The News
Jon Tester sees a lot of problems with Democrats’ brand — but also sees them on course for massive gains in the midterms.
And Tester is foreseeing progress that goes far beyond the 2006 blue wave that swept him into office. The former Democratic senator from Montana compared the current political atmosphere to the year the party picked up 12 Senate seats and the White House thanks to a Depression-era revolt against Republicans.
“It has the potential of being 1932 all over again, quite frankly,” Tester told Semafor in a wide-ranging interview this week. “Because people are starting to realize that this ain’t working.”
With characteristic plainspokenness, he also urged his party to get more specific in order to better capitalize on opposition to President Donald Trump and the GOP Congress. Democrats should “be aggressive with a good platform on cost, inflation, housing, college, our relationships with our allies, all that stuff. But they really haven’t done it yet,” he said.
The former Senate Democratic campaign chief called the party’s message consistently “horrible” and “like it or not like it … not real clear.”
Ousted in 2024 alongside Trump’s presidential win, Tester won’t be part of any Democratic comeback. Some in the party held onto long-shot hopes of recruiting him into Montana’s 2026 Senate race, twinning with former Sen. Sherrod’s Brown run in Ohio. But he said he’s done running for office, be it in Montana or at a national level.
Tester is happy working on his farm full-time and podcasting with longtime journalist Maritsa Georgiou. While the 69-year-old described himself with dry humor as “young by Senate standards,” he also signaled a clear desire for fresher legs on the Hill.
“I spent 18 years there. It was a good 18 years, I worked my ass off,” Tester said. “My generation has screwed this country up enough, quite frankly. It’s time for a new generation to come in and fill some of these seats.”
He also had some advice for his former caucus leader. Tester was close to Minority Leader Chuck Schumer throughout his time in the Senate, providing a cornerstone of Schumer’s majority at times and reliably winning in a tough state.
Now he has a “suggestion for Chuck: Delegate this work, man.”
“You got some really, really powerful people that are good communicators in your caucus,” Tester said. “He can still continue doing what he’s doing. But delegate the workload to get the message out by a lot of different mouths, not just three or four.”
Know More
Tester didn’t drop any F-bombs in the interview, as he often did during his time in office, but he did describe the Trump administration’s anti-rioting justifications immigration enforcement in Minnesota as “total horseshit.”
He said the shutdown fight before Democrats over ICE is about forcing accountability for the administration’s aggressive actions.
Tester isn’t a natural ally of Democrats’ decision this week to oppose a government funding deal: He once led the party on the panel that writes spending bills for the Department of Homeland Security, and he dislikes shutdowns.
But he said Schumer’s decision to play hardball is the only real choice on the table – even though a DHS shutdown wouldn’t prevent the administration from spending billions of dollars on ICE from its tax cuts law.
“I don’t know that it’s going to do anything, because the president has the ability to move stuff around, whether it’s legal or illegal. He has done it in the past and he’ll do it again. What I say is, it sends a message,” Tester said.
“It sends a message to the folks in the agencies and on the ground that Congress is going to start holding people accountable.”
Tester acknowledged that the border security issue played a role in his own election loss to Montana Sen. Tim Sheehy, R-Mont., as well as former Vice President Kamala Harris’s 2024 loss to Trump. He said Trump still has lots of support in red states like his for stopping people from crossing the border — but not for the current brand of interior enforcement in places like Minnesota or Maine.
“On the border, they’re happy. On the tactics that are being used right now? It doesn’t pass the smell test,” Tester said. “There’s a lot of folks out there saying: ‘You know, this isn’t right.’”
Notable
Some ex-lawmakers have a hard time letting go. Tester doesn’t seem to be one of them.
Consider his initial reaction to viewer input from his appearances on MS NOW. He said he gets a lot of emails every day asking him how he would vote on key issues: “Initially when that happened, I got to tell you, I got really pissed off.
“But I’ve come to the conclusion that a lot of people’s lives aren’t 100% politics like mine was,” he added. “And so, normally, now if they send me [a note] and say, ‘Geez, would you vote against this funding or for this funding,’ I send them back a note and say, ‘Hey, look, I haven’t been in the Senate for a year’ … I guess some people think I’m still a sitting US senator.”