(soft music) - [Breanna] On this episode of "Impact," (group claps) Representative Matt Rosendale runs for reelection as three challengers hope to take his seat in Congress.

- The only growing part of Montana politics are independents.

- [Breanna] We'll look at the race in Montana's newly revived second district, and hear the cases the candidates are making on the campaign trail.

- These are the things that we need to be talking about.

- [Breanna] And later, we'll talk to ranchers dealing with drought in North Central Montana.

- We have to rely on Mother Nature and she just hasn't been real good to us lately.

- [Breanna] Plus, we'll learn what climate experts are doing to improve our understanding of how conditions are changing.

That's next on "Impact."

(upbeat music) - [Announcer] Production of Montana PBS Report's "Impact" is made possible with support from the Otto Bremer Trust.

Investing in people, places, and opportunities in the Upper Midwest.

On the web at autobremer.org.

The Greater Montana Foundation.

Encouraging communication on issues, trends, and values of importance to Montanans.

And viewers like you who are friends of Montana PBS.

Thank you.

(soft music) - Welcome to "Impact," our new series, giving depth and context to the news important to Montanans.

I'm Breanna McCabe.

Montana will have two voices in the US House of Representatives for the first time in 30 years.

And as November nears, we wanna take a closer look at the candidates in both races.

(soft music) On this episode, we're looking at the race in Montana's newly restored second congressional district.

Incumbent Representative Matt Rosendale faces three challengers in a crowded field this fall.

We'll hear from all of them, but first, Montana PBS's Stan Parker sits down with the major party candidates.

- [Stan] Montana's second congressional district is back.

And after two years representing the whole state, Republican Matt Rosendale now seeks reelection in this vast eastern Montana district that leans heavily to the right.

- Thank you, Madam Speaker, and thank you, ranking member Bost, for including me today.

- In those two years, he's gained a reputation for voting no a lot.

Can you talk about how that track record relates to your overall political philosophy and how you serve?

- I think first of all, it's important to understand there's a lot of other people there on the House floor that would like to vote no, but they don't have the intestinal fortitude to do so.

- [Stan] This voting record reflects his view that the federal government as an intrusive force that needs to be kept at bay.

- Most of the people that are across this state are in one coalition or another I find.

They want to be left alone to educate their children the way that they choose.

They wanna be left alone to practice their religion the way that they choose to.

But they're all in one of these groups, but they all come together in the leave us alone coalition.

- [Stan] If Rosendale sees his job as getting the federal government out of people's lives, the Democratic nominee seeking to unseat him thinks that helping people with their struggles is core to the government's mission.

- When we have people that are hurting, where 40% of our kids don't have enough to eat.

Here in Billings alone, 6,000 families are on a waiting list for low-income housing.

6,000 families.

These are the things that we need to be talking about.

- [Stan] Penny Ronning is making her first run for federal office after spending four years on the Billings City council.

She says her biggest policy achievement there was getting a public safety mill levy passed to address a rise in violent crime.

- And one of the things I had to learn, about six months in, is that we tend to use different language depending upon the party that we associate with and identify with.

And I had to learn that I needed to let go of some of the language that I was holding onto if I wanted to get anything done.

- [Stan] She's also been instrumental in organizing around human trafficking issues in the state.

She co-founded the Yellowstone County area Human Trafficking Task Force, and it's an issue that's personal to her.

- My mom was trafficked from the time she was five to nine years old in rural South Dakota in the 1940s.

At that time, we didn't have words called human trafficking.

What my mom and her sister had at that time in rural South Dakota was, "Shh, don't say anything."

- [Stan] Ronning has helped start other human trafficking task forces in the state and has co-authored state legislation to address the issue.

As divided as Washington has become, Ronning is hopeful that working together is still possible.

- I once heard Senator Baucus and Senator Simpson talk about how they used to solve problems.

And they used to go to lunch, they used to go to coffee.

They used to go sit and talk with one another.

When we think about the SNAP program and how Senator Dole and Senator McGovern work together saying, "We have too many kids in our state that don't have enough to eat.

