Majestic, messy Montana

BILLINGS, BOZEMAN, BUTTE, LIVINGSTON, & MISSOULA, Mont.—"Hello, I’m Amanda Curtis, and I’m your next U.S. senator.” That was what the Democratic candidate, a 35-year-old high-school math teacher with $24,000 in student loan debt and a pierced nose, was telling prospective voters in Livingston, gateway city to Yellowstone National Park.

Her hope seemed unlikely to find fulfillment—polls showed Republican Rep. Steve Daines with a solid lead—but Curtis is a new face in America’s merry, messy, wacky political theater, and campaign teams on both sides are chugging coffee, biting fingernails, and selling tickets to a play that might soon close its curtains. For eight days I got to peek behind those curtains, joining Montana candidates on the campaign trail and talking to campaign volunteers, local voters, and so-called “nonpartisan” grassroots organizations.

Montana is now a state with dramatic clashes of blue and red, a microcosm of America’s political polarization, and Curtis is running only because the previous candidate, John Walsh, dropped out after newspapers reported he had plagiarized his master’s thesis. With the clock ticking, Montana Democrats rushed out a nominating convention and selected Curtis, a left-wing state legislator from Butte. Even some Democratic top guns saw her as a mouse scratching an elephant, and several people called her a “sacrificial lamb.”

That didn’t keep Curtis from showing up at a picturesque fishing access site overlooking the Yellowstone River. The big sky swirled with dense dripping clouds, then brightened into baby blues and buttercup streaks, and then drizzled again—all within Curtis’ 15-minute speech on public lands, a sore issue for Montanans. She came with her dogs Billie and Rick, her cat Geoff, and her husband Kevin, a freelance videographer and delegate for the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), an anarcho-syndicalist federation championing the dismantling of “parasitic” capitalism.

The IWW peaked a century ago and is now known largely to labor historians, but here Curtis was speaking to 20 voters and inspiring some of them, like “Cunningham,” who would only give his last name. He’s a 67-year-old retired construction worker who’s worried about corporations “raping pillage on the planet” and suspicious of the “whim and capriciousness of the commerce people.” Sucking on a long cigarette tucked between labor-hewn fingers, he added, “Montana needs a new face like her. She’s got a social conscience behind that face.”

Curtis’ ideological roots go deep down to her childhood: Her parents divorced, her mother had mental illness, her brother shot himself dead playing Russian roulette. She watched various family members abuse alcohol and drugs. Her family depended on food stamps and sometimes went without utilities. Today she still shops at Kmart and the Goodwill store. She sings old gospel songs in pubs with banjo-plucking Kevin and a friend who strums a homemade washtub bass. She’s your slightly kooky, salt-of-the-earth neighbor evangelicals hope to invite to church, but few vote for.

Will other Montanans? The conservative America Rising PAC wants to forestall any chance of an upset: It sent a tracker to record Curtis’ every move and radical pronouncement, although it’s hard to beat the video selfies Curtis already put on YouTube each day during the first 87 days of the 2013 Montana legislative session. (She describes herself as “an anarchist at heart.”) But every time the tracker with sunglasses and a video camera moved closer to Curtis, her fans slid their bodies or their signs in front of him. At one point husband Kevin stood beside the tracker whistling loudly, and later another Curtis follower thrust his cell phone into the tracker’s face, snapped pictures, and explained, “I’m harassing back.”

FOR VOTERS like “Cunningham,” Republican candidate Daines represents the story Democrats nationwide are hoping will win votes: He’s rich and “out of touch with the average Montanan.” It doesn’t help that Daines was born in California, the state Montanans love to hate. But it does help that Daines moved to Montana for kindergarten and is not from a silver-spoon family. He attended public schools and grew up hunting, backpacking, hiking, and fishing. He worked for his parents’ construction company—doing carpentry, shoveling gravel, sweeping floors, piling and throwing out trash—to pay for college. Everything about him seems mild: He’s mild-mannered, mild-tempered, mild-spoken, truly a Mr. Montana Nice Guy.

Cindy Daines, a petite woman with chin-length blond hair and a Julia Roberts smile, also helps. During one reception, while her husband of 28 years moved from person to person, she sat with a group of women, nibbled on meatballs, and listened more than she talked. When she does speak up, she’s both lively and humble. She said she wasn’t all too pleased at first when Steve decided to run for office, but she enjoys accompanying him on the campaign trail and learning about things she’s never known before, such as the common values between Native Americans and conservative Republicans. Every time Steve gives a speech, he calls his “beautiful wife” over to stand next to him, and she walks over and slides her arm around his waist.

I trailed Daines as he tossed the coin at a local college football game, visited a campaign office to thank volunteers, and attended a fundraising reception at a friend’s home. While volunteers munched on Jimmy John’s sandwiches and reception guests nibbled on homemade brownies, Daines was constantly on his feet, chatting with people aged 8 to 80. He had flown home to Bozeman the night before from Washington, D.C. He was up at 6 the next morning for meetings, then drove two hours with his wife in a pickup truck to Billings. It was past 7 p.m. when they headed back home.

