Montana senator Steve Daines, the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, is backing businessman and former Navy SEAL Tim Sheehy in his home state’s 2024 GOP Senate primary. The Wall Street Journal reports:
Senate Republican leadership is taking an early stand in the Montana primary to try to help the party win back the majority in 2024 after a dispiriting result last year.
Steve Daines (R., Mont.), the head of the Senate Republicans’ campaign arm, threw his support behind military veteran and businessman Tim Sheehy, who announced Tuesday that he would run for Senate in the state. His entrance could put the party on course for a contentious primary fight.
Sheehy, the founder of Bridger Aerospace, which provides pilots and planes to fight wildfires, cast himself as a pragmatist who would draw from his twin experiences of serving in the military and running a company.
“Whether it was in war or business, I see problems and solve them,” Sheehy said in a statement. “I’m running for the U.S. Senate because our campaign is about service, duty, and country—not politics as usual.”
The Montana GOP Senate primary could become competitive: Congressman Matt Rosendale, who lost the 2018 Senate race to Democrat Jon Tester by 3.5 points, is considering another run for Senate. Daines’s endorsement clearly signals that he thinks Sheehy would be a stronger GOP candidate than Rosendale in 2024.
Montana is a key race in the battle for control of the Senate, which Democrats control 51-49. If Democrats win Senate races in Montana, Ohio, and Arizona in 2024, they would very likely have the votes to scrap the filibuster and pass a wide array of left-wing policies with a simple majority.
While Republican Jim Justice is favored to beat Democrat Joe Manchin in West Virginia, Manchin has so far been a strong supporter of the filibuster, so the fate of the filibuster doesn’t depend on West Virginia. In 2019, Tester said he couldn’t imagine any circumstances in which he’d vote to get rid of the 60-vote rule, but the Montana Democrat later abandoned his support for the filibuster.