We have to figure out how to solve this problem."

Politics has become this boxing ring style of fighting where jab, jab, jab, punch, punch, punch, jab, jab, jab, and nothing gets solved.

So whether the issue is climate change or affordable housing or healthcare, we need to let go of the partisan language and we need to understand that this is about representation.

- [Stan] Since getting to Congress, Rosendale has worked on the Veterans Affairs and Natural Resources Committees.

On the house floor, he's voted no on the Biden administration's signature pieces of legislation, the American Rescue Plan, and the Bipartisan Infrastructure bill.

He also voted against the National Defense Authorization Act, the bill that funds the military.

He says that used to be a bill that was easy to support.

- But now the NDAA has all these additional provisions put in there to support the New Green Deal and to make sure that we have gender training for our military.

And there's a lot of things like that, that there's additional funding going to that the people across the state wouldn't support and so I don't support it.

- [Stan] Before DC, Rosendale held office in Helena for a decade.

First in the State House and then in the State Senate where he eventually became majority leader.

He then won a statewide election to become state auditor in 2016.

His election to Congress in 2020 came after an unsuccessful attempt to unseat Senator Jon Tester, a Democrat, in 2018.

His message to voters this year, "Let's roll back the clock."

- We've seen the consequences of the 2020 elections and we've seen the reverse of a lot of the policies that had been put in place from 2016 to 2020 and how effective they were and how quickly the country took a turn for the worse.

We've seen the inflation increases, we've seen the energy cost increases.

Even if we are still in divided government to create a firewall so that we can stop some of these bad things from happening and try to continue to work in some of the areas like in the Veterans Affairs Committee to provide some kind of positive elements for the people across the state.

We are willing to spend far too much money to engage in conflict and far too little to care for our warriors once they come home.

- [Stan] The candidates also show their differences in issues of perennial importance to Montanans, such as abortion rights.

- I, myself, am 100% pro-life and I think that the Supreme Court decided properly to turn this back over to the states.

- Pregnant persons have abortions for all different reasons and those reasons need to be private.

- [Stan] And the right to bear arms.

- I think the founders use the very most basic language that they possibly could so they wouldn't be misunderstood.

And it says that these rights shall not be infringed.

- We have to take a look at the Second Amendment and say the filter by which we're looking at this, is it keeping our country safe or is it harming our country?

- Rosendale has also centered border security in his agenda recently taking a trip to the southern border, raising concerns about a staggering rise in illegal border crossings, human trafficking, and drug smuggling.

- We have literally an invasion taking place right before our eyes and the Biden administration has failed miserably at defending our nation.

- It seems like there's so much of this rhetoric that's just about outrage and fear though.

Do you think that there's an element of fear in there?

- I think that there's a lot of people that use whatever political tool that they can or language that they can to move opinions on both sides.

- Do you think that it's healthy for politicians to motivate people with fear?

- No, I do not.

Honestly, I personally try my very best to use facts and truth and focus on policy and not personalities.

- We continue to hear my colleagues on the other side of the aisle talking about the New Green Deal and what we need to do to preserve our environment, but yet they ignore this debris and trash that is completely ruining the environment here in this riparian area next to the river where all of the illegal immigrant traffic is coming through.

- [Stan] Ronning agrees that border security is an issue.

- It is a significant issue, especially for those states on the Southern Border.

And I do think that there are things that need to happen and there are plans that need to be put in place that address those issues.

My hope is that we can not only address an immediate issue, but that we can also address systemic issues.

Because until we address systemic issues of what are happening in those other countries, we're going to continue to have to put a Band-Aid, a Band-Aid, a Band-Aid, more Band-Aids on issues.

- When say something should be done, are you referring to increased border security measures?

- I do think so, yeah.

Yeah, I do.

- If history is any indication, unseating a Republican incumbent here is going to be an uphill battle Republican Ron Marlenee was the last person to represent Montana too, with a tenure that lasted from 1977 to 1993.

Like Rosendale that run included a lot of no votes and a small government mindset.

