The Republican Party’s Biggest Winner

Flathead Beacon opinion columnist John McCaslin is a longtime journalist and author. He lives in Bigfork.

He was Montana’s only major office holder not running for reelection in 2024, yet Sen. Steve Daines was among the Republican Party’s biggest winners.

As chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC), it was Daines’ job during this 2024 election cycle to elect enough Republicans to flip control of the Senate. The task carried profound implications, from guaranteeing the future makeup of the U.S. Supreme Court to deftly executing Donald Trump’s aggressive agenda.

Put another way, Montana’s junior senator wasn’t vying for one but numerous Senate seats. And now that the dust has finally settled he succeeded in his mission, including with his most ambitious objective of all: unseating Montana’s senior Sen. Jon Tester, who got swept away in this state’s raging red tidal wave.

With Daines’ blessing, the NRSC lobbed every available weapon in its arsenal at the Big Sandy dirt farmer and three-term Democrat. Which, for the record, didn’t sit well with everybody in the Republican Party.

Republican strategists overseeing pivotal Senate contests in several other states expressed frustration that the NRSC had “focused too intensely on the Senate race in Montana to the detriment of other winnable races – so much so that some have started calling the group the ‘Montana Republican Senatorial Committee.’”

One of them told the Washington Post that Daines and Co. was “obsessively focused on Montana.”

The NRSC chairman would be undeterred, given his personal stake in Montana’s election. It was Daines, after all, who encouraged Republican businessman Tim Sheehy, who had no previous public office experience, to run for Tester’s seat in the first place.

As Daines argued during one televised appearance this late summer, the Tester-Sheehy matchup was “the most important Senate race that we have in 2024.”

“It is as simple as this: when Tim Sheehy wins Montana,” he said, “we have taken the gavel out of [Democrat] Chuck Schumer’s hands and Republicans now have control of the United States Senate.”

Sheehy, for his part, didn’t disappoint, taking full advantage of the NRSC’s generous support and going on to capture 53 percent of the vote to Tester’s 45.

Daines now tells me this week: “Tim Sheehy was a first-time candidate who defeated a longtime incumbent senator by an impressive margin. That is incredibly difficult to do, and I expect Tim to continue to be a rising star in our party.”

But what, I ask, about the internal GOP complaints that the NRSC in 2024 effectively morphed into the Montana Republican Senatorial Committee?

“Montana was a key to our majority strategy, but Democrats still outspent Republicans by tens of millions of dollars in Montana,” the chairman counters. “It was impressive that Tim Sheehy was able to overcome the spending disparity, and I’m glad the NRSC was able to play a key role in helping him do that.”

More importantly to Daines, Democrats lost their slim majority in the Senate, relinquishing crucial seats in Montana, Ohio, West Virginia and Pennsylvania. As a result, when the new Congress convenes this January, Republicans will occupy 53 seats to the Democrats’ 47.

“Republicans retook the Senate majority and held every single incumbent,” Daines reminds me, adding the new GOP majority “will work to secure the border, bring down prices and confirm President Trump’s nominees.”

Still, it can’t be overlooked that Republican candidates simultaneously lost key Senate bids in Arizona, Nevada, Wisconsin and Michigan – all states won this year by Donald Trump. Without a doubt the NRSC will share in the blame for the shortfalls.

One also has to wonder what more might have been accomplished on Capitol Hill had Republicans won an even larger majority in the Senate.

God forbid, you say?

Consider an old black-and-white photograph of a beaming Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield, the legendary Montana Democrat, clutching in his hands a printed tally of 1964’s historic landslide election, when Democrats outnumbered Republicans 68 to 32 in the Senate.

Given the Montana leader’s genial guidance and trademark knack of working across the aisle, that extraordinarily lopsided Congress turned out to be one of the most productive in American history.

Fingers crossed that Daines and Co. will now follow Mansfield’s lead.