Hacker News Reader

Comment by alexkavon | Hacker News Reader

Why do you say this?

I ask because, I am from Montana and I often find outside knowledge of Montana consists of "they have an unlimited speed on the highway/interstate" (which hasn't been true for quite sometime) mindset applied to any information about Montana. It is usually viewed as a red state, but it's a different kind of red than what you find on the coasts. Our governor is blue and our state was essentially founded by socialists. Our state is usually pretty vocal on political matters and protecting the public (our most famous and easiest example of course being protection of public lands).

View on HN

Not OP but I had the same thought as them. I know I was expecting the first state to be WA or CA, or some other heavily/known blue state, not a (somewhat random) midwestern state. If I were to research it further I'm sure it wouldn't come as much of a surprise, but my initial and uneducated reaction was shock.

Montana is considered a Western state, not midwest. I agree it's somewhat surprising, but Montana is dominated (population-wise) by relatively left-leaning population centers. I'd consider it to be a libertarian leaning western state similar to Colorado but without the insanely religious component of Colorado Springs.

I agree with this to an extent. The red has a Libertarian tint, but even the Libertarians in Montana are different. The best way I've been able to identify with it over the years is consider myself an independent.

And without the CA transplants who (I'm generalizing here) lean left to the point where "libretarian" is not a good descriptor for any government they have a meaningful say in.

Montana might be a western state but as far as most people on the coasts (also generalizing) care or know (is there a difference) if you don't have saltwater coastline or a big city you're a backwards flyover state with nothing much going on.

You're probably not wrong about "most people on the coasts" (I'm from WA and live in CA) but I think those of us on the west coast are far less inclined than east coasters to dismiss Western states like UT, MT, WY, NV, CO, etc, as "midwest". I think to the east coast it's often "somewhere over there in the middle" and not realizing how far west they really are, and how similar in many ways the culture is to the Pacific states, particularly the inland areas of said states. The same way I think all those east coast states are "little states somewhere way over there" :)

I work in a city on the east coast. About 1/4th of the people I work with are from or have lived on the west coast.

I notice no difference.

Actually, most of the "transplants" that go to Montana or Idaho are those who are going because they believe the state is "too liberal" or that there's "too much crime".

Sure, but that doesn't mean they don't bring values that don't fit there.

I actually sat next to a woman and her son at a Seahawks game in Seattle; they live in Pocatello, ID but had moved there from Redding, CA a handful of years ago. Some amusing (to me) bullet points from our conversation:

* She wanted to make sure they went to an afternoon game because she didn't want to be in "the city" after dark

* As a reaction to moving to Pocatello, "when we moved to Idaho, I thought WE were conservative, but..."

* She was successful in her career and her husband was a stay at home dad and had difficulty meeting people/making friends as someone not in the workforce and who didn't 'fit in' to the social fabric of non-working folks (Eg, female homemakers).

They might even be more conservative than the average Idahoan, but it's not a binary thing; likely they've got "California values" they didn't even realize they held, but folks in Idaho could spot a mile a way.

The same way (say) cops in populated areas of California might be VERY pro-law-and-order and consider themselves very conservative, but not bat an eye over LGBT issues that might rile up a bible-thumper from the midwest who is otherwise a moderate.

When I think of Montana politics the first thing I remember is this: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/05/2...

For better or worse this makes me think of Montana as a pretty red state unlikely to pass regulation like NN.

Well, it actually dovetails into NN quite well. Montanans do not like outsiders, for some definition of outsider, f'n with them.

Being red isn't the governing factor on which side of NN you fall on. Current FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworce (D) https://youtu.be/Ja6MW94RaIQ?t=3m40s put it nicely.

Yes that was our most recent national claim to fame in politics. Gianforte is not a good representation of Montana politicians. He is a party boy and his campaign was nearly a replica of Trump's in a time of political uncertainty. He went up against a very weak Democratic candidate and a very week Libertarian candidate. That event also took place on the night before going to the polls after most Montanan's had sent in their ballots through the mail. When it boils down to being a red state, you'll see more party line voters. However if you were to sit down with these red staters you'd find they're mighty different.

Just to be clear, the majority of Montana's do not vote by mail. It's just about 1/3 of the population. And only 2/3 of those absentee ballots had been returned when that news hit.

So still ~75% of the population voted with that knowledge and put him in office.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2017/05/25/poli...

The weird thing about ISPs is that whether or not they are effectively a monopoly is location dependent. It's probably safe to assume that a higher than average percentage of people in Montana have access to one or fewer broadband services. I wonder if that factors in.

A pretty solo point. I think that story is more about the candidate than any particular party. Note one of the comments in the article:

Both papers, the Missoulian and the Billings Gazette, issued scathing denunciations of Gianforte.

He did win though, so while there may have been unusual circumstances suggested by other commenters - he had some support of the people of the state.

Because people vote party lines. If your goal is Republicans in office, then a little assault isn't gonna get in the way of that.

There were a lot of votes cast before the incident, so the outcome might have been different had the incident happened sooner.

This is the most salient point -- Montana has one of the largest, if not the largest, vote-by-mail operations in the US, so ballots were probably cast and posted a few days before the election.

Oregon only uses the mail for voting so Montana isn't the largest.

It is not the most salient point. I personally know several folks that still voted for him in person after it happened. Getting a Republican into office was the number 1 priority and pushing down a reporter was hardly crossing a line when they already distrust the media.

Greg isn’t from Montana* and is about as far as you can get from the typical Montanan imho. Curiously though he is an actual hacker.

*He’s a transplant like many who live here including me.

He's from New Jersey -- my alma mater (Stevens Tech) named a building after him; alumni basically rebelled and withheld donations until his name was removed.

Haha wow, well sorry to burst your bubble but he essentially succeeded at the same goal at MSU.

Montana is very purple (and very weird politically). Rural red areas but most of our population centers are wildly blue. Democrat governor, 1 Dem Senator. There's no real religious right, just a libertarian right.

'wildly blue' is incorrect about the population centers. If that were correct the vote would have gone to Trump given how the vast majority of the population is in the cities.

Look at the election results from Missoula, Great Falls, Billings, etc and then compare them to San Francisco (a place actually wildly blue).

I generally assume that Democrats are more concentrated in cities, which generalizes to states with high rural population percentages being Republican.

I don't know why this got downvoted, this is a pretty common theme across America. Look at the Alabama senate race and pretty much every race in North Carolina for examples. This, as well as gerrymandering, has lead to the disproportions in the house and state governments. Democrats being concentrated makes it much easier to have close races in terms of total votes cast per party, but disproportionate representation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com