Morning Digest, sponsored by Campaign Hub: Montana's Supreme Court will be a top battleground—again

Conservatives hope to expand their influence and roll back a seminal decision protecting abortion rights

Flathead County District Court Judge Amy Eddy, who is running for Montana’s Supreme Court (credit: Amy Eddy for Montana Supreme Court)

Leading Off

MT Supreme Court

Montana's Supreme Court, which has long been dominated by a moderate majority, could shift sharply toward conservative control next year if Republicans flip a seat held by a retiring swing justice. Such an outcome would leave the seven-member court with four members elected with the support of the GOP, which already controls the governorship and both chambers of the legislature.

Up for grabs is the seat held by two-term Justice Beth Baker, who announced her retirement last month. Like the court writ large, Baker's ideology is not easy to pin down, though she's generally been a swing vote and has often sided with more liberal colleagues, including in cases where a seminal 1999 decision defending abortion rights has been at issue.

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Two candidates are already running to replace Baker in next year's officially nonpartisan race, both of them judges in western Montana's Flathead County. One is Amy Eddy, who was first appointed to the bench in 2015 by then-Gov. Steve Bullock, a Democrat who was serving the first of his two terms. The other is Dan Wilson, who unsuccessfully ran for the Supreme Court last year with Republican support.

Eddy is likely to emerge as the consensus choice for Democrats. Given the state's Republican lean, though, she's avoiding any ideological messaging, instead emphasizing her impartiality and independence. Wilson, by contrast, described himself as "a native Montanan and a conservative" in a statement kicking off his campaign.

Those credentials, however, were not enough to propel Wilson to victory in 2024. Instead, he lost to the Democratic-backed candidate, Katherine Bidegaray, by a 54-46 margin. In winning, Bidegaray successfully defended an open seat that had been held by Dirk Sandefur, who'd generally been identified as a liberal but had compiled a somewhat eclectic voting record, much like Baker.

On that same night, however, conservative prosecutor Cory Swanson defeated former federal Magistrate Judge Jerry Lynch to become chief justice, flipping a seat that had been occupied by another liberal, Mike McGrath—a race that also resulted in a 54-46 win.

Swanson's victory made him the second hardliner on the court, along with Justice James Rice. Wilson would give them a third, but in some cases, that could be enough, because a fourth justice, Laurie McKinnon, was also first elected with Republican help. However, as with several of her colleagues, McKinnon's track record has been heterodox.

The two other members of the court, James Shea and Ingrid Gustafson, are also part of the moderate-liberal bloc, which has for many years acted as a check on Republican power-grabs and efforts to clamp down on reproductive freedoms.

That has included a major ruling last year striking down four GOP-backed laws to make voting more difficult, as well as a decision invalidating a law requiring minors to obtain parental consent to receive an abortion. In a sign of just how unpredictable the court can be, though, the abortion case was decided unanimously while the voting rights decision saw the ostensibly liberal Sandefur and the doctrinaire Rice join together in a dissent.

A win for Wilson would move the court's center of gravity to the right—potentially enough for the conservatives to cobble together majorities on certain issues. The precedent that Republicans are most eager to eviscerate, though, was the one set 26 years ago in Armstrong v. Montana.

In that case, the court ruled that the Montana Constitution protects the right to abortion under its explicit guarantee of privacy rights—language that isn't found in the U.S. Constitution. Subsequent attacks on abortion rights have all failed thanks to Armstrong.

Those rights were also bolstered in a crucial way last year when Montana voters passed an amendment to their state constitution by a 58-42 margin that explicitly safeguards abortion access. To roll back abortion rights in the state, Republicans would not only have to overturn Armstrong, they'd have to convince voters to repeal the new amendment.

At the moment, those look like tall tasks, but given the right's ultimate success in its 50-year war on Roe v. Wade, Democrats in Montana won't take any chances and will vigorously defend Baker's seat on the state's top court.

Democracy prevails in North Carolina

Senate

GA-Sen, GA-Gov

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene announced on Friday night that she would not run against Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff, who predicted to CNN in March, "I don't think that she's got the guts to do it."

Republicans who may be relieved to hear the news, though, should still keep the Pepto handy: In a 1,600-word tweet explaining her decision, Greene at no point addressed next year's race for governor, a contest she previously said she was considering.

Separately, an unnamed advisor to U.S. Small Business Administrator Kelly Loeffler told Axios that she'd prefer to run for governor of Georgia than try to return to the Senate. However, there's no word on how interested Loeffler, who was sworn into her current post less than three months ago, may be in running for either post.

Governors

AL-Gov, AL-Sen

Lt. Gov. Will Ainsworth has ended his brief but unenthusiastic flirtation with a Senate bid and is back to looking at Alabama's open-seat race for governor. Ainsworth told conservative radio host Jeff Poor on Thursday that "I really have just never had a desire to serve in the Senate," adding that "the only office I would consider running for is governor."

The lieutenant governor went on to say that "there's some big names out there" looking at the contest to replace termed-out Gov. Kay Ivey, a fellow Republican, though there's only really one big name looming over the primary. Sen. Tommy Tuberville says he'll decide by Memorial Day whether he'll run for governor or seek reelection, though he's reportedly already told donors he's going for the former option.

On the Democratic side, former Sen. Doug Jones didn't rule out running for governor in a recent interview with Alabama Politics. Jones, who lost reelection to Tuberville in 2020, provided a very similar answer to the one he gave when CBS 42 asked him last month about the possibility he might run for the Senate again.

"I am looking at how best to stay in that fight with the groups that I'm working with on a national level, the groups I'm working with on a state level," Jones said. "What that means at this point, I can't say."

