All of a sudden, Montana — and Senate control — is slipping away from Republicans

A poorly managed scandal response could once again prevent the GOP from ousting the ‘most vulnerable’ Democrat of 2024. John Bowden reports after a warning that ‘the meltdown is about to begin’ among Trump campaigners nationally

Tim Sheehy, left, and Jon Tester, right, participate in a debate as part of the Montana Senate election (BEN ALLAN SMITH, Missoulian)

One day out from Election Day 2024 and Republican control of the Senate is suddenly looking a lot less certain.

It had been seen as a near-inevitability by some for months. With the loss of West Virginia’s seat thanks to the retirement of Joe Manchin, the defeat of Jon Tester — the incumbent senator from Montana, who has been trailing his opponentTim Sheehy through the summer and fall —  was set to throw the majority into GOP hands, unless Democrats unseated a Republican incumbent elsewhere.

But on Monday, that calculus looked a lot different. A pair of new polls released over the weekend from the Des Moines Register and New York Times/Siena College depicted a race swinging suddenly in the Democrats’ favor in just about every major battleground state. That includes Iowa, where Harris now leads Donald Trump by three percentage points in the Register poll.

And Montana may be no different. Stephen Leuchtman, polling director for Pharos Research Group, tweeted Monday that his firm had conducted one last poll of the Montana race, concluding on Sunday. It found Tester four percentage points ahead of Sheehy, according to Leuchtman, who did not release the full poll results (his firm does privately commissioned polling), just within the survey’s 4.97 percent margin of error.

It’s far from a certain thing, but the poll does fall roughly in line with two other surveys taken in mid-to-late October which found the gap between the two candidates shrinking rapidly from earlier in the year. One, from The Hill/Emerson College, found the Republican leading by three percentage points — within the margin of error — while a second from the University of Montana - Billings survey found the race tied.

Sheehy’s polling collapse and potential defeat on Tuesday could very well end up being a casualty of his failure to provide a clear explanation and proof for a scandal that has followed him for months: the case of the bullet wound in his right arm, which Sheehy maintains was suffered during a deployment to Afghanistan.

Jon Tester is seen as the most vulnerable Democratic incumbent running in 2024, a title he’s borne before (AP)

His opponent, Tester, is a centrist Democrat, but a more reliably Democratic vote than other perennial Biden-Harris administration headaches Kyrsten Sinema or Joe Manchin (both Sinema and Manchin declined to run for re-election when faced with their own polling realities.) Tester is no stranger to being the “most vulnerable” Democratic incumbent — he bore that label in both his 2012 and 2018 runs, which he both won narrowly, the latter time doing so while Donald Trump campaigned with his opponent. But 2024 has seen some of the most brutal polling for his campaign in memory, with some surveys finding him down by as many as 8 percentage points in early October. For weeks, everyone was convinced it was all over.

Then came a controversy surrounding his Republican opponent. A former Navy SEAL decorated for his actions in combat, Sheehy claims that he was shot in the right arm during a possible friendly fire incident during his deployment. The bullet remained lodged in his arm, but he says he did not get formal medical treatment at the time and covered up the injury to avoid implicating Afghan security forces whom he says he suspected accidentally hit him.

Then, in 2015, a year after he’d left active duty, Sheehy says, the story evolved even further. He claims he was on a trip to Glacier National Park, when he fell and injured the same arm on a hike. He sought medical treatment, and was supposedly told at the time that medical professionals would have to report the bullet in his arm to law enforcement. Then, Sheehy says, he lied again — this time to a US Park Ranger, Kim Peach, telling her that he accidentally shot himself in the parking lot when he dropped a loaded gun and it discharged, striking him in the arm.

Montana Senate candidate Tim Sheehy has seen his polling lead shrink amid new scrutiny into a story he’s told about a bullet wound he supposedly suffered in Afghanistan (Getty Images)

His latest effort to explain the incident came on Saturday during a conversation with Megyn Kelly, a conservative journalist. Kelly began the interview respectfully but within a very short time period found herself questioning the veracity of very basic aspects of his explanation.

“Did you shoot yourself in the arm?” a stern-faced, skeptical Kelly asked Sheehy.

“No, that was never the allegation,” Sheehy responded.

It was. Peach has come forward in an interview with The Washington Post to claim that Sheehy definitely said he’d shot himself in the arm that day in 2015 at Glacier.

Still unexplained, after his interview with Kelly: why Sheehy would have needed to lie to a US Park Ranger, who had no authority or capability to investigate his (supposedly true) story that he was actually shot in Afghanistan. Still unexplained: why Peach, the Ranger, said that a gunshot was reported that day at the park, prompting her investigation. Still unexplained: why medical professionals at the park would have needed to report the presence of a bullet in his arm to law enforcement at all if a shooting had not occurred that day at the park.

There’s also Sheehy’s statements about the medical records — he says they don’t exist. And he has nothing, not even a photo, to prove that a bullet was lodged in his arm prior to that 2015 park visit.

Put simply, it’s a lot of holes in a story that’s supposed to be about just the one.

Republicans are in full panic mode. With early voter numbers coming in, the Trump campaign on Monday desperately tried to spin a reduction in early voting from pandemic-levels in 2020 as a positive sign. But multiple media reports indicate that the party is coming to terms with some very bad poll numbers.

“The meltdown is about to begin,” wrote former Trump communications director Anthony Scaramucci on Sunday evening. “They have figured out how bad things are.”

If this collapse is as real as it looks, Jon Tester may return to Washington next week as the ultimate comeback kid.