The carpenters and sheet-metal workers sitting inside a Montana union hall were Seth Bodnar’s kind of crowd: fed up with Democrats and Republicans.
Mr. Bodnar, an Iraq war veteran and former president of the University of Montana, had come to the old copper-mining town of Butte to pitch himself as an independent candidate for an open Senate seat in the state, as well as an antidote to the partisan warfare that has left many Americans disgusted with politics.
“I’m angry about the direction of this country,” Mr. Bodnar, 47, said. “We need a new approach.”
Any other year, a candidate like Mr. Bodnar, who lives in the liberal college town of Missoula, has never held elected office and has no party support, might have no shot in a vast rural state where Republicans control every statewide and federal elected office. But this year, people are angry at high prices and the war in Iran, and many are upset over the backroom machinations that Senator Steve Daines, a Republican, used when he dropped his re-election bid at the last minute in an attempt to clear the field for a handpicked successor, Kurt Alme.
Mr. Bodnar’s supporters say Montana, a state that prides itself on its independent streak, is ripe for a major disruption.
But critics on the left say just the opposite — Mr. Bodnar’s candidacy will turn a winnable two-way Senate race into a three-way mess that will divide moderate and liberal voters and hand a victory to Mr. Alme, a former U.S. attorney for Montana widely expected to become the Republican nominee.
While in Nebraska, another Republican state, Democrats decided to stay on the sidelines and quietly back the independent mechanic Dan Osborn as he makes a second Senate run, members of the party in Montana are promising a fight. The populist candidates competing in Montana’s Democratic primaries deride Mr. Bodnar as an interloper backed by Beltway consultants and out-of-state wealth.