Thursday is a special election in Montana to replace the seat vacated by Ryan Zinke, who is now serving as President Trump’s Interior Secretary. The race has garnered national attention — especially in light of recent events — and could have implications on the GOP’s electoral chances in 2018.
Here are five things you need to know about Montana’s special election.
1. The Republican candidate, Greg Gianforte, allegedly body-slammed a reporter on Wednesday evening. This story has gone viral ever since the reporter, The Guardian‘s Ben Jacobs, claimed that it happened. The Daily Wire‘s James Barrett cited Fox News reporter Alicia Acuna’s account of the incident, which described it as Jacobs repeatedly pressing Gianforte to comment on the Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) latest report on Trumpcare. Gianforte eventually snapped and “grabbed Jacobs by the neck with both hands and slammed him into the ground behind him” and “then began punching the reporter.”
“As Gianforte moved on top of Jacobs, he began yelling something to the effect of, ‘I’m sick and tired of this!'” reported Acuna.
Barrett noted that “an audio recording of the confrontation posted by Jacobs seems to confirm the Fox News team’s account.”
Gianforte released a statement on the matter that pinned the blame on Jacobs:
However, the audio recording and Acuna’s account of the incident contradict Gianforte’s statement. According to Barrett, “Gianforte has been charged with misdemeanor assault and faces up to a $500 fine, six months in jail, or both.”
It’s unclear how the incident will affect Gianforte’s standing in the polls, but three major newspapers in the state have already retracted their endorsements of Gianforte, per Barrett.
2. Gianforte has been running as an ardently pro-Trump candidate. According to Politico, Gianforte tends to fill “his events with Trump stickers” and “his standard speech with mentions of the president.”
“He’s also received in-person visits from Donald Trump Jr. and Vice President Mike Pence,” reports Politico. “In the past three days, the White House has even chipped in with separate robocalls from the president and vice president, urging voters to support Gianforte.”
The Democratic candidate, Rob Quist, has not been making Trump himself an issue in the campaign, but has been consistently attacking Trumpcare throughout.
3. Quist has had problems with paying his taxes. Quist had accumulated over “$27,000 of unpaid debts and property taxes” that wasn’t paid off until 2017. He has blamed it on a “botched gallbladder operation” and filed a medical malpractice lawsuit against the surgeon who performed that operation, identified as Dr. Roch Boyer. However, Boyer charged “that Quist entered the procedure with a history of marijuana usage, a pre-existing genital herpes condition, a previous positive test for tuberculosis, and a past meeting with a marriage counselor where he discussed his ‘failing marriage,'” per PJ Media.
The PJ Media article also points out there is reason to believe that Quist’s health problems may not necessarily be to blame for the debts and property taxes he owed:
The Washington Free Beacon’s Scher questioned Quist’s contention that he was unable to pay taxes and other debts due to the 1992 surgery. During the suit, the Quists disclosed that they brought in $136,412 in income in 1994. Real estate records show that the candidate’s wife, Bonni Quist, has sold over $15 million worth of property since 2006, which would have earned her about $500,000 according to standard commission rates.
In 2007, the year the Quists refused to pay thousands of dollars in property taxes, Bonni Quist was the agent for three real estate sales each valued at nearly $1 million.
Quist has continued his struggling music career, and performed 50 times in 2007. In recent years, he has gotten paid a few thousand dollars per performance, according to a recent financial disclosure. This does not mean he received the same amount in 2007, but it stands to reason that he was bringing in some appreciable income through performing. The Free Beacon also reported that he has been able to secure recurring gigs at a nudist resort in Idaho.
4. In order for Gianforte to win, he needs a strong turnout on Thursday. Jeff Roe, who was Sen. Ted Cruz’s (R-TX) campaign manager during the 2016 Republican primary, explained the current state of the vote on Twitter:
Gianforte is still expected to narrowly win, but it’s certainly possible that the body-slamming incident will have enough of an effect on turnout to hand Quist a victory.
5. A poor showing by Gianforte could spell trouble for the GOP if it’s part of a broader trend. FiveThirtyEight‘s Harry Enten explains:
The consistency here is key. Any single House special election is susceptible to district-specific factors. (There’s the body-slamming incident, to take just one example. And even before that, Gianforte seemed a bit out of place in Montana. He was a billionaire tech entrepreneur from New Jersey who was last seen losing Montana’s 2016 gubernatorial race, even as Trump was cruising in the state.) But special elections as a group have done a decent job of forecasting the following midterm’s House results. When a party vastly underperforms the past presidential vote consistently, it tends to do poorly in the following midterm. If the average House Republican candidate has underperformed nationally by 16 points once all the special elections occur, it would be on par with 2006, when Democrats took back the House.
In other words, if the GOP candidate puts in an underwhelming performance in Kansas, and in Georgia, and in Montana, it’s probably safe to conclude that there’s something going on nationally rather than in just those three states specifically. We already heard Republicans try to explain away Ron Estes’s relatively poor performance in Kansas by pointing to Gov. Sam Brownback’s unpopularity. And while Gianforte’s flaws probably give Quist (who himself has issues) a better chance than normal in such a red state, Montanans typically don’t send a non-incumbent Democrat to Congress unless the national mood is poor for Republicans. The state’s Democratic Sen. Jon Tester originally won office in 2006 when he beat then-incumbent Sen. Conrad Burns. That year, Tester benefited from President George W. Bush’s 47 percent approval rating in the state. Williams originally won the state’s only congressional seat when President George H.W. Bush was so unpopular that he lost Montana in the 1992 presidential election.
If Quist were to win, he would be the first Montana Democrat elected to the House since 1994, which, of course, would be an alarming result for the GOP. The wild card here is the body-slamming incident’s effect on the election, so a Quist win may be the result of that incident and not necessarily part of a broader trend against the GOP, but if the Georgia special election in June sees similar results, then the GOP should definitely start panicking.