Democrat Senator Says He Won’t Endorse Kamala Amid Tough Re-Election

A Democrat senator worrying about his re-election campaign says he won’t endorse Vice President Kamala Harris for president.

Sen. Jon Tester (D-MT) has previously refused to endorse Harris, but last week, he specifically told NBC Montana why.

“Two reasons — because I’m focused on my race, and number two, people want to nationalize this race, and this isn’t about national politics,” Tester told the outlet. “This is about Montana.”

NBC Montana said it had previously asked Tester about Harris running for president, as he hadn’t said anything about it throughout August. But Tester wouldn’t respond, and his staff told the outlet he was too busy harvesting to answer the question.

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The outlet was finally able to pin him down at an event last week following Tester’s decision to skip the Democratic National Convention. The senator was asked why it was so crucial for him to be in Montana right now and whether the “energy” from the DNC had made him reconsider if he would endorse Harris.

Tester’s refusal to tie himself to Harris has been seen as an effort to save his own job. Former President Donald Trump leads the polls in Montana, which Trump won by 16 points in 2020. Tester is also the only Democrat in Montana’s congressional delegation.

He won his previous elections by less than four points (3.1 percentage points in 2018 and 3.7 percentage points in 2012), so if his GOP opponent, Sheehy, is helped even a little by the state’s favor of Trump, Tester could lose his seat.

All recent polls of the Montana Senate race put Sheehy in the lead, and the Real Clear Politics polling average has him up five points.

The most recent poll, from Rasmussen, gives Sheehy a 7-point lead, and the three polls before that, conducted between June 29 and August 12, also showed the challenger leading by a comfortable margin: +5 in the latest Remington poll, +2 in the latest poll from Emerson, and +6 in a poll taken by KULR-TV between August 10 and 12.

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Tester also appears to be running against his own record, including attacks on President Joe Biden’s handling of the border – when just last year, Tester was praising Biden’s policies.

“I think the big issue here is we need to make sure the southern border is secure and I think the President has helped do that,” Tester said last year on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”

Tester now claims that he is “working with Republicans to do whatever it takes to finally secure the border,” according to a campaign ad that ran in May.