Republican challenger Tim Sheehy had a strong performance against Sen. Jon Tester (D) in the debate for Montana’s U.S. Senate race on Monday.
Tester, who faces an uphill battle for reelection against the former U.S. Navy Seal, had a tough showing on Monday night as he and Sheehy discussed a variety of topics, from abortion to border security to housing prices.
In one particularly strong moment from the debate, Sheehy contrasted his service in Afghanistan to Tester cozying up with lobbyists in D.C.
“Sen. Tester knows all about backroom meetings; he’s been taking them for 20 years as the number-one recipient of lobbyist cash,” said Sheehy. “So if you want to talk about backroom meetings: while I was fighting in Afghanistan, he was eating lobbyist steak in D.C.”
In another moment during the debate, the two discussed housing prices and the government’s role in fixing them.
“I think the federal government getting involved more in housing projects, as we see, if you want the problem to get worse, then hand more of it to the federal government,” he said. “I think having Congress come in and having the federal government try to take over housing or price-fix housing, or start turning the knobs on a market, usually that ends up making things worse.”
“We’ve seen that in education where we started federally backing student loans that have driven the cost of education through the roof. Folks are now realizing that taking on that amount of debt to get a degree may not be their best path after all. So building regulation has slowed a lot of building around the country,” he added. “Here in Montana, we’ve seen massive growth in only a handful of our communities across the state while other communities are suffering, and they like to have economic growth.”
SBA Pro-Life America also fact-checked Jon Tester on whether or not he believed there should be a single national law on abortion in the United States. Because Tester did not answer, the group said on X, “Tester voted for a national all-trimester abortion mandate that would wipe out pro-life protections in every state.”
On the issue of border security, Sheehy attacked the Biden-Harris administration for not sealing the U.S. Southern Border.
Senate Democrats and White House Democrats created this border crisis,” Sheehy said. “We had a secure border four years ago. Donald Trump handed a sealed border to the Biden-Harris administration”
“Kamala Harris, the border czar, with the help of her friends on the hill, like Sen. Tester and Chuck Schumer, opened the border wide open for three years, left it open. She refused to even go there. Democrats on the hill, refused to hold the administration accountable for the largest mass migration in the history of this country. We’ve never seen that many people come in in such a short period of time,” he added.
While Sheehy thanked Tester for his service in the U.S. Senate, he reminded voters how he voted to impeach former President Donald Trump twice and said on CNN that Americans should punch Trump in the face.
As Newsweek recently reported, Sheehy’s odds of beating Tester have steadily increased since entering the race.
“A Napolitan News survey, conducted by RMG Research, of 491 likely voters found that 50 percent would back Sheehy, compared to 43 percent who would support Tester in November. In a previous Napolitan survey conducted in August, Tester was ahead in the Montana Senate race by 5 points (49 percent to 44),” it reported last week.
