When Montana voters sent Jon Tester to the United States Senate for the first time in 2006, the Democratic Party also won Senate elections in North Dakota, Nebraska, Missouri, Ohio and West Virginia. At the time, the party’s senators also included members from Arkansas, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana and South Dakota. Republicans, meanwhile, represented states including Colorado, Maine, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Oregon and Virginia.
Nearly 20 years later, Maine is the only one of the 19 states above to still be represented by a senator from the “non-dominant” party in the state.
It’s a trend that’s been widely covered over the years — the decline in split-ticket voting. Somewhat less analyzed, though, is its connection to the decline in local news.
Tester was one of the latest casualties of the split-ticket decline. He lost his bid for a fourth term in the Senate last November to Republican Tim Sheehy. Despite losing by roughly seven points (53%-46%), he still outran Vice President Kamala Harris at the top of the ticket by nearly 13 points, the highest overperformance of any Democratic Senate candidate for the 2024 cycle. Yet, it wasn’t enough. Montana’s two senate seats, two congressional seats, governorship and both branches of the state legislature are now all held by Republicans.
In an interview shortly after his loss on the progressive podcast, Pod Save America, Tester noted that the decline in local media was one of the biggest changes he saw over the 18 years he spent in the U.S. Senate. This tracks with the Medill State of Local News Report’s data which shows that since 2005, Montana has not only lost 14 newspapers (69 in 2025, down from 83), but the state now has just one local paper (Billings Gazette) that prints daily, down from seven 20 years ago. Lee Enterprises, which owns four of the state’s newspapers including the Billings Gazette, laid off more than a dozen employees in 2023 and a long-time editor and reporter in 2024.
Tester expanded on his observations in a phone interview with Medill from his farm in Big Sandy, Montana.
“You’d be hard pressed to get an interview with the statewide officials, the senators or the house members, and the reason is because they don’t have to, because they know it isn’t that big of a deal anymore,” he said. “It used to be that if you did something stupid and the press reported on it, it could be politically devastating. But now, their reach just isn’t what it used to be. So that’s where we’re at.”
As a result, candidates who emphasize local issues in statewide races struggle more to gain traction, while civic engagement lags in local races. Is the decline of local news the reason for this? Maybe not completely, but Tester thinks they’re very much intertwined.
“I don’t know that it’s about who gets elected,” he said. “I think it’s more about getting the facts and letting the voters make up their own decision on who they should vote for based on the facts and the facts of honest reporting. That’s what we had. Now, we just don’t have the reporting, so people just don’t have the facts, and then you have all this bullshit about everything’s fake news unless it’s fake news, and then it’s real.”
Ticket splitting and civic engagement
The nationalization of state and local politics has made it increasingly difficult for politicians like Tester, who for the entirety of his tenure in office also maintained his family farm.
While the decline in local news isn’t the only reason, it’s certainly played a role, said researchers Joshua Darr and Jennifer Lawless.
Darr, a communications professor at Syracuse University, focuses his research on polarization and local news, while Lawless, a professor of public policy at the University of Virginia, studies campaigns, media and politics.
In a 2018 paper, Darr found that when local newspapers close, split-ticket voting decreases, with Americans relying more on national news to make decisions on who to support.
“Split ticketing was really something that only Americans did. It’s sort of an American privilege that this happens at lower offices,” Darr said. “I think we as a field (media research) have focused on social media mis and disinformation and partisan news and that sort of thing, and I think we’ve missed the massive increase in national politics news that is available at people’s fingertips.”
So how does a more robust local news system increase the chances that people will be more willing to split their ticket?
“I think there’s something to politics that isn’t nationalized, because if there’s only national, then why would you vote against the party you want to see nationally at the local level?” Darr said. “Local politics doesn’t fit neatly into the frames that come out of Washington, so what people are thinking when they go into the ballot box is, I think, determined partially by their media environment, and if it’s mostly nationalized, they’re not going to have any patience for these state-level idiosyncrasies.”
Take the 2024 Senate race in Montana as an example.
On his campaign website, Tester had the following issues listed at the top: Indian Country, Veterans, Affordable Housing, Protecting Public Lands, Infrastructure, Young Montanans and Rural America. Meanwhile, Sheehy’s top seven listed were Public Lands, Economy & Energy, Border Security, Gun Rights, Fiscal Responsibility, Supporting Montana Agriculture and Veterans.
On the surface, those lists might not seem that different. But read their descriptions and you’ll see that they’re quite stark. Each of Tester’s explanations is hyper-focused on Montana, its communities and bipartisanship work he’s done. Sheehy, on the other hand, mentions now-former President Joe Biden multiple times, Washington spending and the image next to the section on border security shows a border wall and a cactus, suggesting it’s of the Mexico border.
That’s not to say the issues Sheehy highlights are not ones Montanans care about — after all, the nearly 320,000 votes cast for him were more than Tester received in any of the three statewide elections he won. But, it demonstrates a clear shift in how campaigns are run, with a focus on national issues, rather than local ones, seemingly leading to more success.
