead have directed funds to Texas, where former NFL linebacker Colin Allred is just a few points behind incumbent Republican firebrand Ted Cruz.
But Harris’s party is loath to give up a state that has for decades shown that Democrats can hold their own in the hardscrabble west.
For much of its history, Montana was a Democratic stronghold, with powerful mining and farming unions holding sway over the vote. But waning union power led to a shift towards the Republicans in the 1990s. An influx of wealthy conservative voters has since added to its Republican bent.
Tester, a 68-year-old farmer who returns to his Big Sandy ranch in the north of the state weekly, is the sole Democrat still holding statewide office in Montana. Campaign groups backed by the likes of Citadel’s Ken Griffin and Blackstone’s Stephen Schwarzman are betting an infusion of cash will help put the final nail in the coffin of the party’s control of the state.
The rhetoric in the Montana race has at times become nasty.
“While I was fighting in Afghanistan, he was eating lobbyist steak in DC,” Sheehy jibed at Tester in a recent debate, mocking the Democrat as a career politician. Tester has accused Sheehy, who moved to the state in 2014, of being “part of the problem” of wealthy outsiders driving up prices.
“I hate to say it, but partisanship has caught up to Montana,” said Greg DeBoer, 63, the mayor of Big Timber.
While the ramifications of the vote might be felt from Taipei to Gaza, it will be local issues that decide how most Montanans cast their ballots.
Wendell Ingraham, a 74-year-old retired horse breeder who has already voted, said he backed Tester because he was a “real Montanan” and a man of “character” whose re-election would be in the state’s interest, noting the senator’s role on the powerful appropriations committee.
“It’s ironic that people in the state of Montana would give up a senior senate seat,” he said. “It makes no sense.”
Public land access, housing and agriculture have dominated the electoral debate. And while some nationwide issues such as abortion and immigration have also been factors, the race’s global repercussions are rarely discussed.
“I think it just bears out the truism that all politics is local,” said Eric Austin, professor and head of the political science department at MSU. “There is a little bit of a juxtaposition between the things that are really driving the campaign narratives and then what the implications of this are in terms of much larger domestic and international policy implications.”
Damion Lynn, a 29-year-old environmental health specialist and vice-chair of the Democratic party in Gallatin county, said Tester had focused on “the day-to-day things that are hurting Montanan citizens”.
“Obviously the Ukraine-Russia war, Israel-Gaza — they’re really important things and the US plays a really big role in them. But for the voters in Montana it’s like: ‘I don’t know what to do about those things.’”
Trump has visited Montana to campaign for Sheehy, a 37-year-old businessman and former Navy Seal, whom the former president lauded while mocking Tester for his weight.
But Sheehy has found himself in hot water over contested claims of a wartime gunshot wound, disparaging remarks about members of the state’s Crow tribe being “drunk at 8am” and leaked comments calling for the “pure privatisation” of healthcare.
For all the high drama and Wall Street money pouring into Montana, locals just want the race to end.
“To the extent Montanans understand they are in the national spotlight, it’s something that they would be uncomfortable with,” said Bob Brown, 76, a former Republican secretary of state in Montana who is backing Tester.
“I don’t think Montana has ever been a player on the national scene — or certainly the international scene. Now there’s more focus, but the rank and file Montanan on the street or out on the ranch doesn’t spend much time thinking about it.”
Additional reporting by Eva Xiao in New York
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