Jon Tester may be in better shape than what you’re hearing

| 3:00 pm EDT October 6, 2024
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All along now the 2024 Senate majority has largely come down to whether or not Democratic Senator Jon Tester can get reelected in Montana. It’s a red state but he’s exceedingly popular there, and it’s always felt like a 50-50 proposition. But over the past month a number of new polls have pegged Tester as being down by as many as five points, and it’s resulted in a doomsday narrative about how Tester is supposedly toast.

But here’s the thing. Remember 2022? All along the polls said that the Democrats were set to do pretty well in the 2022 midterm elections – until the final month of the election, when a flood of new polls suddenly had the Republicans supposedly dominating. The catch is that these were legitimate polls. The Republicans were flooding the zone with partisan polls showing themselves doing a lot better than they were really doing. Everyone bought into it (except Palmer Report and a handful of experts like Simon Rosenberg and Tom Bonier). Every talking head on every cable news network spent the final month of the 2022 election yelling “red wave” based solely on these junk polls. And of course we all remember how things played out. The 2022 election results ended up pretty much looking like what the polls had been saying all along, before that final month of partisan junk polls muddied the waters. So what does this have to do with Montana in 2024? As it turns out, a lot.

Simon Rosenberg is now warning everyone about a new flurry of Republican-leaning junk polls aimed at skewing the averages. Specifically, a bunch of those polls are focused on Montana. Why? The same reason the Republicans spent the final month of the 2022 election trying to convince everyone that they were going to win no matter what: it’s a good way to bait our side into giving up and not trying to win.

Think about it. Jon Tester is in a toss-up race and has a 50-50 chance of winning it. But now the Republicans have managed to use their junk polls to convince a lot of folks on our side that Tester can’t win. If we take the bait, we end up giving up on a crucial Senate seat that we have a 50-50 chance of winning, and then suddenly our 50-50 odds drop to zero odds. We all know by now that you can’t win a close race if you give up on it.

What we’re seeing with this Montana polling is a concerted effort by the Republicans to trick us into believing that Jon Tester is doomed. And as always, nearly all of the media is eagerly going along with the doomsday narrative. But our job is to ignore all the noise, remind ourselves of the reality that the Montana Senate race is just as winnable as it was a month ago when we all knew it was winnable, and keep fighting for it.

The good news is that with the Senate seats in Florida and Texas now in play, Montana isn’t our only hope. But the Senate race in Montana is very winnable. We’re not going to let the Republicans and their junk polls trick us into giving up on it. Now more than ever, today is the right day to sign up to phone bank for Jon Tester (no matter what state you live in) and to donate to the Senate races in Montana, Ohio, Florida, and Texas.