By the time Monica Tranel, the Democratic candidate for Montana’s 1st congressional district, arrived at the Philipsburg Fire Volunteer Department, the event was in full swing. A long line of cars was parked along the dirt road leading to the fundraiser, which featured live music and chili. Attendees sat at fold-out tables inside the fire hall or gathered outside in the parking lot, holding cups of locally brewed beer as they chatted under the strengthening April sun.

Tranel, who came within striking distance of defeating Republican Ryan Zinke when she first ran for the seat in 2022, approached potential voters with a drink in her hand and a smile on her face. Philipsburg is a nineteenth-century mining town nestled among the mountains between Butte and Missoula. It is staunchly Republican. Two years ago, Zinke won the surrounding county with 64 percent of the vote; Donald Trump won it with 67 percent in 2020.

Although she is running as a Democrat, Tranel told attendees, she was first and foremost a Montanan: shorthand to let residents know she was, more than anything, one of them. She aimed to maintain a local focus in a conversation with a mustachioed local business owner in P-Burg, as residents call it. They talked about how coal mine closures had affected the local economy and expressed mutual frustration with increased private ownership of public lands. The biggest political issue in the state is arguably the upheaval—and the rising cost of living—caused by rapid population growth. But Tranel wasn’t trying to connect with recent arrivals—she wanted to make an impression on the native Montanans.

“I’m really trying to convey to people that I know this district,” Tranel explained to me later. “I know the people who live here, and I know what the issues are right now.… I know what’s causing hurt, and I know where people are wanting solutions to be advanced.”

But Tranel’s local focus would not necessarily be enough to sway the man’s vote. He told me that he consumed national political talk radio regularly, trying to hear both sides. He listened to what liberal media outlets were saying until it made him want, he said, to “puke in my mouth.” Engagement with national media only entrenched his stance that his conservative beliefs were the right side of America’s political divide. He appreciated that Tranel had visited, he said—as Tranel later told me, showing up where Zinke did not might sway voters in her favor—but he still didn’t believe he could vote for her. They just disagreed on too much.

Aided in part by the decimation of Montana’s local newspapers, the state’s politics have become ever more focused on national issues, to the benefit of Republicans. The GOP has simply done a better job than the Democrats of tying rivals to their party’s national platform, said Tammi Fisher, a former mayor of Kalispell, a town in conservative Flathead County. At the same time, the type of moderate “Blue Dog” Democrats that Montanans have long preferred are a dying breed.

“The greater Montana population doesn’t know who a Blue Dog Democrat is anymore because they’re afraid—‘Is that Nancy Pelosi in sheep’s clothing?’” Fisher explained.

Of course, moderate Republicans are also nearly extinct as well. Bruce Tutvedt, a business-oriented Republican who previously represented Kalispell in the state legislature, described the current political leanings of his former district as “red meat, rabid, red, red, raw.” That trend is playing out statewide: During its 2023 session, the Montana legislature focused on several issues that have dominated right-wing media, such as barring gender-affirming care for minors and banning drag queens from reading to children in public libraries.

“It used to be that local and state issues mattered a lot more, so you could have Democrats in Montana carve out their unique personal brand that was sufficiently detached from the impressions that........

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