“Schweitzer won Yellowstone County (Billings) in the last election”
That’s something I wouldn’t have expected. Was Bob Brown damaged there by his regional base or was there some special circumstance that made the populace of Billings Republicans defect from him?
Brown got beat all around the state. The libertarian candidate for governor who was in at least one of the debates loved to say that there were two tax-and-spend liberals on the stage with him. And there was more truth to that than anyone cared to think about.
I think a lot of Republicans stayed home, knowing that Bush would win Montana and that Rehberg would crush Lindeen in the Congressional race. This unquestionably hurt us in state legislative races — we lost seats in Billings that we should have won.
Basically what happened in the primary was that 3 Billings Republicans split the conservative vote, leaving the “moderate” Bob Brown to win the nomination. He was a poor candidate, and it was over before the race against Schweitzer ever started. (The Billings Republican who came in a distant second is now in federal prison for securities fraud, so there was a silver lining behind that loss.)
One factor that helped Schweitzer was that he picked Republican state Sen. John Bohlinger of Billings to be his running mate. They trumpeted around that it was a bipartisan ticket, and all of that.
Now, Bohlinger was the Jim Jeffords of the state legislature. Never saw a Democratic bill he didn’t like, an never saw a Republican bill he did like. And it kept getting worse as the years went by.
He represented a heavily Democratic section of Billings, so he could never be challenged successfully in a primary, and the GOP basically learned to accept him. We had such big legislative majorities in the 1990’s that it didn’t matter.
We Republicans are much more tolerant of diversity than Dems are, and that came back to bite us when Schweitzer picked Bohlinger to run with him and Bohlinger accepted. Suddenly, the Democratic ticket had a Billings Republican with high name recognition and who the Yellowstone County GOP had never criticized as they perhaps should have.
So that played a role. Now, the Dems think that this will work again in 2008, but I don’t think it will. Roy Brown is a real Billings Republican (which means that he is solidly conservative but can’t be portrayed as a “wingnut,) and Lt. Gov. Bohlinger has been a snide lap dog who continues to claim to be a Republican, but who trashes Republicans every chance he gets.
Roy Brown will carry Yellowstone County — the question is whether we can help him carry the vote here and in other GOP strongholds by margins big enough to make the difference.