NJ-Gov

Federal authorities arrested Newark Mayor Ras Baraka on Friday, accusing him of trespassing outside an Immigration and Customs Enforcement complex in his city. The mayor, who is competing in the busy June 10 Democratic primary for governor of New Jersey, was released hours later.

Baraka spent the days after the incident countering the Trump administration's claims that he and the three House Democrats from New Jersey who were also at the ICE facility—Reps. Bonnie Watson Coleman, Rob Menendez, and LaMonica McIver—had instigated the episode.

"This is all fabrication, and they get on the media and they lie and lie and lie and lie," Baraka told reporters on Saturday. "There's no other way to describe what's happening in this country right now but authoritarianism."

NM-Gov

Businessman Duke Rodriguez, who runs a large medical cannabis company, says he's interested in seeking the Republican nomination for New Mexico's open governor's race.

Rodriguez told the Santa Fe New Mexican's Milan Simonich that he'll decide by August, though he separately informed the Albuquerque Journal that he's "90% confident" he'll run. The Republican also told both outlets he'd likely spend at least $2 million of his fortune to finance such a campaign.

Rodriguez spent 15 months running the state's Human Services Department in the mid-1990s, a brief tenure that, Simonich says, led to critics calling him "arrogant and a poor listener." Rodriguez later founded Ultra Health, which has 25 dispensaries in New Mexico.

On the Democratic side, Simonich writes that former Las Cruces Mayor Ken Miyagishima plans to announce on May 27 that he'll join the race to succeed Democratic Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham. Former U.S. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland and Bernalillo County District Attorney Sam Bregman are already running to replace the termed-out incumbent, while Lt. Gov. Howie Morales has said he'll decide by June.

Morales, who hasn't said much about how likely he is to run, told Simonich on Tuesday, "The larger the field gets, the more enticing it is to me."

OH-Gov

The Ohio Republican Party voted on Friday to endorse businessman Vivek Ramaswamy in next year's race for governor despite calls from term-limited incumbent Mike DeWine for it to remain neutral. Signal Cleveland writes that the party's vote allows Ramaswamy to coordinate directly with the state GOP and use it as a fundraising vehicle.

Attorney General Dave Yost, who has trailed Ramaswamy badly in the polls, sounded unenthused about continuing his primary campaign following the setback. Yost's team put out a statement saying, "The Attorney General is going to take a few days to consult with key supporters about the path forward—but the people of Ohio deserve a choice, not a premature coronation of an untested candidate."

Yost's comments came one day after Lt. Gov. Jim Tressel confirmed he was interested in waging his own campaign for the GOP nomination, though he did not commit to running.

DeWine appointed Tressel, who became a household name as coach for the Ohio State Buckeyes, to his current post in February, leading observers to immediately begin wondering whether the new lieutenant governor might seek the top job.

An unnamed GOP leader told NBC ahead of Friday's vote that they believed DeWine was trying to "forestall an endorsement taking place, because I think he would like to see if he can convince Jim Tressel to run for governor."

DeWine's appeals, though, weren't enough to sway party leaders. Donald Trump Jr., whose father is Ramaswamy's most prominent backer, took to social media to urge the GOP to fall in line, writing, "We have a country to save, and we don't have any time or money to waste."

VA-Gov

Republican Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears launched her first TV ad Wednesday, with her campaign describing it as a "major, seven-figure television advertising investment." Earle-Sears, who has no opposition in next month's primary, talks about her biography in her first TV spot, including how her father "legally brought us to America" from Jamaica.

House

FL-19

Marine veteran Mike Pedersen said Friday he was entering the primary to replace Rep. Byron Donalds, a fellow Florida Republican who is the frontrunner for governor, in the safely red 19th District around Fort Myers.

Former Trump administration official Catalina Lauf, meanwhile, told the conservative site Florida's Voice that she's thinking about running. Lauf, who lost congressional bids in Illinois in 2020 and 2022, said she'd be "sharing more very soon."

The GOP field already includes two notable names: former Illinois state Sen. Jim Oberweis, who defeated Lauf in the 2020 primary before losing to Democratic Rep. Lauren Underwood, and businessman Jim Schwartzel, who, like Pedersen, does not appear to have sought office anywhere before now.

Other Republicans—including several more who've won or unsuccessfully sought office in other states—are considering running here.

IL-08

Cook County Commissioner Kevin Morrison on Monday became the first prominent Democrat to announce a campaign to succeed Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, a fellow Illinois Democrat who is running for the Senate.

Morrison won his post in 2018 by unseating Republican incumbent Tim Schneider, who also led the state party, flipping a district that had long been a GOP bastion. Morrison, who was 28 at the time, became the youngest member of the Cook County Board and its first openly gay member.

Morrison, who had no trouble winning a second term in 2022, could soon find himself in the middle of a busy primary for the 8th District, which is based in Chicago's western outer suburbs. This constituency, according to calculations by The Downballot, favored Kamala Harris 53-46.

WI Redistricting

A second group of voters filed a lawsuit before the Wisconsin Supreme Court on Thursday challenging the state's congressional map, this time arguing that its eight districts do not have equal populations. A day earlier, a different set of voters filed a separate suit attacking the map as an unlawful partisan gerrymandering.

Attorneys General

VA-AG

Henrico County Commonwealth's Attorney Shannon Taylor received an endorsement Friday from former Attorney General Mark Herring ahead of the June 17 Democratic primary for Herring's old job.

Taylor's opponent next month is former Del. Jay Jones, who challenged Herring for renomination in 2021 but lost 57-43. Herring went on to narrowly lose reelection to Republican Jason Miyares, whom both Taylor and Jones are competing to take on this fall.

Due to an editing error, we incorrectly attributed ad spending in New York City’s race for mayor in the previous Morning Digest. Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani is spending $550,000 on advertising, according to AdImpact, while state Sen. Zellnor Myrie is spending $710,000.