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Comment by gonehome | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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...

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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