Posted on 04/04/2023 12:38:37 PM PDT by cotton1706
The last Democrat occupying a statewide office in Montana may have an even tighter path to re-election in 2024, under legislation advanced by Republican state lawmakers Monday night.
Senate Bill 566 would establish a top-two primary election for U.S. Senate next year, when Democratic U.S. Sen. Jon Tester is up for re-election. It passed an initial vote 27-23 with no Democratic support on Monday, and must clear a final vote in the Senate to move to the House.
It would establish a version of a “jungle primary,” in which every candidate, regardless of party, runs in the same primary election. The top two vote-getters would advance to the general election, meaning third parties would almost certainly be kept off the ballot.
Democrats decried the bill as a “partisan power grab,” targeting just one specific race in just one specific election, as the bill would sunset the following year and applies to no other races. The race is widely anticipated to be the most expensive and one of the most-watched in Montana history. Tester is considered one of the two or three most vulnerable Democrats in the GOP’s quest to retake the Senate.
(Excerpt) Read more at helenair.com ...
Remove an incumbent Senator in the primary!
Good to see them taking action. Ballot harvesting in every saloon is next!
Jungle primaries usually always help Democrats. Why implement a Democrat trap? Just find a candidate who can beat Tester.
Love it. What’s good for California…
It won’t help him in my state of Montana, which is moving in the same political direction as Florida as the Democrats get more extreme each election.
Exactly
And look what California has as senators
“Jungle primaries usually always help Democrats. Why implement a Democrat trap? Just find a candidate who can beat Tester.”
A. These primaries “help Democrats”, if at all, only in heavily Democrat states or districts. Montana isn’t California or Washington. Yet.
Jungle primaries don’t help Democrats one bit in Louisiana anymore because the state isn’t 90%+ Democrat like it was in the 1970s when Eddie Edwards first implemented that scheme in order to screw Republicans.
B. This ensures a 1-on-1 battle in November, without Democrat shenanigans such as getting a Libertarian on the ballot to take votes away from the Republican, as happened in 2018.
The Libertarian (Rick Breckenridge) in that race, eventually realizing that he was just a dupe for the loony left and displeased with a particular dirty Democrat trick during the campaign, withdrew very late in the race and endorsed the R candidate. Tester got 50% — just barely — anyway.
This jungle primary may end up having no effect on the race whatsoever, even assuming some liberal judge doesn’t strike down this law before it’s ever used, but I give the Montana GOP credit for trying.
The reason they usually help Democrats is that they are usually done in Democrat strongholds. Republicans in Red States need to start adopting the same winning strategies the Democrats use. This is not the same as that ranked choice garbage.
Yes and Montana will have two republicans!
Sorry, this is going to backfire. Don’t implement Democrat policies. Are you seriously going to tell me there isn’t one conservative in the entire state of Montana who can beat Tester on the up and up?
Republicans aren’t nearly clever or competent enough to play the games Democrats do. The more states that do this, the more states will adopt it. Republicans could lose 50% of their Senators, just like that.
I don’t think you are thinking about this correctly. This also makes it harder for the GOPe to foist their preferred candidate on us. Having two Republicans run against each other in the general is a real possibility, which will pull the campaigns to the right, rather than the squishy center they usually get pulled too in a Dem/Repbulican general.
And yes, we should emulate a lot of the tactics the Democrats use. They are winning all the time, while the Right is losing. I am tired of it. Time to actually get in this fight.
Actually, I a worried that on jungle primaries the ultra-RINOs will win. That seems to be what usually happens.
Then how come DINOs don’t win them in Blue states? They go hard left in Jungle Primaries in California.
We’ll see
I’d rather not have a Libertarian siphon off 5% that might be needed. Dems don’t have that problem; they just ban opponents in primaries.
“Sorry, this is going to backfire.....Are you seriously going to tell me there isn’t one conservative in the entire state of Montana who can beat Tester on the up and up?”
Well there better be, or no amount of tinkering with the election mechanism is going to help. To repeat, the ONLY thing the jungle primary is going to accomplish here is to make this a two-man race in November instead of having three or more candidates on the ballot.
Those two candidates will be Tester and some Republican.
Having 1 Democrat and 1 Republican on a November election ballot isn’t exactly unprecedented in the history of U.S. elections.
This isn’t some complex liberal concoction like Rigged Choice Voting (see Alaska), it’s much ado about nothing. But if Democrats are squealing because they won’t be able to use one of their typical underhanded tricks in what will surely be a close election, then let them howl. They can redirect the money they would have spent on a Libertarian to generating more vote fraud in Missoula.
So, there isn’t one conservative who can beat Tester in the entire state of Montana?
The Democrat ballot fraud machine rigs Montana for Tester.
Cankles 2016 Tester 2018 Trump 2016 Rosendale 2018 Montana 177,709 253,876 143% 279,240 235,963 85%
The 75,000 extra Democrat ballots appeared like mushrooms in 2018...
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