“Jon Tester was not your typical Democrat, but voters in Montana who might not have seen him as a typical Democrat in 2006 when he first ran, now basically associate him with (Democratic Senate leader) Chuck Schumer and all the other Democrats in the Senate because that’s the information they’re getting,” Lawless said. “They’re getting national coverage of the Senate; they’re not getting local coverage of what’s going on in their state or their district.”
The decline in local news isn’t just linked to a decline in split-ticket voting, either. At the local level, Lawless’ work has found that when there’s less coverage of local politics, there are lower levels of voter turnout.
She’s also currently working on research that so far, has shown that when there’s less local news coverage and when people are exposed to less local news coverage, they’re less interested in running for local office.
“If you look at some of these school board elections or local political races that are not linked to bigger contests on the ticket, voter turnout is quite low,” Lawless said. “And, separate and apart from that, even if voter turnout isn’t that low, in a lot of these races, you have uncontested elections anyway.”
It all adds up to a system where elected officials aren’t watched closely, fewer Americans show up to cast their votes and fewer throw their hat in the ring to run for public office.
“I think it’s incumbent upon elected officials to be accountable to the people who elected them, and I think one of the ways I did it was talk to the press and let them report on what I was doing,” Tester said. “Look, every press story wasn’t good, but I told the truth, and most of the time, they reported the truth, and that was all that I wanted.”
‘They would always be in your face’
Much like a Democrat in increasingly red Montana, Illinois State Senator Don DeWitte often feels like he’s in the wilderness as a Republican in a state with two Democratic senators, a house delegation of 14 Democrats to three Republicans, a Democratic governor and Democratic supermajorities in the state house and senate.
But like his “friends across the aisle,” as he refers to them, DeWitte understands the importance of local news. He was part of the bipartisan Illinois Local Journalism Task Force which ultimately led to the passage of the Strengthening Community Media Act which, among other provisions, provides tax credits to local media outlets for hiring and retaining journalists.
Representing a district in the northwest suburbs of Chicago, DeWitte said he came to understand the importance of local media from a young age. His mother, Dorothy, was a newspaper reporter and editor for several publications in the Fox Valley including the Aurora Beacon, the Elgin Courier and the St. Charles Chronicle.
“As I was starting to get into politics early in my political career back in the ‘90s, she always reminded me that the role of journalism is to always keep an eye on what’s going on in government at all levels,” DeWitte said. “It’s one of the traits that I took with me when I started into local government here in St. Charles and eventually ended up working in the state senate.”
DeWitte remembers the earlier days of his political career when local reporters from several publications would show up at local meetings.
“They would always be in your face right after the meeting with questions,” he said. “Now, we get them after the fact, which is probably just as good, but it has changed.”
However, DeWitte doesn’t necessarily view the demise of local news as a key factor in the hyper-politicization and nationalization that’s occurred at the state level. He blames extreme partisan gerrymandering and campaign contribution laws instead.
“I really believe money and maps have had a lot more to do with creating the polarization in the state of Illinois than the diminishment of local journalism,” he said.
Illinois, for context, received an ‘F’ rating from the Princeton Gerrymandering Project for its congressional, state house and state senate maps that give Democrats a substantial advantage. With fewer competitive districts, it allows candidates to cater to the more extreme wings of their parties, though the connection isn’t as direct as conventional wisdom might suggest.
DeWitte represents one of the few “purple” districts. After being appointed to the seat in Sept. 2018, he narrowly won the election for a full four-year term by less than 1,500 votes that November. He ran uncontested for a second term in 2022 but announced this July that he won’t run again next year.
And as he reflected on how the political environment has evolved, he pointed to why he thinks it’s so important to maintain local media.
“I think the local print press does a much better job of maintaining a balance on political issues than some of the more individual or subscriber-oriented models,” he said. “I think it’s much worse on the national level to be honest with you.”
A murky future
Of course, the major question facing the journalism industry remains how to not just reverse the decline of publications that have folded but rebuild the local news infrastructure to meet the current moment of fractured media consumption and a proliferation of “news influencers” and “creator journalists.”
As the research from Darr and Lawless show, the disappearance of local news has clear implications for politics, both locally and nationally. And, as Tester and DeWitte point out, an absent local press means less accountability and less unbiased information reaching the voters.
DeWitte said he favors the approach the Illinois legislation took providing tax cuts for local news organizations. Tester, meanwhile, continues to ponder the solution. Since losing his reelection bid, he started a podcast with former Montana reporter Maritsa Georgiou. But even he admitted it doesn’t provide the same level of oversight.
“I think it’s probably going to be done with online newspapers,” Tester said. “Maybe it’s done with podcasts. Maybe it’s done with Substack. I don’t know how we get things done, but I do know that the experience I’ve had with online newspapers is they do hold you accountable, and I think it’s important if you’re going to have honest news that they hold their elected officials accountable. And I know a lot of other forms don’t necessarily do that, and I got a podcast myself.”
