Jon Tester looks like Montana.
The Democratic senator weighs in somewhere north of 300 pounds, sports a flat-top haircut, and still works his late grandparent’s farm with his callused, seven-fingered hands after the spinning blades of an industrial meat grinder separated him from three of his fingers long ago.
Anyone arguing that a burly man like Tester has succumbed to the decadence of Washington, D.C., has their work cut out for them. Naturally enough, that job falls to the Republican National Senate Committee.
The NRSC just cut their first ad to put the optics of the senator in context with his voting record. “He may look like Montana,” a disembodied voice says as images of Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren flash on screen, “but he votes like them.”
And there is something to that. Sanders and Warren are probably helpless on a ranch. They lack the aw-shucks appeal of Tester. But when it comes to voting on big marquee pieces of legislation, the three aren’t wildly different. Like Sanders and Warren, Tester voted against Obamacare reform and against the tax cuts.
The NRSC is trying to boost Matt Rosendale, another candidate who also looks like Montana. If Republicans are going to win in Big Sky Country, they will need to find a way to get voters to focus on issues, not image. The ad isn’t a bad start.
