This story is adapted from Capitolized, a weekly newsletter featuring expert reporting, analysis and insight from the editors and reporters of Montana Free Press. Want to see Capitolized in your inbox every Thursday? Sign up here.
Montana Democrats attended the party’s annual Mansfield Metcalf dinner March 2, a tony (and boozy) fundraising event sometimes called “Democratic prom” at which the party’s top officials deliver speeches and rally the troops ahead of the coming election.
At this year’s dinner — the 46th annual — the message was clear. As Montana Democratic Party executive director Sheila Hogan put it, “2024 is a pivotal election for Montana. You’ve heard it before, but this is it.”
Leading the charge for the party is U.S. Sen. Jon Tester, the lone Democrat with a statewide constituency in Montana and a top target of national Republicans as he seeks a fourth term this fall. Almost every speaker Saturday evening — candidates for office, party officials, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, the featured guest — made sure to emphasize that the path to Democratic success in Montana goes through Tester’s hometown of Big Sandy.
“We have a guy at the top of the ticket who understands what the Legislature does, understands what it means to have good candidates up and down the ticket, is willing to put money into a coordinated campaign that will benefit all of us, and we didn’t have that last cycle,” House Minority Leader Kim Abbott, D-Helena, said of Tester.
Tester was himself once a legislative leader. But when he was in the state Senate, Montana Democrats had a majority. Now they find themselves in the super-minority, only able to exert meaningful influence on the legislative process when the fractious Republican caucus turns on itself or runs afoul of the governor’s office.
Abbott pledged that Democrats would win “10, for sure” legislative seats this November.
“Kendra took care of that,” she said, referring to Kendra Miller, one of two Democrats on the most recent Montana Districting and Apportionment Commission. The commission finalized new legislative districts last year, with the body’s non-partisan fifth member siding with Democrats on the new map.
“We’re gonna win some [expletive] legislative seats. We’re going to make it a little better in that building. We deserve to be in the majority, we deserve to take back the governor’s mansion and the rest of our statewide offices,” Abbott said.
Democrats painted the GOP as a “confederacy of fanatics” and “radical jackwagons” intent on limiting Montanans’ freedom and selling the state to the highest bidder.
“It is no secret. The stakes are high in this election. The Montana we know is on the line, it’s on the ballot in November,” Tester told the crowd.
Most of the speakers discussed abortion. Democrats are counting on voters being turned off by the GOP’s embrace of hardline abortion restrictions in a post-Dobb’s world. The Montana GOP’s platform calls for a ban on “elective” abortion without exception.
“And then there’s a little thing called freedom, and freedom as it applies to rights; that’s also on the ballot,” Tester said. The last time I ran for re-election, Roe v. Wade had been the law of the land for 50 years. My folks’ generation did the fight on that. I will tell you that the Republican attacks on freedom and our women’s health care are only just beginning.”
Montana Republican legislators have passed several abortion restrictions since Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte took office in 2021, but most have been blocked by judges. Abortion access in Montana is presumptively constitutional under the Montana Supreme Court’s 1999 ruling in Armstrong v. State.
Spirits at the dinner were generally high. But there was also a palpable tension. Several sheriff’s deputies patrolled the banquet hall. Outside, a group of protesters with a group called Montanans for Palestine lined the road into the Lewis and Clark County Fairgrounds, holding signs calling for a permanent ceasefire of the war in Gaza and specifically calling out Tester for his position as chairman of the influential Defense Appropriations Subcommittee in the Senate.
The tension boiled over when a pair of protesters disrupted Tester’s speech.
The first held up a Palestinian flag and shouted, “I am a Jew! I am a Democrat” and later, “You have blood on your hands.” Deputies grabbed the man and dragged him out of the building. Staffers began holding up Tester signs and initiated a “Let’s go Jon” chant. A second protester, Leticia Romero, spoke up a few minutes later but was quickly drowned out and removed from the building by sheriff’s deputies. Deputies told MTFP that neither protester was cited nor arrested and that they had anticipated a disruption of the event.
“Sen. Tester is funding genocide. We will not forget, and we will not forgive. There’s children being murdered with our tax money, and veterans know that,” Romero, a Missoulian who said she is a veteran of American wars in the Middle East, told Capitolized after being ejected from the dinner.
Tester did not directly address the protesters and referred MTFP to a spokesperson when approached after his remarks.
“Isn’t it great to be popular?” he asked the crowd after Romero was removed.
A spokesperson for Tester later said that the senator has called for humanitarian aid into Gaza and supports “the use of strategic pauses in military action.” The spokesperson also said Tester has met with the organizer of Montanans for Palestine, Brendan Work.
Tester has faced public questions about his stance on the war in Gaza before. At a town hall in Butte last fall, he was asked why he wouldn’t support a full ceasefire.
“The truth is, it’s a horrible situation,” Tester said then. “There are no good answers here. And it’s not a good sight, what’s going on in Gaza right now. It wasn’t a good sight on Oct. 7”
Tester’s spokesperson added that “there are countless other Montanans who have strong feelings about the conflict and support Sen. Tester’s actions” and that “Tester has met with and held discussions with several other groups, including Jewish faith leaders across the state, who have urged the senator to support America’s ally Israel in their war against Hamas.”
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