Whoever wins this fall will head to a bitter divided Washington with a tough job of rolling up their sleeves and getting some work done for Montanans.

For "Impact," I'm Stan Parker.

- And for the first time since 1994, an independent candidate for the House of Representatives will appear on Montana ballots.

Billings businessman, Gary Buchanan, launched his campaign in March and since then has been traveling the district to meet with voters.

The financial advisor has managed to raise more money than the Democratic candidate.

Buchanan has served both Republican and Democratic governors in various roles.

He says he wants to be an alternative candidate.

- What I'm hearing everywhere is if you're tired of politicians beating up on each other, tired of legislatures and politicians attacking schools, attacking electoral officials, attacking hospital officials, vote for me because I can bring a well-intentioned view to politics, but a well backgrounded view to politics.

They call us the old guard and I've got probably a dozen traditional Republicans.

They don't think the Republican party resembles what we used to know as conservatism.

The Republican Party in this state has gone off the rails and become way too extreme.

And that's why I'm getting Republican support from some very prominent Republicans 'cause they remember how it used to be that we could get things done with opposite parties and that's gone.

On the Democratic side, I'm getting a lot of moderate Democrats that think that the national policy and state policy has gone too far to the left.

So I'm aiming down what I think is an eight-lane highway in Montana in the middle, picking off partisan votes, but also appealing to, the only growing part of Montana politics are independents.

- Buchanan says he's conservative on fiscal issues and moderate on social issues.

And there's another candidate challenging Matt Rosendale for his seat in Congress.

Attorney Sam Rankin of Billings.

Rankin has run for federal office several times as an independent, as a Democrat, and now is a libertarian.

And there's one issue that rises above the rest for him.

- The problem with politics, and it's only gotten worse, and it's why everybody despises Congress right now, nobody I think can say anything favorable about Congress, is it's the money.

And I said that way back in the '90's that it's corrupting and it's only gotten worse.

And there's no way that the Supreme Court can change it 'cause Citizens United took care of that.

And of course, congressmen aren't gonna, you know, vote anything against their own interest and they get a lot of money and they like the adulation.

So I've run before, but I think my message may resonate this time because it basically says it's not the people that are the problem, it's the money that's the problem.

Corporations, PACs, and lobbyist money.

- Rankin says because he's not taking corporate money, his decision making won't be influenced like other politicians.

And we'll preview the race in Montana's other congressional district in our next episode.

(soft music) This spring, heavy rains and cool temperatures helped relieve longstanding drought conditions in some parts of the state.

But in North Central Montana, dry conditions persisted, leading to a third consecutive summer of drought.

Montana PBS's Joe Lesar reports how one ranch family is affected and how a team of researchers is trying to help.

- [Perri] I remember this spring being down where there's a dry reservoir and seeing nothing but dead turtles on the bottom and that was kind of a heartbreaking sight.

- [Joe] Lee and Perri Jacobs live and work on the same ranch that Lee's family homesteaded in 1917.

- [Lee] We're 50-mile south of Malta, Montana in what's, most of the locals we call it South Phillips County.

We're a cow calf operation.

- Yeah, I've been here all my life.

It's hard to beat.

- [Joe] The Jacobs run a dry land cattle operation.

They rely solely on rain and snow melt to grow grass to feed their cattle.

They have several wells on the land they work, but the primary source of drinking water for their animals is the sky.

- We have to rely on mother nature and she just hasn't been real good to us lately.

- [Joe] According to the US drought monitor, January of 2021 was the last time Phillips County was drought free.

That spring was hot and dry and by the end of June, the driest and second warmest on record.

61% of the state was experiencing severe to extreme drought.

Conditions worsen through the fall and by December of 2021, a third of Montana was experiencing exceptional drought.

This spring brought relief to much of the state, but not in North Central Montana where drought conditions have persisted through the year.

- [Perri] We had some nice spring moisture enough to get the grass going, but we've not had the big hard rains or the big heavy snows that created lots of runoff to fill the reservoirs for the livestock and the wildlife.

- [Joe] Drought is nothing new for agricultural producers in Montana.

