Gianforte’s Win Really Does Spell Doom for Dems

The votes had not even been counted Thursday in Republican Greg Gianforte’s special election win in Montana when progressives and pundits began writing about Democrat Rob Quist’s “moral victory.”

Gianforte’s six-point margin in the congressional race, they pointed out, was far narrower than President Donald Trump’s 21-point win in the state last year.

“In that sense, you could say that Greg Gianforte was the underdog in this race. It’s not quite a case of Democrats coming close in a race they shouldn’t have been close in.”

“But believe it or not, as long as the margin stays in the 5 percent to 10 percent range, I’m still of the mind that this result will bode well for Democrats nationally,” Cook Political Report elections analyst David Wasserman wrote Thursday during FiveThirtyEight’s live coverage of the election.

The Los Angeles Times quoted elections analyst Nathan Gonzales as saying that sometimes a party can have momentum by losing.

Vox founder Ezra Klein tweeted: “Democrats would’ve liked to win Montana, but if R’s underperform elsewhere as badly, they’ll lose the House.”

His colleague, Matthew Yglesias, agreed. “Republicans need to win places like Montana by 11 or more to hold the House, winning by seven is a danger sign,” he tweeted.

But there is significant evidence that the conventional wisdom is dramatically overestimating the partisan tilt of Montana, which has a Democratic governor and a Democratic senator, who have won with the same electorate.

[lz_table title=”Montana’s Partisan Tilt” source=””]Recent open seat races in Montana
|House races
|Year,Winner,Margin
1996,Rick Hill (R),9%
2000,Denny Rehberg (R),5.5%
2012,Steve Daines (R),10%
2014,Ryan Zinke (R),15%
2017,Greg Gianforte (R),6%
|Senate races
|Year,Winner,Margin
2014,Steve Daines (R),15%
|Gubernatorial races
|Year,Winner,Margin
1992,Marc Racicot (R),2%
2000,Judy Martz (R),4%
2004,Brian Schweitzer (D),4%
2012,Steve Bullock (D),2%
[/lz_table]

Most recent House races in Montana have had wider margins of victory. But most of those races also featured an incumbent. Open-seat races, such as Thursday’s, generally have been much closer.

Former Rep. Ryan Zinke, whose resignation to become interior secretary triggered Thursday’s special election, did win by 15 points in his first race in 2014 — a terrible year for Democrats nationwide. But his predecessor, Steve Daines, won by 10 points in 2012. Former Rep. Denny Rehberg won his first race, in 2000, by 5.5 points. Republican Rick Hill won his first race, in 1996, by nine points.

In that context, a six-point win by a candidate who endured 24 hours of terrible news coverage arising from his alleged body-slamming of a reporter, does not seem so paltry.

Montana Democrats have struggled to win races for Montana’s lone House state, last winning in 1994. But they have held their own and then some in other contests with a statewide electorate. The party has held the governor’s office since 2005. In the Senate, Democrat Jon Tester has won back-to-back races, including a 2006 victory against an incumbent Republican. Former Democratic Sen. Max Baucus served for 36 years. Daines, the current GOP senator, is one of only two Republicans since 1953 to represent the state in the U.S. Senate.

[lz_related_box id=”801879″]

Eric Ostermeier, a political scientist who has studied Montana elections closely, said Democrats have won 55 percent of statewide races in the last 25 years. Excluding presidential races, that figure jumps to 60 percent.

“In the larger sense, Democrats win statewide races all the time,” he said.

The Democratic record is even better in Montana when a Republican is in the White House. According to Ostermeier, a researcher at the University of Minnesota and the founder of Smart Politics, Republicans have won just 36 of 107 statewide races in Montana when a Republican has been president going all the way back to Herbert Hoover’s administration.

“In that sense, you could say that Greg Gianforte was the underdog in this race,” he said. “It’s not quite a case of Democrats coming close in a race they shouldn’t have been close in.”