Despite an assault charge, Greg Gianforte will represent the people of Montana in the House of Representatives after winning a statewide special election on Thursday.

Elections in Big Sky Country rarely make news outside the state. But this one, for the seat vacated by Ryan Zinke, President Trump’s appointee as Interior Secretary, will be remembered for an incident that left the incoming Republican congressman facing a misdemeanor assault charge after an altercation with Guardian journalist Ben Jacobs.

Former tech executive Gianforte, who won 50-43 with almost all the precincts reporting, used his acceptance speech to apologize to the reporter:

Last night, I made a mistake and I took an action that I can’t take back and I’m not proud of what happened. I should not have responded in the way that I did and for that I am sorry. I should not have treated that reporter that way and for that I am sorry, Mr. Ben Jacobs.

Over two-thirds of ballots were cast before Election Day

The incident, which happened the day before polls opened, threw the spotlight onto two key issues – one electoral and one cultural.

Firstly, many of Montana’s votes had already been cast, with no mechanism for second thoughts, before news broke of the incident. By Wednesday night almost 260,000 early ballots had been returned, 69% of the final vote tally.

Supporters of the Democratic candidate, folk musician Rob Quist – who resisted directly attacking Gianforte on the issue until a last-minute party radio ad – were outraged and left hoping the campaign’s final news cycle would have some impact on Thursday’s in-person turnout. Donald Trump had won the state by around 20 points in November, so even in normal circumstances it was going to be a big challenge.

As Gianforte – whose campaign’s initial statement had taken pains to refer to Jacobs as a “liberal journalist” – cancelled scheduled final-day TV appearances, Republicans appeared largely unmoved, even showing precious little sympathy for the role of the press. NBC’s Peter Alexander on Twitter quoted a “source close to [the] Gianforte campaign” saying it had raised more than $100,000 online in the final 24 hours of the campaign – most of it coming after the incident.

Nevertheless, major newspapers in the state rescinded their endorsements of Gianforte, the Billings Gazette wrote:

We previously supported Gianforte because he said he was ready to listen, to compromise, to take the tough questions. Everything he said was obliterated by his surprising actions that were recorded and witnessed Wednesday. We simply cannot trust him. Because trust — not agreement — is essential in the role of representative, we cannot stand by him.

 

While we clearly made a poor choice in our original endorsement, an even bigger mistake would have been to stand by it, or say nothing even though this editorial appears on Election Day and may open us to criticism of trying to unduly influence the outcome.

There are now 28 states that give voters the option of voting early via absentee ballot and late developments like this will inevitably attract criticism of the process. Yale law professor Stephen Carter writes at Bloomberg that “a sense of community is lost” when voters don’t physically go to the polls. He says:

One of the virtues of the town meeting form of government that was common in New England in the early years of the republic was that the voters faced each other and heard each other out before casting their ballots. Admittedly we are well past the point when partisans want to hear out the other side.

‘Well past that point’ might be something of an understatement.

The second, and probably more serious issue in its implications for civic discourse – since the mechanisms of voting can in theory be amended more easily than attitudes to one’s opponents – is the basic question of whether there’s a new normal in politics, where an atmosphere of anger and confrontation has become commonplace, and almost something to be celebrated in some circles.

Michael Calderone at the Huffington Post pointed to other recent incidents involving reporters and said they collectively showed the “peril of asking questions in Trump’s America.” And commentators were quick to draw a line back from what happened in Bozeman to last year’s campaign by the current President.

NBC’s Joe Scarborough said the incident “shouldn’t be too surprising in an age of Trump where he calls the press ‘enemy of the people.’ These reckless words have consequences.”

Meanwhile, Richard Wolffe in The Guardian describes the impact of how Trump “riled up his crowds to turn on the press and hurl abuse in their direction. “That’s the same candidate who longed for the days when he could punch protesters in the face. Sure enough, his supporters ended up punching people in the face.”

Montana, and other upcoming special elections, had been talked about as possibly presaging a “wave” election in next year’s midterms.

And had Quist managed an upset last night, it would certainly have been presented as a referendum on health care or on the President’s first few months in general.

So is there encouragement for Democrats?

Cutting a deficit by 13-odd points in a solid Republican state like Montana is no mean feat, even without the dramatic last-minute intervention.

As for the national picture, Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight writes that Trump’s base appears to be shrinking – or at least the numbers who strongly support him are falling. He writes:

During last year’s presidential primaries, Trump received about 14 million votes out of a total of 62 million cast between the two parties, which works out to 23 percent of the total. So perhaps it’s not a coincidence that 20 to 25 percent of the country still strongly supports Trump; they were with him from the start.

 

But 20 to 25 percent isn’t all that large a base — obviously not enough to win general elections on its own… So while there’s risk to Democrats in underestimating Trump’s resiliency, there’s an equal or perhaps greater risk to Republicans in thinking Trump’s immune from political gravity.

The next big test comes in Georgia’s 6th District, where another Democratic newcomer, John Ossoff, has been leading Republican Karen Handel ahead of the June 20th election to replace Health Secretary Tom Price.