Jon Tester spends his weekdays in Washington, bouncing from Senate committee hearings to votes on the floor and other appointments on Capitol Hill. When Thursday (or sometimes Friday) hits, he flies home to whatever chore awaits him next on his organic grain farm in North Central Montana.
It’s the same routine the three-term senator, whose reelection race could decide which party controls the chamber in 2025, has been following for 17 years now. Balancing his duties in Washington with planting, haying, harvesting and fixing machinery has been a challenge, Tester admits. But he’s managed to find ways to make it work: sourcing his seed months before planting season, using larger machinery that can cover more rows of crops, and relying on help from his wife, Sharla.
“If the seeding doesn’t get done, it’s because I didn’t do it,” he says. “If the harvest don’t get done, it’s because I didn’t do it. But please know that my wife can run every piece of equipment that I can, and that’s how we get it done.”
Tester is a rarity in today’s Senate — a rural Democrat who’s used his agriculture background and down-home image to maintain his lock on a seat representing a conservative constituency (Montana has voted for a Republican in the presidential election on every ballot since 1996).
Tester, a member of the Senate Ag Appropriations Subcommittee, is one of three Senate Democrats with races rated as “toss-ups” by both the Cook Political Report with Amy Walter and Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia Center for Politics. Democrats (and independent members who caucus with the party) currently hold a 51-49 majority in the Senate, though West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin's retirement in a deep red state is expected to bring it to a 50-50 split, according to Jessica Taylor, Cook's Senate editor.
This means that if Tester or one of the other two at-risk candidates — Ohio Democrat Sherrod Brown and Arizona Independent Kyrsten Sinema — were to lose their reelection bids, Republicans could take the chamber.
“If we win Montana, we win majority control of the United States Senate,” said Tester's GOP colleague, Montana Sen. Steve Daines, who chairs the National Republican Senatorial Committee. “It’s as simple as that.”
Tester's size — he's over six feet tall — and flat-top haircut make him easy to spot on Capitol Hill. He has sent Sen. Cory Booker, a New Jersey Democrat and former college football player, tumbling to the ground several times, including for a video the two senators created about “tackling” consolidation in the ag industry. Tester and Booker, or the “immovable object” and the “unstoppable force” as the latter puts it, have made a game of trying to knock one another down.
Sens. Cory Booker, D-N.J., (left) and Jon Tester, D-Mont., (right) appear in a video to discuss their work to address consolidation in agriculture.“He’s a fighter,” Booker says. “We joke about our physicality with each other. I’ve been knocked down by Jon Tester more than any other Senator — on a basketball court, in a conference room. But the truth of the matter is he’s ferocious in this institution for battling for Montana, and for battling for farmers.”
Tester’s grandparents homesteaded in Choteau County in 1910 and passed control of the farm to his parents in 1943. His father opened a custom butcher shop in the 1960s, where a nine-year-old Tester would accidentally sever the three middle fingers of his left hand while helping his parents guide beef shoulder through a meat grinder.
Tester went to college in Great Falls in 1974 with a performance scholarship to play trumpet, graduated with a degree in music in 1978, and worked for the following two years as a music teacher at the Big Sandy School District. He also took over the farm — something he had told his family he wanted to do when he was eight.
Today, Tester’s main cash crops are barley and white, red, spring and winter wheat, though he still plants “damn near half the place” into peas every year to plow down later for fertilizer. He has 2,400 acres of land in total, though it’s not all farmed; roughly 160 acres of land came out of the Conservation Reserve Program last year, but Tester has yet to till the land to make it suitable for crop production and is still determining the tract's next steps.
Tester converted the farm into organic in the ‘80s, in part because of his wife's allergy to a particular seed treatment. While he says organic is not the right choice for every farmer, he was able to find a market — when he initially started he was offered $7.50 a bushel for organic durum wheat — and said the decision worked well for him.
“I don’t think we would be in business if I hadn’t done it,” Tester said.
Montana ranks third and fourth in the nation in production of barley and wheat respectively, according to USDA. It’s also prime cattle country, serving as home to 1.27 million head of beef cows. Sheep production, too, is an important sector, with about 190,000 raised in the state.
Competition, cattle issues top of mind for Tester
Tester has placed a large focus on competition issues and, according to Montana Farmers Union President Walter Schweitzer, is even looking into satisfying the long-running Farmers Union push for a “competition title” in the farm bill, though that will be a tall task due to divisions in the industry. Tester has advocated for strengthening the Packers and Stockyards Act, which he says has been weakened gradually over the past 100 years.
“The bill’s still there, it still works,” Tester said of the Packers and Stockyards Act. “You’ve just got to be able to put teeth in it.”
During the Trump administration, Tester fought an effort he thought would weaken PSA enforcement. Ahead of a 2021 call with Tester, Agriculture Department officials were alerted that the Montana Democrat “cares deeply about the provisions related to demonstrating harm across the entire sector and ‘sweetheart deals’ between major meatpackers and select large livestock producers,” according to a 2021 memo obtained by Agri-Pulse through a Freedom of Information Act request.
Tester, a current MFU member, also waded into the “right-to-repair” debate last year by introducing a bill that would require farm equipment manufacturers to provide producers with “any documentation, part, software or tool required to diagnose, maintain, or repair their equipment.” If manufacturers were to violate the law as proposed, they’d lose the copyright and any patents relating to that product.
Tester also has worked across lines on other competition issues.
