Montana: The Last, Worst Place for the President’s Party
Like many predominantly rural states, Montana swung heavily towards President Trump in the 2016 presidential election. In 2012, Barack Obama lost the state by a 55.30%-41.66% margin, while Hillary Clinton lost it by a 55.65%-35.41% margin in 2016.
Yet two years later, Senator Jon Tester won reelection by a 50.33%-46.78% margin. Interestingly, a FiveThirtyEight analysis found that Tester’s vote share in rural Montana was largely similar to 2012. This contrasted with his colleagues like Claire McCaskill in Missouri and Joe Manchin in West Virginia who saw huge drops in these areas.
Why did Tester hang on as his colleagues in deep red states lost reelection or — in the case of West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin — won by a substantially reduced margin? I contend that this is at least partly because of a tendency in Montana for the presidential in-party to perform poorly. As David Parker notes in his 2015 book Battle for the Big Sky, which focuses on the 2012 Senate election between incumbent Democratic Senator Jon Tester and at-large U.S. Representative Republican Dennis Rehberg, Montanans have a complicated, love-hate relationship with the federal government. Issues ranging from resource extraction to public lands use often pit Montanans against the federal government.
The individualist spirit of Montanans is a recipe for many voters in the state to rebel against the current administration, regardless of their party. This pattern can be best shown by comparing the swing in presidential vote in Montana compared to the previous presidential election.
Looking at all the presidential elections since the end of World War II, the presidential in-party has only improved its two-party percentage compared to the previous election in three elections: 1948 — when President Harry Truman shocked the country with his surprise defeat of Tom Dewey — and the landslide elections of 1964 and 1972. The two-party percentage looks at the percentage of the vote received by the two major parties, eliminating votes received for third parties, but if you look at the all-party percentage, things get even worse for the incumbent party. Only LBJ in 1964 was able to increase his party’s all-party percentage compared to the previous presidential election. In addition to voting for the major party not in the White House, some Montanans rebel by voting for third parties — for example, Ross Perot received 26% in Montana in 1992, well above his national share of 19% in that election.
I display these swings against the presidential in-party in the charts below. In these charts, if the line is at zero, then that means that the president’s party gets the same percentage in Montana as in the previous presidential election. Anything below zero means they are losing ground; notice how the line is almost always below zero in both the two-party and all-party graphs.
It is worth noting that throughout this period, the president’s party actually improved upon its previous two-party percentage nationally in 6 of 18 presidential elections. Furthermore, typically when the president’s party lost ground nationally, it lost more ground in Nevada. Exemplifying Montana’s anti-in-party trend, Republicans substantially improved their national position in the 1984 election, but Walter Mondale actually did better against Ronald Reagan in Montana than had Jimmy Carter four years earlier.
To predict how well the Democratic nominee does in Montana in a given presidential election, I ran an OLS Regression. In this model, I used several factors to predict the Democratic two-party percentage in Montana in the 18 presidential elections since 1948 (you could run a similar model to predict GOP performance). I used three factors to predict Democratic performance in Montana: the presidential vote in Montana in the previous presidential election, the national Democratic percentage in that year’s presidential election, and whether there is a Democrat in the White House.
The first factor takes into account Montana’s recent political leanings, as a party’s performance tends to be relatively similar from one election to the next (e.g., it’s rare to see a party go from winning by 20 to losing by 35 from one election to the next). While Montana tends to swing against the party of the administration in power, its initial leanings tend to be more Republican than Democratic in most presidential elections. I also account for the national Democratic percentage because most, although not all, states tend to move in the direction of national political leanings. For example, in 2016 39 of the 50 states swung towards the Republican Party according to data from Dave Leip’s Atlas of US Presidential Elections. Finally, the main variable of interest represents whether or not a Democrat currently occupies the White House.
What I find is consistent with my expectations: Democrats do worse in Montana when there is a Democratic President and better when there is a Republican. An OLS coefficient of -9.629 means that when there is a Democratic President, the Democratic candidate for President’s share of the vote in Montana is about 9.6 percentage points worse than when there is a Republican in the White House.
So what does this all mean for 2020? Montana is a no doubt a Republican-leaning state. However, if this pattern holds one should expect President Trump’s winning margin to be narrowed compared to 2016. His 22 percentage point margin in 2016 could easily drop to 15 or 12, depending on how the Democratic nominee fares nationally. Don’t be too surprised if Montana is declared too early to call at 10 Eastern on election night as the networks contend with exit polls that show Trump doing a little worse than might be expected. (Trump should still fairly easily carry the state unless he is truly winning by a gigantic margin nationally.)
In some of the most recent presidential elections, the swing against the president’s party has been more on the magnitude of five or seven percentage points, as polarization causes voters to stick more closely with their party. Thus, while I expect President Trump to win Montana in 2020, there is a good chance it will be by a somewhat smaller margin than in 2016, although this swing against his party may be more moderated than it would have been before the current era.
Additionally evidence of President Trump’s slide in Montana can also be found by looking at his approval rating relative to the country as a whole. In 2016, President Trump won the two-party vote in Montana by 22 percentage points, which was about 24 percentage points better than his nationwide performance. However, in the 2016 Voter Analysis Survey conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago for the Associated Press and Fox News, Trump’s net approval in Montana was +6 (53% approve, 47% disapprove), compared to -12 nationally (44% approve, 56% disapprove). This meant that Trump’s net approval in Montana was 18 points better than in the country as a whole, a 6 point decline from his relative standing in the 2016 election.
Frequent tracking polls form in Civiqs and Morning Consult paint a similar picture when comparing Trump’s relative standing in Montana compared to the country as a whole. Trump is still more popular in Montana than he is nationally, but the disparity is less than it was in the 2016 election.
An important implication of these results relates to the 2020 U.S. Senate race in Montana. Democratic Governor Steve Bullock, despite frequent entreaties from activists and party leaders, has repeatedly said he will not run for the U.S. Senate in 2020. In an era where Senate and presidential results frequently match one another, it makes some sense why Bullock might not want to run in a state that President Trump is likely to win. However, these results — combined with Senator Tester’s win in 2018 and President Trump’s declining approval in Montana — suggest that winning this Senate race might be less of an uphill battle in 2020 than the 2016 presidential results imply.
Overall, the data presented here show that Montana occupies a unique place in the constellation of American states. While the president’s party has often able to improve upon their previous performance in many states, Montana truly is the last, worst place for the in-party to gain ground in presidential elections.
