this goat rodeo of yours

I’ve spent the last week driving all over Montana, talking to people about the special election that’s going to happen here on May 25th to replace Rob Zinke, who Trump selected to serve as Secretary of the Interior. I've driven 1163 miles over seven days. I've talked to people in over a dozen towns. I've ordered microbrews that cost $4 a pint. I've been told countless times that it's time to realize my destiny and move back to the Mountain West. I've stayed in an old flophouse transformed into a boutique hotel, a homesteaders cabin, a C'Mon Inn, and the oldest standing building in Great Falls, Montana. 

This trip might seem like a silly thing for a national reporter to do — who cares about Montana? Only a million people live there? — but if you’re the type of person who reads the internet with any regularity, you know that it’s a big deal because, post-Trump, everything feels like a big deal. The Georgia election felt like a big deal. Every House vote feels like a big deal. For most liberals I know, every vote, every loss, every confirmation feels, for better or worse, like a deeply personal battle — and a widening wound. People are desperate for a win, or at least something that will make it feel like the wound won't start festering. Hence: the temptation to frame a win in Georgia or Kansas or Montana is a bellwether for what will happen during the midterm elections, or during the next presidential race. Put differently: as the beginning of the end of Trumpism.

But I think the best reporting on these races starts from a more nuanced point than just “If [State Democrat] Wins Here, Then [Other Democrats] Will Also Win” (or, more breathlessly, “If [State Republican] Wins, Trump Will Reign Forever”). You have to think about why people in a particular state vote the way they do — and maybe then you can extrapolate about larger tensions and trends that extend to the national conversation. This is incredibly difficult to pull off, because most people could give two shits about another state’s politics.

So how can you make people interested? Most writers start with personal stories. Put a face and a bit of melodrama (and narrative arc) on a piece of history and you’ll get people to watch the movie or read the book; for an article, you do a condensed version of that. Generally, that requires spending a chunk of time with someone — or, at the very least, more than a five minute interview. A picture helps a lot, but so does information like “What do your kids think about this town? How do you get your news everyday? Which high school sports team does everyone root for? What did your parents do? What kind of car do you drive and what are the bumperstickers on it? What’s the bible verse framed above your kitchen table?”

Some of that has nothing to do with politics or voting; some of it only obliquely does. But on the page, it makes someone into a person, not just an interview. So I ask/observe all of the personal quotidian stuff, but then I also ask a billion questions about other issues — in Montana, I talked with everyone about their feelings on the American Prairie Reserve, a conservation organization that’s buying up ranch land in the northeastern part of the state (and pissing off a lot of ranchers) and the Missouri Breaks National Monument, which, like two dozen other monuments, is currently under “review” by Zinke. We shittalked other parts of Montana, and Idaho, where I'm from, and then we shittalked New York

We talked about the local radio stations, and which paper they like the best in Montana, and whether or not they’re on Facebook, and which church they go to, and whether Montanans like church, and the Neo-Nazis up in the northwestern part of the state, and what outsiders think Montana is, and relations between their town and the reservation 30 miles down the road and whether it’s better to take the interstate or the long way when you’re driving from here to Butte.

Which is all way of eventually, or intermittently, talking about politics. I often start the conversation with “How are you feeling about [Insert Candidate]”, and the first answer is often good and blunt. But then you need to take time with all those other questions in order to arrive at a more nuanced and human opinion about other things political. That’s when I got people to work through why it is that Montanans, more than any other state, resist voting party line. Why so many people voted for Trump and for a Democratic governor. Why a guy like Brian Schweitzer, former governor of the state, can be beloved while advocating for both single-payer healthcare and the coal industry.

Oftentimes, as I’m working through these conversations, the person will say “This isn’t helpful, I’m sure.” But it absolutely is: it's all part of the sprawling iceberg of a story like this. 

Up in Malta, Montana — a town of around 9,000, up on the edge of the Prairie Reserve — I set up a meeting with the town's one extension agent. I thought it might be an hour-long chat in his office, but after he tested me out a bit, he said “why don’t we go back to the ranch and have some lunch.” I met his sheepdog, Ray, that protects the flock from coyotes. I saw a bunch of newborn lambs. I saw the bible verse on his wall and talked to his wife and talked about high school women’s basketball and who their arch rival is. He told me all about what the ranchers are concerned about, their anxieties over the end of a way of life, about who’s going to come back to the ranch when they’re too old to handle things, about how hard it is to say no to a group offering you millions for land that’s been in your family for generations. 

In the end, I might use one quote from him, but all those hours of conversation are going to be at the core of my understanding of Montana and why it votes the way it does . . . and what the results of this election can and cannot tell us about the larger, national conversations about politics and culture. It's not about creating empathy, which has become a dirty word when applied to political reporting, so much as creating context. It takes time, and it takes money, and it takes a willingness to sit and shoot the shit for hours. But enough of it does more than just tell stories: it gets to the heart of how ideologies created, sustained, and interrogated . . . why people change and why people stay the same, why some things are so hard to let go of and others are easy to embrace. It tries, in other words, to explain why we act the way we do. 

At the end of the afternoon, the extension agent asked me, “Who else you gonna to talk to on this goat rodeo of yours?” That’s what this sort of reporting truly is: a goat rodeo. But I really fucking love it. Piece coming soon (and you can find all the images from my reporting here, on my Instagram)