Jon Tester needs to defy political gravity in Montana to win reelection, and early returns for a key demographic don’t bode well for him.
The Montana lawmaker is the most vulnerable Democratic senator running for reelection this year, and his seat is the linchpin for Republicans to take control of the Senate. He currently trails Republican challenger Tim Sheehy in the polls. But Montana is a small-population state, and one way he could change the calculus is with high turnout from Native Americans, who tend to vote overwhelmingly Democrat and make up about 6.5 percent of the state’s population.
But as of Sunday evening, majority-Native counties Glacier, Big Horn and Roosevelt were trailing the rest of the state in the rate of returned absentee ballots. While the return rate has slowly increased throughout the last week, Glacier County — home of the Blackfeet tribe — has consistently trailed the state’s average by about 13 percent.
“I was hoping that we’d have a bigger turnout by now,” Glenda Hall, an organizer and member of the Blackfeet tribe, said last week. Turnout in Glacier County plummeted in 2022 after steadily increasing for nearly a decade. Some experts guessed it was a lack of funding to do the hard work of turning out this population — but the war chest is full this year and numbers are still down.