Lee worked through the infamous droughts of the late '80's and early 2000's.

- The '80's and 2001 and '02, we always had some kind of spurt of rain in them, but they were workable.

I don't know, this one's getting tougher.

- You add onto that, the drought has caused us to have to buy hay three successive years at least now and that's an expense we don't normally have.

- [Joe] Doing more with less.

That's the position drought puts many ranchers in.

When buying hay becomes too expensive or when there's no water for the animals to drink, ranchers are forced to coal cattle.

- [Lee] Oh, we've dropped 30, 40%.

- That many fewer calves that we'll be able to sell this fall, so our income will go down by that much.

So we're feeling the pinch.

- [Joe] An important thing to understand about drought in Montana is that it's normal.

It's a natural and recurring feature of Montana's semi-arid climate.

Most producers in Montana will tell you that they're prepared to make it through a dry year.

But it's when those years start to stack up, managing the situation can become dire.

200 miles to the south, a group of experts from the Montana Climate Office are working to equip producers like the Jacobs with a the better idea of how conditions are evolving.

They're installing the latest edition to the Montana Mesonet, a network of weather and soil moisture monitoring stations.

This station is going in just northwest of Cooney Reservoir in Stillwater County.

It's one of over 90 stations currently operating statewide.

By the time this project is completed, in 2027, 205 stations will blanket the state and those will be part of a larger network of 540 stations across five states.

- When this project is done, this is gonna be one of the densest meteorological networks in the world.

- [Joe] And all of that data.

- Temperature, relative humidity, wind speed and direction, incoming solar radiation.

- [Joe] As well as rain, snow, and soil moisture measurements is used by multiple entities to not only study drought, but make flood predictions and monitor fire conditions.

It's also being used by agricultural experts like MSU extension agent, Lee Schmelzer, who helped create some of the first of these stations in Montana nearly 20 years ago.

- So being able to have that soil moisture and the the weather information readily at your fingertips is helpful, but there's also some other tools that we're just at the beginning stages of developing that'll be valuable for producers across the state.

- [Joe] Tools like plant growth models that can help farmers know when to seed or help ranchers know how much grass to expect during a given year.

Tools to help inform but also validate decisions made by producers.

- And then you can move it out.

- [Joe] To understand drought, but from an agricultural and an ecological perspective, it's as important to study what's happening below the ground as it is to study what's happening above.

These stations have five soil moisture sensors at different depths.

Samples are collected during the installation and brought to the climate office in Missoula for analysis.

- When we think about hydrology and we think about drought, we often only think about rainfall.

Well, that's meteorological drought.

And then well, how are the rivers doing?

We monitor that fairly closely and that is hydrologic drought.

Terrestrial drought is why we measure now soil moisture, how much water is in that soil reserve?

That of course is what grows plants.

If we are simply monitoring for precipitation, that's an input, but it doesn't tell us how much water is available for plant growth.

- Make note of kind of in the central part of the state.

- [Joe] The data from the Mesonet also streams to the climate office in Missoula, where it informs weekly drought updates released by the DNRC as well as the US drought monitor, the federal drought map also released weekly.

- That drought monitor triggers federal response and as well state emergency response to drought conditions, whether through insurance programs, restrictions.

- [Joe] Insurance programs for ranchers and farmers like the Jacobs.

The hope is that a better idea of how drought conditions are evolving will lead to a quicker and more appropriate response.

- And so, with added data, it's becoming much easier for us to characterize these conditions and also have some lead time.

We're not responding to what has happened, but we are getting insight as to how conditions are going to evolve as the year progresses.

- [Joe] Making this data accessible to the general public is another major goal of this project.

The climate office has developed an online dashboard where information from each station can be viewed and saved.

According to Schmelzer, one of the next big steps will be getting the word out and informing producers on how this data can be used to help make decisions.

- So just having that long-term data, in a concise form, will be very valuable.

We're on the brink of having some really cool tools for people to use.

- [Joe] People from Stillwater County up to the highline whose livelihood comes from the land.