At his Billings campaign office, the youngest volunteer was 8-year-old Holden Shellnut, who helped hold a huge campaign sign by a street, with his little freckly face barely poking out above the sign. The next youngest volunteer was 13-year-old Gary Nixon, who was calling potential voters: “Hi, my name is Gary and I’m calling with the Montana Voter Engagement Team. …” He read out a script he was given as he swayed about on his swivel chair, then told me he’s against Obamacare and dislikes Michelle Obama for shrinking the amount of meat in his school lunch: He says she’s starving school kids with too much veggies and not enough meat.

Another worker at the campaign office, Richard Waide, 64, has volunteered for Republican campaigns since he was in his 20s. “People don’t realize how important grassroots efforts are,” he said: “If we all do just a little bit, then democracy really blossoms. If we want to maintain our democracy, then we have to take personal responsibility.” During years of campaigning he’s met too many apathetic citizens who don’t even realize how soon the next election is. He calls Steve Daines a “real person. Where’s the beef? Steve Daines is the beef.”

MONTANANS DON'T LIKE the federal government nosing into their business. They still carry the streak of independence that lured their ancestors—homesteaders, Confederate sympathizers, opportunists, and outlaws—to the Wild West. But with one of the nation’s highest percentages of the elderly, veterans, and Native Americans, Montana depends heavily on federal money.

Montanans also have a stormy history with big corporations. Butte, a once-booming mining town, sat under the domination of the Anaconda Company in every area from commerce to government. It wasn’t too long ago that Montana witnessed lynching, violent strikes, mining disasters, and environmental degradation. Today, Butte looks as if the earth sneezed dirt into the air, and skeletal headframes still loom over abandoned mines.

Montana’s voting history shows this struggle between Montanans’ conservative nature and liberal impulses: Its congressional ballot split 78 percent of the time over the last century. Local political scientist David Parker called Montanans politically conflicted: “You look at the state, and it looks red, but it’s really purple.”

Montanans tend to distrust outsiders they haven’t met. Curtis is a hands-on personal campaigner: I watched her wrap two decades-older women into a tight hug, squealing, “Ladies, one last hug!” One of the women later remarked, “I can’t imagine Steve Daines doing something like that.” Republicans are similarly arch about Curtis, often describing her as “crazy” and “communist.” When I told one political aide that Curtis was “interesting,” he boggled his eyes and patted me on the shoulder saying, “What a nice Christian way to put it.”

On my last evening in Missoula, I chugged my rental car up an unpaved road through a blaze of dust, hunting for an address marked “invalid” on my GPS. Then I sat in the rustic kitchen of a three-story farmhouse and tasted the tender backstrap of a well-seasoned elk that my friendly hosts had shot in their backwoods. Later I found myself riding a bright blue four-wheeler with Lana Lake, a 23-year-old Korean adoptee who is now a U.S. Air Force second lieutenant. Accompanying us were her two yellow Labs and a 22-caliber rifle and a 20-gauge shotgun—in case we ran into wolves and coyotes.

I clung for my life as the giant beast bumped, rumbled, and bulldozed over eight acres of wild fields, my butt ping-ponging on the seat and my feet flying up to my ears with every jolt. The bleeding sun plunged into a gauze of violets, the wind whistled, the dogs barked in cacophony to the vehicle’s roar, the air smelled dry and sharp, and we had nothing but wide-open space before us. At that moment I understood with all my senses why Montanans take pride in their land and value their independence.

Whether Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, or politically agnostic, every Montanan’s eyes brightened when I confessed it was my first time visiting the state. I told them the truth—that I’d rarely seen such pristine beauty as Montana’s—and they would nod knowingly, pleased. A few suggested I keep that revelation to myself when I return to Los Angeles. “We don’t want them all moving up here,” one woman said with a wink. “Tell them there’s always Idaho.”

Even I, a stranger, felt fierce protectiveness for this land that holds more cows than humans. The roads took me up and around mountains humped and bristling with conifers like the back of a grizzly bear, reaching so high up that I felt if I stood on my tip-toes I could poke the belly of the heavens. The green hills dotted with yellow, tangerine, and burgundy trumpeted the beginning of fall. Montanans are blessed to witness God’s wisdom, power, humor, and love each time they step out the door. But not everyone acknowledges the Creator.

Learning at school

Observing Montana’s Senate race reminded me of my public-school days in Virginia. I had just immigrated to America from Singapore, and my favorite eighth-grade class was U.S. civics, in which I learned about democracy, the Constitution, separation of powers, checks and balances. I fell hard in love with America, convinced that Americans had created the perfect political system where everyone enjoys equal voice and rights, votes responsibly, and hears freedom ringing in their ears.

I got a taste of democracy during student council elections. Two students ran for president: a popular blond kid, and a less popular freckled kid who promised many appealing things: longer recess, later first period, ice cream parties. The popular candidate proposed more realistic things, such as nicer decorations for dances that I didn’t attend. I knew the first candidate’s promises were wildly idealistic, but I voted for him anyway, because his obvious desperation earned my sympathies. The popular kid won.

Nobody knew what he did as student president after election, and few cared except to complain now and then about the lack of changes. Even middle-schoolers learn that no candidate is perfect and no political system keeps humans from messing up. —S.L.