Joseph Bullington grew up in the small town of White Sulphur Springs, Montana. He recently spent more than a month living in and reporting on the Standing Rock resistance camps opposing the Dakota Access Pipeline.At In These Times, he writes—Don’t Blame Montana Voters for Quist’s Loss: Blame the Frailty of Our Democracy. An excerpt:
The Montana race has often been mentioned in the same breath as Jon Ossoff’s campaign in Georgia—that is, as a referendum on a Trump-led Republican Party. But the comparison confuses more than it explains.
Ossoff, an outsider but centrist Democrat, is running just such a campaign: His slogan is, “Make Trump Furious.” This makes some sense in Georgia’s wealthy, suburban sixth congressional district, where usually dependable Republican voters were apparently not enthusiastic about Trump and his message of right-wing populism. After going for Romney by 23 points in 2012, the district went for Trump by only one and a half point.
Just the opposite is true in Montana’s at-large congressional district, which Obama lost by only two points in 2008 and Trump won by 21 points. It was no oversight that, at Quist’s rallies with Bernie Sanders in May, Trump’s name was barely mentioned. Instead of picking up the pieces of Hillary Clinton’s crashed campaign, the pair tried to articulate a left-Democratic platform that might fly in Montana: “You shouldn’t have to be a millionaire to hunt, fish and hike in our great outdoors, get a good education or be able to support your family,” states the campaign website.
The Quist campaign was not as much a campaign against Trump as it was a left attempt to reclaim populism from the Right. And so the Quist and Ossoff campaigns are more accurately seen not as cohorts in the Democratic resistance to Trump but as two sides in the internal battle to determine the shape of that resistance.
Quist was the underdog in both cases. Democratic PACs got into the race late, and when they did they spent less than $1 million. This is a lot of money. But two days before the Montana election, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee poured $2 million more into the Georgia race, pushing its total spending there to more than 10 times what it spent in Montana.
It is hard to say whether this spending gap results from big liberal donors’ antipathy to the left wing of the party, from the party’s misunderstanding of the rural West and consequent abdication of the region to the Republicans, or some of both. [...]
However, the more than $7 million in spending by outside groups, which made this the most money-infused house race the state has been subjected to since at least 1990, favored Gianforte 10 to 1.
In the face of that gap, Quist needed two things to win: a large voter turnout and media coverage of the race that could cut through the ads and help Montanans understand the stakes and where each candidate stood on key issues. Neither happened. [...]
[T]he unusual placement and reduced number of polling places presented an obstacle to increased turnout. After an expensive election in 2016, Montana’s rural counties were strapped for cash to run a special election and lobbied for a bill that would allow counties to run the election by mail-in ballot. Despite support from the elections offices in 46 out of 56 counties, Republican leadership fiercely opposed the bill. [...]
As a result, some counties had to cut election resources. For example, in Glacier, the rural county in northwest Montana where Quist is from and which contains the large and impoverished Blackfeet Indian Reservation, the number of polling places was reduced from seven to two. This might sound like a mere inconvenience until you consider the geography. The Blackfeet Nation comprises more than 2,300 square miles of land—about the size of the state of Delaware. Of the 10,400 people who live there, only 1,000 live in Browning—the only polling place on the reservation. And there is no public transportation.
As journalist Stephanie WoodardnotedforIn These Timesin 2014, such structural barriers are part of a much larger problem. “American Indians are still working to obtain equal voting rights,” she observes. [...]
“When liberal whites fail to understand how they can and/or do embody white supremacist values and beliefs even though they may not embrace racism as prejudice or domination (especially domination that involves coercive control), they cannot recognize the ways their actions support and affirm the very structure of racist domination and oppression that they wish to see eradicated.” ~bell hooks, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black, 1999
At on this date in 2010—Obama vows justice in address from the Gulf:
From the devastated shoreline of Grand Isle, Louisiana, armed with stories from local residents, President Obama used his weekly address this morning to bring passion and promises, not just to the Gulf region, but to the nation in some of his most powerful remarks to date about the BP disaster.
Every story he tells is an American story: of hard work and love of the sea and land, ravaged and despoiled by the carelessness of Big Business.
The president seems to be finding the path to his inner populist. And the results are impressive.
Ontoday’sKagro in the Morningshow,Greg Dworkinhelps take out the weekend trash. Trump tweet-flubs London response, doubles-down on travel ban.Armandostages an emergency Trump tweet intervention & sticks around to learn about the Qatar crisis. And Mercer’s gaming your Google.
.jpg)
Comments are closed on this story.