People like the Jacobs, who despite economic and environmental uncertainties, are dedicated to their crafts and to their lifestyle.

- [Perri] We love our livestock, we love the wildlife, and we truly love what we do.

I mean, you have to survive out here.

And that passion, I think is what drives us to continue to thrive in the good times and to struggle, but survive, during the bad times.

- [Joe] For "Impact," I'm Joe Lesar.

- When climatologists want to determine the severity of a drought, they compare the current conditions to the conditions normally expected in a given area, but those norms are also changing.

Montana PBS's Jo Lesar sat down with climatologist, Zach Hoylman, who says it's not accurate to compare conditions in two different geographic areas and it's also problematic to compare droughts over time.

- So the conditions that maybe were common back in the early 1900's may not be as common today and that's really the impetus of our research to really understand how these changes in baseline conditions or the reference conditions that we use to describe drought, how they change over time.

And if we don't account for that change over time, how does that influence our assessments of drought severity and extent?

What we did in this study was we aggregated data sets from around 2000 climate grade weather stations across the nation and analyzed their precipitation dynamics over time.

And what we did was we calculated drought models using two different methodologies.

The first methodology kind of represents the conventional methods that we use in drought science pretty frequently.

And so, what we did was we calculated drought models using these really long periods of record, is what we call them, or reference periods, going back all the way to, say, 1900 to describe today's drought conditions and severity.

Then, we compared these long term climatologies to a more recent 30-year climatology, which represents this more contemporary climatic condition.

We compared these two different drought models and what we found was that when we used these really long periods of record to describe today's drought events, we actually overestimate the severity of drought in locations that have shifted towards a drier normal.

And this is because the conditions that occurred back in the early 1900's no longer are appropriate analogs of today's climate.

So we can't use the information from early in our past to describe what we might expect to see tomorrow.

And so, that causes errors in our drought assessment when we're trying to describe current day contemporary drought risk.

What it really comes down to is in locations where climate has shifted over these long time scales, we're not accurately describing our current day drought risk by using these really long periods of record.

We need to be using these shorter periods of record to more accurately describe what types of events we might expect to see in the coming years.

- So what does this mean for agricultural producers and water managers?

How can the ideas in your research help people who are making important decisions based on drought?

- Right.

Yeah.

And that's the whole point of this is that if the objective of drought monitoring is to better inform our producers, our policymakers, and our public programs on what they might expect to see tomorrow, we need to be using these more contemporary records to better reflect current climatic conditions.

And the real objective or the ultimate purpose of this type of research is to understand how to best provide the most accurate information to people so that they can consider their own risk profiles and make informed decisions about their own risk from the perspective of drought.

If we don't provide people with accurate information about what types of events they might be expecting to see in the coming years, then that doesn't give them the information they need to assess their own risk.

And that's ultimately the objective of suggesting a change in the way that we do our drought monitoring towards focusing on these more contemporary drought time scales because it just provides a more accurate depiction of what we might expect to see tomorrow.

Now there's very good arguments for why we might want to use longer periods of record for other systems.

For example, forested ecosystems are responding to much longer time scales and they've adapted to these much longer time scales of climate.

But drought monitoring in the United States is very focused on agricultural and producer sectors.

And so, if the purpose is to inform them about their own risk profiles, it's really important to use these more contemporary reference periods to describe drought severity.

- Hoylman plans to focus future research at the Montana Climate Office to helping in the short term while adapting to long term water availability.

That's all for this episode of "Impact."

Next time, we'll look at the candidates for Congress in Montana's other district and we'll examine how one Montana City is taking a new approach to the issues surrounding the growing homeless population.

Thanks so much for joining us.

I'm Breanna McCabe.

We'll see you next time.

(soft music) (soft music continues) - [Announcer] Production of Montana PBS Reports, "Impact" is made possible with support from the Otto Bremer Trust.

Investing in people, places, and opportunities in the Upper Midwest.

On the web at autobremer.org.

The Greater Montana Foundation.

Encouraging communication on issues, trends, and values of importance to Montanans.

And viewers like you who are friends of Montana, PBS.

Thank you.

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