“Moderate” Tester Goes Kamikaze in Montana

If you don’t live in Montana, you can be forgiven for thinking that “Shady Sheehy” is a mixed drink popular in the old-time Irish saloons of Butte.

But it’s not. “Shady Sheehy” is the disparaging nickname hung on his election opponent by U.S. Sen. Jon Tester. Long before Montana’s June primary, Tester and his super PAC surrogates had dominated the airwaves with ads targeting Montana businessman Tim Sheehy as the worst possible candidate – an out-of-state millionaire who was seemingly shady because he had too much money!

Those ads mostly complained about how Sheehy had glitzy mansions and a ranch where he charged other “out-of-staters” to come and hunt on his wildlife-rich property. If you didn’t know any better, you would think that Jon Tester was running as a far-left anti-capitalist liberal whose campaign was based on class envy. But no. Tester is a candidate who assures us he is a “moderate” “Blue Dog” Democrat who supports down-home Montana values.

As soon as I heard one of those nasty ads, I predicted that they would backfire on Tester. The Blue Dog was a dead dog. Hearing Tester proclaim, “I’m Jon Tester, and I approve this ad,” with all its lies and innuendo, was a slap in the face of every Montanan who believes in fair play and the American dream.

Fortunately, Sheehy also realized that Tester was insulting the common sense of Montanans, and he launched several ads that featured complaints from voters saying that Tester should be ashamed of his attempt to assassinate the character of his opponent and to distort Sheehy’s policy positions such as claiming that he wanted to sell off public lands.

In a recent appearance in small-town St. Regis in Western Montana, Sheehy went after Tester for the nonstop onslaught of negative ads, noting that many of them are paid for by unaccountable super PACs.

“Jon Tester is the No. 1 recipient of out-of-state dark money in the whole country of all candidates. That’s why he has unlimited funds to carpet the airways with abject lies. The Tim Sheehy, or Shady Sheehy, he refers to has a lot more money and land than I do and I might want to trade places with that guy.”

Sheehy went on to specifically refute the oft-repeated lie in Tester’s ads about public lands:

“I believe that the public lands he is saying that I want to open up belongs to the public, which is you, the public. Not the bureaucrats in D.C. Not the environmental groups that want to pass ridiculous laws.”

It’s hard to swallow Tester’s attempt to paint his opponent as a carpetbagger when you look at Sheehy’s history as a Navy SEAL who was awarded a Bronze Star and Purple Heart and then moved to Montana after leaving the service in 2014. Sure, he grew up in Minnesota, but he chose to make Montana his home and started Bridger Aerospace, an aerial firefighting company in Bozeman. You’d think “down-home” Democrat Tester would have appreciated Sheehy moving to Montana to create hundreds of jobs and to protect wildlands, but accusing GOP politicians of exploiting the state by moving here later in life is a common Democrat tactic.

As a 40-year resident of Montana, I am very familiar with the efforts of Democrats to paint their opponents as carpetbaggers who came to the state to pull the wool over our eyes and fool us rube Montanans into voting for them on the basis of their policies rather than their birthplace. The same gambit was used against Rep. Matt Rosendale in his 2020 election for Congress. Rosendale, who lived in Maryland until he moved to Eastern Montana in 2002, was labeled “Maryland Matt” by Democrats eager to turn him into an outsider. Likewise, Gov. Greg Gianforte, who was born in California and raised in Pennsylvania, was painted as a carpetbagger in his races for Congress and the statehouse even though he had lived in Montana since 1995 and started one of the largest tech companies in the state two years later.

All this might be laughable were it not for the fact that Tester’s desperate effort to hamstring Sheehy has ramifications far beyond the Montana border. Indeed, this race very probably will determine the balance of power in the U.S. Senate. That’s because Tester is the indispensable senator for Democrats if they hope to go forward with their pro-war, anti-guns, open-border agenda.

When Sen. Joe Manchin, the moderate Democrat from West Virginia, announced that he was not running for reelection, it meant that the balance of power in the Democratically controlled Senate was up for grabs. If West Virginia turns red as expected, it would set the stage for a 50-50 split if none of the other seats switch parties. But if Jon Tester’s seat moves into the Republican column, then the GOP would control the Senate and either benefit a Trump administration or stymie a Harris administration.

That’s why Big Sky Country is now Big Spending Country as far as campaign advertising is concerned. According to the Montana Free Press, PACs have invested more than $44 million in the Tester-Sheehy race. But spending millions of dollars isn’t necessarily a winning strategy if you have the wrong message, and apparently, Tester’s ads are backfiring, just as I suspected they would. Sheehy is up by 5.2 percentage points in the RealClearPolitics polling average, and even more telling, Tester has shifted to a much more positive ad campaign, stressing that the Democrat is a Big Sandy farmer who cares about real Montanans and jettisoning much of the nastiness that tried to smear Sheehy.

One thing is certain. You can’t count Tester out. He’s been living a charmed political life for the past 18 years, convincing conservative Montana that he isn’t a liberal Democrat despite voting in lockstep with Chuck Schumer’s radical agenda.

Tester was first elected to the Senate in 2006 when he beat the tarnished Sen. Conrad Burns by less than a percentage point. In his next two races, both against Congressman Denny Rehberg, Tester was helped by Libertarian candidates who earned more votes than the difference between Tester and his GOP opponent. Now, Tester is the only Democrat holding statewide office in Montana, and Republicans are eager to give him the boot after 18 years of listening to him claim that he wants to make D.C. more like Montana. If that was his aim, he failed badly, because not only has Tester become a favorite of lobbyists, lawyers, and bankers, he also voted with the radical Biden administration 95% of the time.

But now that it’s election time again, you can bet Tester is spending more time at his farm in Big Sandy and pleading his case that he’s just another common-sense moderate. Are the voters buying it? We’ll know in just under two months, but I’m ready to bid goodbye to the guy who proudly said he approved a slew of negative ads that made Montana a whole lot more like Washington, D.C.

Drain the swamp.

This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.