I attended an election workshop put on by our state democratic party on Monday evening and came away with some good news.
After much encouragement from local dems, the Kerry/Edwards campaign will open a one-person Montana campaign office here in Helena later this week. It will be a tough uphill battle for Montana's three electoral votes, since Gore lost by 20% here in 2000.
But, the argument is that you contest every state, and that without a strong effort on the top of the ticket, the down ballot democratic races all suffer.
And Montana democrats are doing much better than in many other western states. In the state legislature, no democratic incumbent has lost a seat since 1996, while the demos grind away knocking off republican incumbents. With the new favorable redistricting, Democrats are poised to take back both the state house and the state senate. In the 2002 election, democrats neeeded five more seats to take back the state house. An additional total of 285 votes in those five state legislative districts would have turned the tide. Not that I needed to be told again, but every vote counts.
In the race for governor, democrat Brian Schweitzer is up by 10 points (in internal polls) over republican Bob Brown. And Schweitzer has out funded-raised Brown by 2 to 1, $1.1 million to around $600K.
Unfortunately, in 2000 democrat Mark O'Keefe outspent republican Judy Martz by over 2 to 1 in the governor's race, and still lost. Judy Martz was the hand picked successor to two-term governor Smilin' Marc Racicot, who left Montana to go to work as a lobbyist for Enron, and is now campaign chair for Bush-Cheney 2004. In another bizarre historical twist, one of O'Keefe's campaign advisors in 2000 was a guy named Joe Trippi.
Luckily, Schweitzer is running a much smarter campaign than in 2000 and stands a good chnace of ending the 16 year-long republican Raj of governorships.
Hopefully, a Kerry/Edwards campaign presence in the state will help return Montana to its pre-1990s democratic roots.