One of the biggest Senate races of the year is officially set. Finally.
Tim Sheehy on Tuesday easily secured the GOP nomination in Montana to take on Democratic Sen. Jon Tester, nominally kicking off a five-month slog to November.
But the primary had actually long been a formality thanks to national Republicans’ scheming to clear Sheehy’s path. Instead of fighting through a bruising and expensive intraparty battle, Sheehy has spent months going head-to-head with Tester directly, essentially kicking off the general election long before the two nominees were made official.
Neither man’s path to victory in November will be so simple.
Sheehy, a Navy SEAL-turned-aerospace CEO, was personally recruited by Sen. Steve Daines, the head of the Senate GOP campaign arm. Daines is also from Montana, a state that former President Donald Trump won by 16 points in 2020. It is perhaps Republicans’ best pickup opportunity in the country in a cycle where they only need to net one seat to guarantee reclaiming the majority.
But Sheehy will need to get past Tester, a well-funded and battle-tested incumbent who has repeatedly defied political gravity in a state that’s turned more GOP-friendly. The incumbent had $11.7 million banked by mid-May. Sheehy had just $2.2 million.
Sheehy faced only token opposition on Tuesday night. But that wasn’t always the case. For the briefest of moments, Rep. Matt Rosendale (R-Mont.) was in the race.
Eager to avoid the messy primaries and scandal-plagued nominees of 2022, Daines set out to boost his preferred candidates and dissuade any others. As the chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, Daines personally urged Rosendale to sit out the race. GOP strategists feared Rosendale would lose to Tester as he did in 2018.
But Rosendale spent months circling the idea of entering the race — and launched his bid in February. Within hours, Trump endorsed Sheehy at the urging of Daines. Less than a week later, Rosendale dropped out, saying he had no path to victory following the Trump endorsement.
Many Democrats had initially hoped to face Rosendale, a conservative hardliner who joined seven other Republicans to depose then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy. Democrats instead turned their sights solely toward Sheehy in mid-February.
They have been lobbing attacks for months casting Sheehy as a Minnesota native and interloper who doesn’t understand Montana values. They have knocked him for statements he’s made in favor of privatizing public lands and for giving conflicting accounts of how he obtained a bullet wound in his arm.
Tester and Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) are the two red-state Democrats seeking reelection in 2024. Sen. Joe Manchin (I-W.Va.) is retiring, giving Republicans a near-certain pickup there.
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