Less than a month before Election Day, and with absentee voting already underway, the two top candidates vying for Montana’s lone seat in the U.S. House of Representatives have been teasing out strains of distinction as they hammer out the main planks of their respective campaigns in a series of statewide debates and campaign ads.
Republican Ryan Zinke, of Whitefish, a former state senator and Navy SEAL, and Democrat John Lewis, of Helena, a longtime aide to former U.S. Sen. Max Baucus, are vying for Montana’s open congressional seat. They are both first-time candidates running for the House.
The third candidate, Libertarian Mike Fellows, was not invited to the recent debates and is lagging in the polls.
All three candidates will appear on the ballot and are running in the Nov. 4 election for the House seat that U.S. Rep. Steve Daines is leaving to run for Senate. Absentee voting began Monday, Oct. 6.
In particular, two recent debates have sharpened the edges of both campaigns, drawing out key shades of distinction in the candidates’ central tenets and revealing a clear divide on issues ranging from health care, to energy development, U.S. military intervention in Iraq to the federal budget, as well as campaign spending and women’s health issues.
The central points of Zinke’s campaign don’t stray far from the GOP boilerplate – an overreaching federal government has thrown the nation into a downward spiral; free, untethered enterprise is the clear path to private-sector job creation and a strong economy; the United States must become energy independent, which he says is possible in five years with heavy expansion of domestic oil production; and the Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare, should be abandoned because its regulatory burdens hinder business.
Lewis said his opponent had not demonstrated a plan for achieving those goals, relying instead on “platitudes” and sound bites to craft a message.
Repealing the Affordable Care Act with no safety net would be harmful to Montanans, Lewis said, and Zinke has failed to outline an alternate plan to provide health insurance to 179,000 uninsured Montanans and millions of Americans, responding to a health care question at an Oct. 4 debate in Bozeman with the response, “I don’t view life through a red lens or a blue lens. I view life through a red, white and blue lens.”
Of the sweeping health care law, which was crafted while Lewis was working for its lead architect, Baucus, he said the law did not fix the health care system and that it can and should be improved, but that it has nonetheless benefited tens of thousands of Montanans.
“Repeal it? Repeal it to what?” Lewis said. “What is the solution to improving our health care system in the country? My opponent hasn’t answered that. This is a long-term project, so let’s be flexible.”
Zinke said he is flexible, as evidenced by his voting history, which does not subscribe to hard party lines.
“I don’t yield to political pressure,” Zinke said. “I do yield to higher principle, and as a congressman you are obligated not only to represent the people who voted for you but also the people who didn’t.”
On reducing the federal deficit, Lewis said he would identify wasteful spending and downsize government property, as well as eliminate outdated and duplicitous agencies while working to update the tax code. Zinke said he would trim bureaucratic fat from the Department of Defense while still maintaining a strong and capable military, and that he would cut funding for the state-led “Common Core” public school standards.
Zinke called Lewis’ notion “a rounding error,” and voiced his support for the House-passed budget by Budget Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wisconsin, as a framework to balance the federal budget in the next decade. However, Zinke said he opposed cuts to Social Security and Medicare, prompting Lewis’s retort.
“Supporting some aspects of the Ryan budget and not others, that’s a rounding error. I don’t think we should look at Medicare or Social Security to solve the deficit.”
Lewis has repeatedly jabbed Zinke for not supporting the North Fork Watershed Protection Act, a popular piece of legislation supported by all three members of Montana’s congressional delegation that would permanently protect 430,000 acres of U.S. Forest Service land near Glacier National Park, placing the parcels off limits to hard-rock mining, mountaintop-removal coal mining, and oil-and-gas development.
Zinke said he takes umbrage with the bill because it takes the land off the energy-development table “in perpetuity,” without consideration for technological advances that could lead to responsible extraction of resources.
“I don’t know what the technology of tomorrow is,” Zinke said. “No one knows more about the North Fork than I do out of my opponents, but if future technology allows us to responsibly tap into those resources then we need to explore those options.”
Zinke has also opposed lands bills like the Forest Jobs and Recreation Act and the Rocky Mountain Front Heritage Act, which Lewis supports.
“These are examples of bills where people of all different stripes came together and collaborated,” Lewis said. “I think we should support those types of home grown solutions.”
Lewis said he has also laid out specific plans for agriculture, energy and public lands, and has criticized his opponent for peppering his campaign with banalities that lack substance, while Zinke, 52, painted his 36-year-old opponent as young and inexperienced.
Zinke agreed that the nation’s health care system was broken and said he appreciated the intent of Obamacare. He said there are aspects of the reform that were good, such as allowing those with pre-existing conditions to receive insurance. But he still supports its repeal.
“I say repeal it,” he said. “We took a bad system and made it worse.”
He said his solutions would include supporting tools for small businesses to offer insurance through co-ops and health savings accounts.
Lewis’ energy proposal includes protecting traditional energy development, including coal and oil and gas. He will also cast an eye toward renewable energy and how to alleviate the deleterious effects of climate change. His plan also includes focusing on making permanent the Indian Coal Production Tax Credit, ending the ethanol corn mandate, which he calls outmoded, enacting a national renewable energy standard similar to the standard Montana already is using, and extending the wind energy production tax credit for 10 years.
Zinke has campaigned heavily on energy independence, calling it the key to growing the country’s economy. He does not believe in placing heavy emphasis on renewable energy as part of that plan.
“Any energy plan that doesn’t look at oil and gas and coal is simply relying on pixie dust and hope,” he said.
Democrats haven’t won a congressional race in Montana since 1994.
Clarification: At the Sept. 29 Billings debate, Democrat John Lewis did not stumble in his response to a question about how to reduce the federal deficit because he lacked an answer; rather, there was confusion about whether he should proceed with his response due to a panelist’s off-stage hand gestures.