BOZEMAN, Mont. — The Democratic defeat
in a hard-fought special House election in Montana on Thursday
highlighted the practical limitations on liberal opposition to President
Trump and exposed a deepening rift between cautious party leaders, who
want to pick their shots in battling for control of Congress in 2018,
and more militant grass-roots activists who want to fight the
Republicans everywhere.
Rob
Quist, the Democratic nominee in Montana, staked his campaign on the
Republican health care bill, but he still lost by six percentage points,
even after his Republican opponent for the state’s lone House seat,
Greg Gianforte, was charged with assaulting a reporter on the eve of the election.
The
margin in this race was relatively small in a state that Mr. Trump
carried by more than 20 percentage points last year. But Mr. Quist’s
defeat disappointed grass-roots Democrats who financed nearly his entire
campaign while the national party declined to spend heavily on what it
considered, from the outset, an all-but-lost cause in daunting political
territory.
This
tension — between party leaders who will not compete for seats they
think they cannot win and an energized base loath to concede any
contests to Republicans — risks demoralizing activists who keep getting
their hopes up. It also points to a painful reality for Democrats:
Despite the boiling fury on the left, the resistance toward Mr. Trump
has yet to translate into a major electoral victory.
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In
part, this is because the few special elections for Congress so far
have taken place in red-leaning districts, where the near-daily barrage
of new controversies involving Mr. Trump has not damaged him irreparably
and where he remains fairly popular.
The
Montana contest was the second special House election this year in a
conservative district where rank-and-file progressives rallied behind
their candidate only to see Washington-based Democrats shrink from the
fight as Republicans launched ferocious attacks to ensure victory.
In
Kansas last month — in a Wichita-area district that is even more
conservative than Montana — national Republican groups stepped in to
ensure that another lackluster candidate, Ron Estes, pulled out a win, while the Democratic nominee, James Thompson, waited in vain for his party’s cavalry to ride in.
“If the national Democratic Party
would start getting more involved in these races earlier, then maybe we
could flip them,” Mr. Thompson said in an interview. “It’s
frustrating.”
For
Republicans, the outcome in Montana, where Mr. Gianforte apologized in
his victory speech late Thursday night to the reporter he had attacked,
is likely to calm nerves at least for a while, staving off what the
party feared would be a full-blown panic if Mr. Gianforte lost on such
favorable turf. Washington-based Republican strategists had grown
increasingly pessimistic about the race in recent weeks, bemoaning their
candidate’s political deficiencies and predicting a narrow victory.
For
Democrats, though, the contest pointed to an increasingly heated
disagreement over where the party has a realistic chance to win. Party
officials in Montana and progressive activists beyond the state’s
borders grew frustrated last month watching outside Republican groups
savage Mr. Quist as Democratic groups remained on the sidelines.
After a special House election in Georgia in which the Democrat Jon Ossoff received more than 48 percent of the vote
— nearly averting a runoff and demonstrating the extent of voter
enthusiasm on the left — Senator Jon Tester, a Montana Democrat facing
re-election next year, called Representative Ben Ray Luján of New
Mexico, the chairman of the House Democratic campaign arm, and implored
him to consider spending money on Mr. Quist in the final weeks of the
Montana race, according to two Democratic strategists briefed on the
call. Mr. Tester also contacted the Senate Democratic leader, Chuck
Schumer of New York, to see if he would carry the same message to the
House Democratic leader, Nancy Pelosi of California.
But
House Democratic officials make no apology for their prudence,
believing they are more likely to claim the 24 seats needed to capture
the House majority in suburban districts with highly educated voters,
where anger at Mr. Trump runs high. That includes districts like the one
in suburban Atlanta, previously represented by Health Secretary Tom
Price, where both parties have poured tens of millions of dollars into a
contest that looms all the more consequential after the Democratic
defeats in Kansas and Montana.
