Two years ago, when Whitefish’s Ryan Zinke set out to win the nod for Montana’s lone seat on the U.S. House of Representatives, he did so decisively, edging out Democratic challenger John Lewis by nearly 15 percentage points.
So when Superintendent of Public Instruction Denise Juneau launched her bid to limit Zinke, the country’s first former Navy SEAL Congressman, to a single term in the House and enter the national political sphere as the first Native American woman to serve in Congress, pundits predicted an uphill battle.
And it has been.
Still, even though the headwinds have been fierce — as is typical when battling an incumbent candidate in a Republican-controlled House enjoying the strongest majority in 80 years — Juneau has nicked away at Zinke’s lead, narrowing the margin and proving herself a more than capable candidate.
But is it enough?
As a Democrat, Juneau is running for a seat that Republicans have held since Rick Hill took it over from Democrat Pat Williams in 1997, but recent polling shows Zinke up by just 3 percent, within the margin of error, albeit the polling outfit was Democratic and released via the Juneau campaign.
Rob Saldin, a political science professor at the University of Montana, said the polling results were impressive, but added that some caution is in order given the relative dearth of polls in the Treasure State.
“I think that this has to be encouraging for the Juneau campaign, and it was certainly carried out by a legitimate polling outfit, but with that said it’s just one poll,” Saldin said. “Ideally, you want a bunch of polls to draw from, and obviously in Montana we don’t have that. But it does strike me that when Ryan Zinke won by 15 percentage points in a complete blowout against John Lewis, he was less well known than he is now. So to see it this close is surprising.”
The same day Juneau dropped her polling results by the Harstad Strategic Research poll, which statistician Nate Silver grades a B-plus for historical accuracy and placed her opponent ahead just 45-42, Zinke released his own Moore Information survey, a poll predicting a much wider 49-38 lead for the Republican.
Either way, Saldin said, the polling results paint a different picture than what voters saw in 2014.
“At the very least, this would suggest that this race is a lot closer than it was two years ago,” Saldin said.
Juneau’s demographics as an openly gay Native American woman have also found purchase with some voters, although it has been a relatively low-lying issue on the campaign radar, in part because over-emphasizing identity politics could be a double-edged sword, obscuring Juneau’s record as superintendent of public instruction and an issue-oriented contender, Saldin said.
At the third and final U.S. House debate on Oct. 5, Juneau, Zinke and Libertarian candidate Rick Breckenridge sparred on a range of issues, including public land management, coal, and gun rights.
But the most audible response from the audience came when a panelist asked what the candidates would do, if elected, to ensure the rights of members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender communities in Montana.
In the closest moment to a gaffe that occurred during the relatively humdrum debate, Zinke drew loud jeering when he responded: “If you want to be lesbian, you want to be Muslim, you want to be whatever, it doesn’t matter to me. It doesn’t matter. And it doesn’t matter in Montana, and it doesn’t really matter in this election because Montanans generally aren’t that way. What’s important is that you have the right to be you.”
“It was probably not his best moment,” Saldin said. “The way it came out, and I don’t know if this is what he intended to say, was that being gay is a choice that people make, which is probably what accounted for the strong reaction from the crowd.”
Juneau, on the other hand, responded confidently that the first thing voters could do to ensure LGBT rights is “elect me,” making a strong argument for diversifying establishment political institutions.
“Representation matters,” she said. “I have watched it happen at the state Legislature with American Indians at the table in record numbers, and the type of policy that gets talked about, the kind of stereotypes that get broken down, I have watched the discourse change. And with me at the table in Congress, the discourse changes again.”
Zinke’s status as an incumbent still counts for a lot, Saldin said, and he has strong support in the state and a healthy approval rating.
Many of the substantive issues that Juneau has accused Zinke of waffling on in political ads — chief among them his commitment to public lands — don’t seem to have resonated with voters, even as some conservation groups go after him as soft and inconsistent on environmental issues, Saldin said.
“The fact of the matter is that when Zinke says he has never voted to sell public lands, there is really no debating that,” Saldin said. “It is hard to lump him in with some of the other extreme voices calling for selling land or transferring federal land, and that seems to be something that the Juneau campaign has really planted their flag on.”
Last year, the Land and Water Conservation Fund, which takes a portion of offshore oil and gas royalties and offers them as matching grants for conservation and community projects, sunsetted for the first time in its 50-year history. When Congress attached a three-year reauthorization stipulation to its budget bill, Zinke cast a lone-wolf vote to reauthorize it, breaking from the pack as the only Republican to vote in favor of extending funding for the conservation measure.
“To me the bigger issue on public lands is we are talking about a member of the Republican Party, and for a Republican to do some of the things that he has done in my view is cutting against the grain.” Saldin continued. “He has stuck his neck out there a little bit, so it is hard to tar Zinke as being some zealot on public lands. His record in Congress just doesn’t support that very well.”
As to whether the tenor of the presidential election will have a trickle-down effect for other political races like Montana’s Congressional contest, Saldin said it’s curious how emphatically Zinke has tethered his support to GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump.
On Oct. 7, Juneau seized on Zinke’s allegiance to Trump when a leaked video from 2005 revealed the celebrity-turned-presidential candidate making vulgar remarks about women, prompting droves of Republicans to abandon him.
“The language is shocking and wrong and should never be used, ever,” Zinke responded in a statement from his campaign. “Lola (Zinke’s wife) and I have talked about it and we pray he has grown from this mistake.”
However, he stopped short of pulling his endorsement of Trump, saying only that he and Lola “can never vote for Hillary,” even as other prominent Republicans disavowed Trump and promised to write in Mike Pence, Trump’s running mate, for president.
Juneau released the following statement after Trump’s comments about women were revealed: “I’m calling on Congressman Zinke to denounce Trump’s violent remarks, withdraw his endorsement, and apologize for joking about Trump’s consistently offensive language. Montana’s 500,000 mothers, daughters and sisters are watching.”
Saldin said that while he doubts Trump’s comments will have an effect on Zinke’s campaign, he questions why someone like Zinke, who bills himself as an expert on foreign affairs, would lash himself to a candidate whose views on foreign policy are “frankly, just beyond the pale.”
The speculation among political observers is that Zinke will run for the U.S. Senate seat held by Democratic Sen. Jon Tester in two years, assuming he wins next month, which would leave the House race wide open.
Even with a tight race, Saldin said Juneau still has a serious hurdle to clear, but her ability to campaign so effectively suggests that even if she loses in November, this won’t be the last that Montana sees of her.
“She has run a credible campaign here and given all her demographic strengths, she just is in so many ways an appealing candidate for Democrats,” Saldin said. “If she doesn’t win, I think she will have first right of refusal to go for it again in a couple years.”