Tester teamed up with Grassley and Sens. Deb. Fischer, R-Neb., and Ron Wyden, D-Ore., on legislation aimed at increasing cash trading in cattle markets, and he introduced a bill with Booker and South Dakota Republicans John Thune and Mike Rounds to reinstate mandatory country of origin labeling for beef products.
"Rural issues are things that bring a lot of us together in the upper Midwest," said Rounds. "We have a similar relationship with some of our colleagues in Minnesota, Nebraska, North Dakota, Montana, Wyoming. We've all got that same sense of kind of a rural nature and we work together on projects."
Tester's work across the aisle isn't limited to legislating. He and Rounds last year created “Seventeen Finger Select,” a beer named after the collective number of digits on the two lawmakers' hands. Tester described the dark American wheat-style beer, which was brewed using his own barley and won last year’s Brew Across America Congressional Brewing Competition, as “sweet, and pure, and like mother’s milk.”
“Look, it was a good beer, but I’ll be honest with you, it’s not a beer you’d want to drink a lot of,” Tester said. “Because it tasted good with brats, but if you drank a lot, I’m afraid you might wake up with a headache.”
Tester the 'New Deal Democrat'
Despite hailing from a state former President Donald Trump carried by 16 points in the 2020 elections, Tester has been a reliable Senate ally of President Joe Biden.
Tester voted with Biden 91% of the time in 2021 and 2022, according to political analysis site FiveThirtyEight. Tester voted for the Inflation Reduction Act, which included about $370 billion in subsidies and other measures to carry out Biden’s climate policy. He also voted for a $1.9 trillion pandemic aid package, the American Rescue Plan, and has supported Biden on environmental and gun regulations.
Tester's ability to win over voters in some of Montana’s more rural- and military-oriented areas — like Cascade, Hill, Lake and Park counties — has been key to his success in previous elections, according to Lee Banville, a journalism professor at the University of Montana. Tester garners enough support to “either be really close or slightly win” in these counties, and then he “runs up the numbers” in the population centers of Butte, Missoula and Bozeman, Banville said.
“He’s fairly well received in agricultural communities,” Banville said. “I think that helps stabilize his vote in communities where he’s probably not going to win, but he doesn’t lose that badly, and that allows him to put together a coalition that gets him over the line.”
Former Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, who represented North Dakota as a Democrat from 2013 to 2019, calls Tester a “New Deal” Democrat, someone who believes that “America does best when we invest in people,” pointing to his work on rural and veterans issues.
Heitkamp said she shares many of the same values as Tester, including the idea that people should never be left out “because of where they live or what their ZIP code is.” She was pleased, she said, when she was given the nickname “Jon Tester in a skirt” due to their similar views.
Former Sen. Heidi HeitkampHeitkamp, who also served a largely rural, conservative constituency, said Montana’s politics do differ from her own state’s in a number of ways. Montana has a high veteran population, which heightens the importance of Tester’s focus on veteran issues and chairmanship of the Senate Veterans' Affairs Committee.
Montana also contains a vast array of public lands, which makes conservation issues crucial for him. And Montanans have a libertarian “my business is my business and you don’t belong in my business” mindset, something she said Tester understands.
Tester also has a sense of humor, "a trait that’s way undervalued in politics,” Heitkamp said.
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“He doesn’t blink if someone tries to give him grief or some crap. He’ll just look at them and say, ‘Yeah, I did that.’”
GOP opponent to be determined
Two Republican challengers are so far vying for their party’s 2024 nomination, though it’s possible more may jump into the race, including Rep. Matt Rosendale.
Tester won election to the Senate in 2006, a strong Democratic year, unseating Republican incumbent Conrad Burns, and then won re-election in 2012, defeating then-Rep. Dennis Rehberg, and in 2018, when he beat Rosendale.
The current Republican front-runner appears to be Tim Sheehy, a former Navy SEAL and the CEO of Bridger Aerospace, though he will need to face off in the primary against Brad Johnson, a former Montana Secretary of State who also chaired the state’s public service commission.
Armed with $2.8 million in campaign cash, Sheehy has the backing of both Daines and Montana's other congressman, Rep. Ryan Zinke. Sheehy helped found Little Belt Cattle Co., a 20,000-acre Black Angus and Wagyu cattle ranch, and lists “Supporting Montana Agriculture” as one of his priorities on his campaign website.
Sheehy’s campaign website says he believes in “fair prices” for farmers and a “secure” U.S. food supply. Daines said Sheehy is actively involved in the Montana Stockgrowers Association and describes him as a “guy who’s very comfortable cutting hay and rounding up cows.”
“I think he will definitely have a strong appeal to our ag community,” Daines said.
Tester, meanwhile, has amassed a $19.6 million war chest, which includes contributions from political action committees affiliated with the American Trucking Associations, the Southern Minnesota Beet Sugar Cooperative, the Minn-Dak. Farmers Cooperative, the American Bankers Association, the Farm Credit Council, and the American Soybean Association.
Rosendale, who lost to Tester in the 2018 general election, is “heavily considering” jumping into next year’s race, according to a video the conservative House member released last week.
While Montana voters used to elect more Democrats into office, Banville said the state has seen a “pretty dramatic shift towards almost straight Republican votes” over the last 15 years, with Tester being the exception. It makes him wonder if the organic grain farmer is truly the “last of a breed” of Democrats able to succeed in the state.
“Is Jon Tester — even if he wins reelection — is he the last of his kind? Or is there still a kind of Democratic candidate out here who can win? We just don't know,” Banville said.
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