Dennis McDonald won the Democratic nomination for Congress, receiving perhaps 40 percent of the vote (a lot of precincts are still out, but the trend is clear). That’s no surprise: McDonald had union support, always useful in a low turnout election.
Here are the totals on the Montana Secretary of State’s website as of 0200 this morning:
But the vote totals for Melinda Gopher and Sam Rankin, and the lower than expected total for Tyler Gernant, are surprises. Gopher and Rankin were running soapbox candidacies on a shoestring. I expected each to receive around five percent of the vote. And I expected a much closer race between McDonald and Gernant.
What happened? Two things, I think.
First, I believe that early voting hurt Gernant. His campaign gathered steam during the last half of May, but by then a lot of Democrats, the ones who reject the idea that they have a responsibility to keep their minds open until the campaign ends, had voted — and a lot of them voted for McDonald. Early voting almost always helps the initially better known candidate.
Second, most Democrats understood that none of the Democratic candidates had an ice cube’s chance in a blast furnace of beating Rehberg. That provided an opportunity to cast a protest vote against the Democratic establishment, which was represented by McDonald and Gernant.
One could argue that Gopher lost the election but won the campaign. Some will. I’m tempted, but I’m also mindful that had her votes gone to Gernant, he probably would have defeated McDonald. Instead, in a bitterly ironic twist, she probably sealed the victory for the candidate she liked least.
Dennis McDonald is a good Democrat, but a weak candidate. Three out of five Democrats voted against him. The party will rally behind him (Gopher grudgingly, if she does close ranks), as it should. I wish him well, but unless that ice cube is more heat resistant than I reckoned, this is his last hurrah.