Jon Tester Bets the Farm
Senator Jon Tester and I are in the cab of his Case IH combine, rolling through a field on his 1,800-acre farm outside Big Sandy, Montana. I’m trying to get him to talk about identity politics and the future of the Democratic Party. He’s trying to harvest wheat.
It’s a Tuesday morning in August. This year’s harvest happens to coincide with the closing weeks of one of the most closely watched Senate races in the midterm elections. Tester is campaigning for a third term as a Democrat in a state that went for Donald Trump by more than 20 points. The inside of a combine might not be the obvious place for a senator facing such a challenge, but wheat, he notes, doesn’t harvest itself.
Tester is some 300 pounds and north of six feet in his cowboy boots, with a flattop haircut and three missing fingers from an accident with a meat grinder when he was 9 years old. He is wearing a frayed baseball cap and a blue button-up with dirt smeared on the front.
He looks less like a standard-bearer of the Democratic Party than like the kind of guy who long ago abandoned it.
I ask about the charge that the Democrats have forgotten the white working class—a demographic that includes most of the voting population of the state.
“If we become a party of ‘These guys are for the white guys, and these guys are for the brown guys,’ I don’t think that’s healthy for the country at all,” he says over the thrum of the combine engine. “I think we’ve got to be for everybody.”
What does he make of rising stars like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the perceived leftward swing of the party?
“I think difference of opinion is a good thing.”
Tester is sticking to the center, and that shouldn’t come as a surprise. He first won office in 2006
