Op-Ed: Even with a win in Georgia Tuesday, Democrats lose — they could have had two seats for the price of one

Though I have lived for 30 years in Montana, I grew up in Texas, inculcated with the story of the Alamo, where the heroes — Travis, Bowie, Crockett and Austin; 186 men, one woman, two babies — fought Santa Anna’s Mexican army of 10,000 for 13 days, inflicting heavy casualties and buying time for Sam Houston to muster at San Jacinto, where, less than a month later, the Texan volunteers wrested the land we now call Texas away from Mexican rule. A loss for a gain — the sacrifice play.

In Montana, on May 25, in a special election to fill the state’s single House seat vacated by the newly appointed secretary of the Interior, Ryan Zinke, state Democrats shaved 14.5 percentage points off Donald Trump’s showing in November, turning out for candidate Rob Quist. Despite that remarkable reversal, Republicans held the Montana seat. Quist lost to billionaire Greg Gianforte by 6 percentage points. Perhaps the most telling stat from Quist’s campaign was this: 95% of his contributions were for $200 or less.

In other words, national Democrats barely showed up for this race. They weren’t savvy enough, or they just didn’t care enough, to recognize that even a few hundred thousand dollars more, combined with despair over Trump and the rarity of a special election, might have switched this heartland prairie seat from red to blue.

That amount of money would have been chump change compared with what the Democratic Party has lavished on another similar special election, Tuesday’s similar special election in Georgia, where Jon Ossoff is trying to flip a House seat in a traditionally Republican suburban Atlanta district. One Georgia-Montana comparison is instructive: The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has invested $5 million in Ossoff’s run; the DCCC kicked in about $500,000 to aid Quist.

Those figures raise this question: Which is more valuable, a seat in Congress that represents suburban “elites,” or a seat that represents the newly prized flyover voter, in this case gun-owning nurses and tractor-driving PhDs., city refugees and fifth-generation ranchers, the third-largest landmass in the Lower 48, a sprawling energy and agriculture state with a deep tradition of support for what Democrats once were leaders in: big-hearted, pragmatic populism suited to the rural and urban enclaves of the New West (and maybe even the New South)?

I think the appropriate answer in a democracy should be neither, but the national Democratic Party made a clear choice.

I’m a Democrat. I even like to think of myself as a good Democrat, and I do not like to think of myself as one who points fingers in defeat. But I also like to think of myself as someone who learns from a mistake, and I would hope national Democrats would do the same: Fight with something like equal firepower for every seat, every time.

Hindsight’s 20-20, but early on especially, national Republicans in Montana supported Gianforte far beyond what the Democrats did for Quist (according to NPR, Gianforte got five times more “outside” money than Quist).

I found Gianforte’s verbal spew more abusive than even his physical violence — he choked and punched a journalist just before the election. Day after blessed day during the campaign, I went up to my rural mailbox and opened it to find a new oversized postcard — a photo-shopped portrait of Quist, a sweet and good man, stomping his country-and-western boot heels on pictures of smiling foursquare Anglo families, or blowing up mountaintops with dynamite, or dressed in vampire garb and in cahoots with a cackling Nancy Pelosi, both grinning fiendishly as they destroyed “Montana values.”

Montana values, indeed. It was enough to make one sick.

Timing is everything in politics. I submit that the special election in Montana was a big thing, not just in Montana but nationally; that it was worth going all in not just because the seat was winnable but to support issues like the protection of public lands and to make a stand in flyover country for sweet reason. If you believe Trump must be countered to protect national and global security, then the Montana vote was as much a crucial referendum as the vote in Georgia. Yet, as with the Alamo, sufficient reinforcements didn’t show up.

Rage is unpredictable, and damned near impossible to sustain; it tends to ultimately consume and destroy the vessels that house it. The time, then, is now. Was now. Yet the national resources flowed to Georgia, not Montana. They flowed to the old model of urban Democrat rather than the struggling middle-lander, the rural guy who can speak the language of Trump voters.

Democratic brothers and sisters: If you win in Georgia — taking just one slender House seat, instead of the two you might have had — remember Montana’s sacrifice.

And Ossoff — if you become Rep. Ossoff, you will have an obligation to your district of 92,000 (approximately one-tenth the population of Montana’s single at-large House district) but also the residents of Big Sky Country.

Remember, please, a battle fought with scant outside help, nearly 3,000 miles away, on almost nothing but guts and glory. Be humble, be helpful. Our loss will be your victory.

Author Rick Bass brought together 40 Montana writers in support of Rob Quist’s candidacy, with a website and printed anthology titled “We Take Our Stand.”

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