GREAT FALLS, Mont. — For much of his life, Randy Gray knew his hometown in northern Montana, Great Falls, as a stronghold for Democrats.
On the banks of the cascading Missouri River, a local smelter purified the copper wire that electrified America, produced by union laborers who were reliable Democrats. So too were the Catholics, committed to issues of social justice, who had followed early missionaries to the area. Even the farmers who tilled the fertile wheat fields of the northern Great Plains often supported the Montana-style Democrats who applied the principle of conservation to tax dollars and nature alike.
Gray served three terms as a Democratic mayor, up through 2005. Barack Obama won the area in the 2008 presidential election, and Democrats cornered a vast majority of the county’s legislative seats. Jon Tester, the Democrat who has long represented the state in the U.S. Senate and farms in the same northern plains region, holds his election-night celebrations in Great Falls…