Posted on 02/01/2011 11:41:14 AM PST by Harley
Rep. Denny Rehberg (R-Mont.) will announce Saturday he is challenging Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.).
“It’s happening Saturday,” said a knowledgeable Montana GOP political operative. “He’s running. There is a lot of support and enthusiasm back home, and Denny knows he can win.”
(Excerpt) Read more at rollcall.com ...
He might be able to win, but will his House seat then go Democrat? MT is “democrat” country, but will it back Obama?
Montana isn’t Dem country.
Has been voting Republican in Presidential elections
Denny wins big every election and can do it again.
Pleasant surprise in MT. Only concern is who will run for the open House seat. The GOP has no statewide bench at present who would ordinarily be the natural choice.
Montana is a Red State and a recreational state with two liberal Dem senators who have been trying to turn Montana into a wilderness state and make a lot of the land untouchable.
Obama campaigned hard in Montana in 2008, but still didn’t win the whopping 3 electoral votes. There’s a pretty strong Tea Party influence and it hasn’t dwindled since the 2010 elections. I don’t think Montana has went Democrat for President since Kennedy.
Clinton carried MT.
You are correct, in 1992, but not in 1996.
Clinton carried MT in 1992 with only 37.63%; had Perot, who got 26.12%, not been on the ballot, President George H.W. Bush would have carried it by like 55%-45%.
Obama’s 47.11% in MT in hopey-changey 2008 is the best performance for a Democrat presidential candidate in the state since the 1964 LBJ landslide; second best was Dukakis’s 46.20% in 1988 and third best was Carter’s 45.40% in 1976. Obama will be lucky to get 40% in 2012.
BTW, Nixon carried MT in 1960.
If the legislative vote in MT was any indicator, Zero is as popular as AIDS up there. The House swung from 50-50 to 68%R-32%D. In the Senate, it swung from a 4 seat R majority to 8 seat (29-21). That’s the largest Republican majority in years. If the statewide offices had been up, the Dems might very well have lost most, if not all, of them.
I am very hopeful about this race now. Good point about the House seat and I’ll look for possibilities.
Maybe former state senator Corey Stapleton can switch from the gubernatorial race to the open-seat U.S. House race:
http://www.coreystapleton.com/
Best news I could have hoped for out of MT. Tester must be crapping his pants.
I wonder, will Gov. Schweitzer go for the House seat? Is he term limited?
Rehberg is very likable in Montana. Aside from his Taco Bell foolishness, Tester has gone into hiding.
Schweitzer has been thinking about ascending to national politics, he’s never ruled out a run for Congress.
Steve Daines said he would gladly run for the vacating House seat. He’s currently running for the Senate seat but he’s not as well recognized as Rehberg or Tester.
What can you tell me about Daines?
He will be term-limited out for 2013. He could go for the House seat, but the problem is that (if he won), he’d be a backbencher in the minority. Whether he’d want to be that is another question. I don’t know what his approval rating is, but after his stunt of bragging about “fixing” the election in MT back several years ago, I wouldn’t think it’d be that high.
He might run for the House seat for the same reasons that Janklow and Castle ran for House seats after two (or four) terms as governor—it’s a statewide federal office that makes you the heir apparent to a Senate seat (and Baucus might retire in 2014). Of course, Janklow had his car crash before he could run for the Senate, and Castle couldn’t convince Roth to retire in 1994 or 2000 and then lost the 2010 Senate primary.
You may remember that Janklow did run for the Senate back in 1986 at the end of his first two terms, losing in the primary to first-term incumbent Jim Abdnor, but not before inflicting enough damage to allow Tom Daschle a narrow win in the general. The egomaniacal Schweitzer would be more covetous of a Senate seat, so a House seat seems like it would be beneath him (especially with the Dems in the minority).
I was wondering about fmr. Rep. Rick Hill making a comeback to his House seat, but I just discovered he has declared to run for Governor. He seems to be potentially the strongest of all the current candidates.
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