GLENDIVE, Montana — Republican Tim Sheehy is warning voters in the final days before the election that his closely watched Montana Senate race has higher stakes than control of the upper chamber.
The former Navy SEAL argued that reelecting Sen. Jon Tester (D-MT) to a fourth term means not only that Donald Trump‘s agenda could possibly be thwarted, but that the former president would also be impeached for a third time if he returns to the White House.
“Make no mistake: If he does not have a Congress that’s supporting his actions, we saw last time what happened. He was impeached twice,” Sheehy told a small group of supporters gathered for a rally on Monday. “Oh, by the way, your senior senator, Jon Tester, voted to impeach him not once but twice. If Trump doesn’t have the Senate when he gets there, he will be impeached right away.”
The Tester campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
The case laid out by Sheehy comes in the remaining weeks of what has become the most expensive per vote Senate race in history, and it assumes Trump would retake the presidency while Democrats keep the Senate and flip the House.
Republicans are almost certain to take back the Senate, with or without Sheehy, if Trump defeats Vice President Kamala Harris, given Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) would be the tiebreaker as vice president.
Still, Sheehy’s pitch was emblematic of the likelihood that the winner of his race may very well be the Senate majority-maker.
Tester, fighting for his political life in a Trump-dominated state that has drastically reddened since he was first elected in 2006, is banking on winning over split-ticket voters by distancing himself from the Biden administration and national Democrats.
Sheehy sought to counter that messaging by painting the picture of a Democratic Congress putting a stop to Trump’s second-term agenda, particularly with Senate-confirmed Cabinet, judicial, and Supreme Court nominees.
“The Senate, arguably, is just as important as the White House this cycle,” Sheehy said. “And our state, Montana, will have a deciding vote.”
Sheehy spoke to a crowd of just under 150 supporters. It was a size that exceeded the campaign’s expectations, and what surrogates said underscored the enthusiasm for the GOP challenger, given it was in the middle of a Monday in a small eastern town near North Dakota with a population of barely 4,000. The rally was not promoted on social media by event space organizers at the direction of the Sheehy campaign, according to event staffers.
The Washington Examiner was the only media outlet present.
“The bottom line is if Biden-Harris have done it, Tester’s voted for it, including voting against all President Trump’s Supreme Court nominees,” Sheehy said.
Nonpartisan election forecasters give the Republican a slight edge over Tester, a multigenerational dirt farmer who has accused Sheehy of being a wealthy carpetbagger and lacking deep roots in the Great Plains State.
Sheehy has surged ahead of Tester by several points in public polling in recent months. The political newcomer branded the statistic to the Washington Examiner as a small but important milestone against a well-funded incumbent Democrat whose name recognition stretches to every corner of the state.
“Coming from never run for anything in my life — it’s not like I’m an established political name. I came from fighting wars and building businesses to doing this,” Sheehy said. “I’m pretty happy where we’re at. We can’t rest on our laurels, as one of the most well-funded Democrats in the nation with the full backing of the Montana media, and the national media do everything they can to push him across the finish line.”
Sheehy was accompanied by Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA), a member of GOP leadership. She lamented on her time back in Washington serving with Tester, the man she said whose voting record proves he is a closet liberal for largely aligning with President Joe Biden. Ernst also credited him for recruiting Harris to the Senate in 2016 as the then-chairman of the Democrats’ campaign arm.
“It was literally Jon Tester that brought her into the fold,” Ernst said. “So now, we have this San Diego liberal-left senator that became vice president that is now running to be president of our great United States of America.”
Ernst put the race into stark terms of her own: Elect Sheehy to be the GOP’s “seat No. 51,” or reelect Tester and kiss the majority goodbye forever. She charged Democrats with wanting to abolish the 60-vote filibuster threshold to usher through an array of liberal policies, including packing the Supreme Court and adding four new Democratic seats by giving statehood to Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico.
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Tester has resisted progressive efforts to remove the 60-vote requirement entirely but has proposed changes or legislative carve-outs that would weaken it.
“Republicans will never, ever again have a majority in the United States Senate,” Ernst said. “We have got to defend our nation, and the way we do it is through the United States Senate.”