On the cool, drizzly last Saturday of September, Montana’s governor, Steve Bullock, spent yet another afternoon on the road, travelling from the capital, Helena, to the western part of the state for a string of appearances. A former state attorney general and onetime Presidential candidate, he is challenging the freshman Republican senator Steve Daines in a race that could very well flip the Senate in the Democrats’ favor. Bullock was trailing or leading in the polls by a point or two, depending on the week. As a sitting governor, his handling of the coronavirus pandemic has been on trial: his spring shutdown earned high praise, but case numbers have recently soared. To win, Bullock needs every vote he can get from Montana’s traditional Democratic coalition, which is composed of seniors and conservationists and, above all, Native Americans and union workers. Which is why, on that Saturday, he made sure to visit a union headquarters and a tribal reservation.
In a small office in Kalispell, a northwestern town best known for its proximity to the sublime Glacier National Park, Bullock greeted a few of the seven hundred nurses who recently formed a union at Kalispell Regional Healthcare, a local hospital network. Purple stickers and “WE SUPPORT KRH NURSES” yard signs seemed to be everywhere, along with whiteboard flowcharts and children’s toys. Molly Moody, an organizer with the Service Employees International Union, gave Bullock a hug—they’d first met twenty years ago, when he was a labor lawyer. Bullock listened to the nurses describe their fight for a first contract, then made his way an hour south, to a coronavirus-safe, drive-in rally on the campus of Salish Kootenai College, on the Flathead Reservation.
Under darkening clouds, a long line of mostly trucks and S.U.V.s turned past a highway billboard reading “PLEASE WEAR A MASK / PROTECT OUR ELDERS” and into a giant parking lot. In Montana, as in the rest of the country, Native communities have suffered more sickness and death owing to COVID-19 than their population numbers would predict. A prerecorded drum circle played over loudspeakers as a jumbotron projected the names and head shots of Democratic candidates for local, state, and federal office. One after another, eight politicians climbed a dais and unmasked at the mike. Bullock spoke last. “I’ve learned from you. I’ve grown with you. I’ve respected the government-to-government relationship,” he said, teeth chattering, to a barrage of supportive honks. “There’s a real choice here—Indian country should never be an afterthought.”
Native Americans are the largest minority group in Montana and, from the perspective of the Democratic Party, as presumptively reliable a voting block as Latinos in the Southwest or Black voters in big cities and the South. In 2018, when Montana’s other Senate seat was on the ballot, Native voters, concentrated among late-count absentees, were widely credited with securing a third term for the Democrat Jon Tester. But they are not a monolith. Ian I. McRyhew, a Jicarilla Apache citizen and student at Salish Kootenai, told me at the rally, “I don’t identify as a Democrat or a Republican. Some of my views fall more into Libertarian.” In 2016, he voted for Donald Trump, he whispered—a fact he rarely discloses. But “I’m definitely voting for Bullock,” he said.
This year, the Senate race in Montana, population one million, could be decided by a vanishingly thin margin. Bullock’s fate, and perhaps the nation’s, may rest on the ballots of around forty-five thousand voting-age Native Americans and forty-six thousand union workers, half of whom belong to the Montana Federation of Public Employees.
Every election, in every state, invokes its own peculiar imagery and slogans and categorically “American” tests of authenticity. In Montana, candidates must wear the worn blues of old jeans, along with belt buckles, cowboy boots, and rugged fall jackets. They must pose in various outdoor settings, lift guns in the air, and speak of “access to public lands” in lieu of climate change. They must distance themselves from candidacy-killing concepts like a sales tax, friendliness with China, or a ban on the Keystone XL pipeline, while promising health care, jobs, and tribal sovereignty. Republicans like Daines, a wealthy businessman from Bozeman, hope to benefit from their association with President Trump and Vice-President Mike Pence, who won the state in 2016 by a margin of twenty per cent. Meanwhile, Democrats like Bullock avoid gratuitous references to “Chuck and Nancy”—Charles Schumer, the Senate Minority Leader, and Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House.
Montanans pride themselves on voting independently. Since I moved here, in early August, for a journalism fellowship at the University of Montana, several people have used the same gesture by way of explanation. Holding an imaginary pencil, they start at the top of a ballot and move down in a series of left-right zigzags: Democrat, Republican, Democrat, Republican. The statewide and federal offices currently abide by this logic: a Democratic governor (Bullock), a Republican congressman (Greg Gianforte, famous for body-slamming a Guardian reporter), a Democratic senator (Tester), a Republican senator (Daines), a Republican secretary of state, and a Republican auditor. The question is: Will this purple pattern hold four years into the Trump era and in the thick of an ever-worsening pandemic?
At the end of March, Bullock shut down the state, drawing national admiration and surprise, perhaps on the mistaken assumption that Montana is Tea Party red. But, after he eased restrictions, businesses reopened, summer vacationers arrived en masse, and schools and colleges resumed in-person teaching—and the number of new daily COVID cases went from seven to seven hundred. In a debate between the Senate candidates hosted by Montana PBS, in late September, Daines criticized Bullock by pointing to “consecutive days of record positive COVID numbers.” Montana now has one of the worst per-capita infection rates in the country.
Yet only a small minority of Montanans I interviewed, Democrat and Republican alike, told me that they were dissatisfied with Bullock’s handling of the pandemic. A few people complained that Phase I had not lasted long enough. Several teachers said that the governor should have required masks in schools from the beginning of the summer, instead of adding that requirement much later. And some Native citizens regretted that the highways cutting through their land had not been closed to outside traffic. The Blackfeet Nation, for one, restricted access on the eastern side of Glacier National Park, even after the state began to move into Phase II. (About two-thirds of Montana’s indigenous people live on reservation land.) “I supported Bullock’s shutdown, also because tribes could then extend it,” Alissa Snow, a Blackfeet citizen and director of the Native vote program for the Montana Democrats, told me.
The disproportionate impact of the pandemic makes Native outreach at once more necessary and more fraught. Snow is currently supervising twenty-four organizers across the state’s seven reservations, where sovereignty, reproductive rights, health care, language preservation, domestic abuse, and environmental policy are core issues. But, given the well-documented history of discrimination against indigenous voters in the U.S., she explained, “voting feels foreign. It’s new to Native people.”
