The New Yorker:

Only around a million people live in Montana, but the state will likely determine the balance of power in the U.S. Senate.

By E. Tammy Kim

A summer heat wave had once again sped up the harvest in the Golden Triangle, a mostly flat, fertile pocket of land in Montana’s northern plains. In early August, Jon Tester, the state’s third-term senator, was home, at the end of a long unpaved road, tending to his wheat. Tester calls himself the only “working dirt farmer” in the Senate, and despite his critics’ belief that this is mostly performance, he does, in fact, continue to till the soil near the town of Big Sandy, where he has lived his entire life—and which his grandparents settled in following the Homestead Act of 1862, a giveaway of Indigenous land. Tester and his wife, Sharla, had recently bought some additional acres from their neighbors, Verlin and Patty Reichelt. “I just talked to him this morning next to his tractor,” Verlin told me. The Reichelts are recently retired wheat farmers and, like the Testers, part of a vanishing clan of rural Democrats.

When I met the Reichelts for a drink at the Mint Bar and Café, one of the few storefronts in Big Sandy, and asked if they felt comfortable talking on the record, Patty said, “I’m tired of being off the record! I’m so tired of Republicans saying that the Democrats are going to take the guns away.” She pulled out a little card she’d laminated, listing thirty-one priorities the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 suggested for a second Trump term: “Cut Medicare”; “End marriage equality”; “Deregulate big business and the oil industry.” She wanted to be out and proud as an MSNBC liberal, and was feeling good about the burgeoning energy around Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. But when a man in a Trump shirt (“we’re taking america back”) walked in a few minutes later, and received a compliment from someone at another table, she lowered her voice.

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