While Montana Rep. Matt Rosendale pissed off party leaders last month by refusing to ever support Kevin McCarthy for speaker, the deep-pocketed Club for Growth is making it clear they’ll back him if he decides to challenge Democratic Sen. Jon Tester again. “If he decides to run, we’d want to support him again,” said Club president David McIntosh, who also declared, “We like what he did in terms of the speaker’s selection process.”
Tester has not yet announced if he’ll be seeking a fourth term, but if he does, he may be quite pleased if the Club helps ensure that he gets a rematch with Rosendale. The organization was the Republican’s main ally during the 2018 primary when he beat an unimpressive field of opponents, but he proved to be a weak nominee himself. Tester and his allies delighted in reminding voters that Rosendale had only moved to Montana from Maryland in 2002 and still sported a Maryland accent, and they didn't hesitate to exploit a Talking Points Memo report about how that the self-described "rancher" didn't own any cattle or actually ranch his property.
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Rosendale didn’t get requisite air support to push back, though: While the Senate Leadership Fund spent huge amounts for other Republican Senate candidates, it only went on the air in Montana during the final two weeks of the race. That delay may have made the difference: While other Senate Democrats struggled that year in dark red states, Tester beat Rosendale 50-47.
The Club, however, still very much wanted to see Rosendale in a chamber of Congress. The group, along with its then-ally Donald Trump, supported him in his successful 2020 run for what was at the time Big Sky Country’s only House seat. Rosendale, two years later, claimed the new and safely red 2nd in the eastern part of the state as former Rep. Ryan Zinke returned to D.C. by winning the more competitive 1st, and both men immediately made it clear they could challenge Tester.
But even though Montana had two House members for the first time in three decades, Zinke and Rosendale immediately parted ways on the marathon speakership votes. Zinke, who served a chaotic stint as Trump’s first secretary of the interior, loyally sided with McCarthy on each and every one of the 15 votes, while Rosendale kept supporting alternate candidates. Rosendale explained his disgust with McCarthy by arguing his leader “squandered every opportunity to protect Americans from woke policies,” while Zinke called the spectacle “embarrassing.”
While Zinke avoided directly trashing his homestate colleague, he told Politico, “A lot of the members you see—before they couldn’t buy an interview … And now look at them, some of these members walk around, they got a mob around them and they’re fundraising off it.” Unnamed Republicans also speculated that Rosendale’s obstinacy was all about getting ready for another Senate bid. The 2018 nominee never came around to McCarthy, though he did him a small favor on the very last ballot by voting “present” instead of for an alternate speaker pick.