Even
this week, just two days before the Montana vote, Mr. Luján announced
new spending in the Georgia race. And in private, Mr. Luján was telling
other House Democrats that Mr. Quist stood little chance, based on
private polls showing Mr. Gianforte with a healthy, consistent lead of
about 10 percentage points, according to one of those present at a
closed-door meeting of the caucus. After the election was called, the
Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee circulated a memo declaring
that it had “refused to waste money on hype.”
On
Friday, Democratic leaders emphasized that Mr. Quist had performed
better than the party’s past congressional candidates in Montana,
apparently benefiting from the enthusiasm of rank-and-file Democrats
even as he fell well short of victory. The party’s nominees, they noted,
are outpacing their predecessors on fairly forbidding terrain, and
Democratic voters are participating at higher rates than Republicans,
despite being outnumbered in these districts.
But
other Democrats acknowledged that they must work harder to make inroads
with voters who live far beyond major cities and their suburbs, if they
want to pick up seats like the one Mr. Gianforte just captured.
While
both Mr. Trump and key Republican policy proposals, like the American
Health Care Act, are broadly unpopular in public polling, the president
and his party retain a strong hold over rural America, potentially
limiting the map on which Democrats can compete next year.
Representative
Joseph Crowley of New York, the chairman of the Democratic caucus, said
that the outcome in Montana had come as little surprise, and that he
took heart that it was “not an easy struggle” for Republicans to retain a
normally safe seat.
But
Mr. Crowley said that his party’s approach to competing in rural areas
was a work in progress, and that Democrats were still honing a positive
message on the economy and jobs ahead of the 2018 campaign.
“What
it says is we can be competitive in rural districts in states like
Montana,” Mr. Crowley said of the special election, adding: “With the
right candidate, with the right resources.”
The
first element of that formula was on the minds of many Democrats on
Friday, looking back at the avalanche of opposition research Republicans
used against Mr. Quist as a sign that party leaders need to intervene
more in primaries to ensure better candidates.
“I’m
for grass-roots politics, but if you’re going to actually win seats,
you need to focus on helping candidates who will be the most potent for
the general election,” said David Axelrod, the veteran Democratic
strategist, holding up Mr. Ossoff as an example of someone party
officials had coalesced around early. “That’s one of the reasons there’s
a competitive race there now.”
National
Democratic strategists were deeply skeptical of Mr. Quist from the
outset: The party’s campaign committee and House Majority PAC, a
Democratic “super PAC,”
dedicated only modest sums to the contest. Both groups faced harsh
criticism from the left for holding back while Republican groups pounded
Mr. Quist early in the race, driving up his personal unpopularity and
effectively disqualifying him in the eyes of many voters.
But
by not finishing more closely, Mr. Quist mitigated the postelection
grumbling on the left. Two groups that had stoked enthusiasm for him —
Our Revolution, a committee backed by Senator Bernie Sanders, and
Democracy for America, a grass-roots liberal organization — applauded
Mr. Quist for his effort but declined to fan grievances against the
Democratic Party establishment.
The
party will face a more telling test of its favored strategy on June 20
in the Georgia runoff. Democrats are more optimistic about that contest,
and the Montana defeat increases pressure on the party to deliver a
special election victory at last.
“That race becomes more of an actual test of what might happen in 2018,” Mr. Axelrod said.
The
good news for Democrats is that Republicans will be unable to replicate
across the map next year the kind of multimillion-dollar spending
blitzes they have mounted in this year’s special elections.
Yet
while it may be possible for Democrats to win control of the House
without staking their fortunes on states and districts like Montana’s
at-large congressional seat, the implications of being less competitive
in rural precincts could have graver consequences in the Senate, where
Democrats are defending a cluster of seats in conservative, sparsely
populated states — including Montana.
“Democrats
have to compete in Western states and rural areas,” said Tom Lopach, a
Democratic strategist and former chief of staff to Mr. Tester. “For
Democrats to have a governing majority, they have to listen to folks in
rural America.”
Mr.
Lopach, who led the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee in 2016,
said that writing off rural voters would be a betrayal of “our governing
philosophy of standing up for working folks and all Americans.”
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