Body Slam Politics: Montana Political Insider Explains Greg Gianforte's Alleged Attack On Journalist

The day before the special election to fill Montana's single House seat, Republican candidate Greg Gianforte allegedly assaulted and "body slammed" Guardian reporter Ben Jacobs for asking him a question about the Congressional Budget Office's analysis of the Republican American Health Care Act. Audio of the incident quickly went viral. A Fox News camera crew corroborated Jacobs' account of the altercation, which greatly differed from the description in the statement issued by Gianforte's campaign. Gianforte eventually was charged with assault just hours before the polls opened.

Gianforte, who is running against Democrat Rob Quist to fill the House seat vacated by Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, is no stranger to Montanians, having lost last year's gubernatorial race to Democrat Steve Bullock.

To understand who Greg Gianforte is, and how the bizarre incident could impact Thursday's election, International Business Time's David Sirota talked to Eric Stern, a longtime Montana political strategist and adviser to both Bullock and Montana's previous governor, Democrat Brian Schwietzer. Stern also has served as a political columnist for Salon.com. Audio of the conversation is available below.

What follows is a lightly edited transcript of the conversation.

Sirota: You live in Montana, you live in Helena, for people who don't know, who is Greg Gianforte?

Stern: Greg Gianforte is a person who came to Montana in the early '90s from the East Coast and he started a software company, which he sold in 2011 to the Oracle Corp. for almost $3 billion. So on that side, he is a Silicon Valley type. Massively successful. He probably walked away with close to $1 billion for himself. But he's also a very religious man. He's an ultra-religious Christian. He builds religious schools. He and his wife have fought very hard against nondiscrimination ordinances designed to protect gay and lesbian people in Montana towns and cities. They have opposed those types of things on religious grounds. So he's this sort of paradox, and he ran for governor unsuccessfully in 2016 and tried to knock off the incumbent, Steve Bullock, and failed. And then it looked like he wasn't going to do much of anything, but then Ryan Zinke vacated the congressional seat because he was chosen by Trump to be interior secretary, and so Gianforte kept running. He was now running for Congress instead of governor.

Sirota: And now he's like the most ridiculous person —

Stern: This is the most bizarre incident. Everyone has always known that he had a short temper because you could hear it in the interviews he did with liberal reporters in places like Montana public radio. And you would often hear it. It would sort of bubble up a little bit. When this happened, I wasn't surprised. What was surprising is that it happened 24 hours before an election day on which he is projected to win because the polls were showing him leading by anywhere from 8 to 14 points. There's never really been a poll showing it very close.

Sirota: He's been massively outspending the Democrat.

Stern: He probably outspent his opponent by, I would say, in the end when you add up both piles of money I would say that you'll probably be looking at four or five to one Republicans and Gainforte outspending Democrats and Rob Quist. And Rob Quist has never run for Congress before, never run for office before. He's a musician. He walks around with a cowboy hat and kind of a scarf tie, and he is an interesting guy. He struggled in this campaign. They did a lot of good opponent research on Quist, and they made it tough for him, and there were all sorts of nasty articles in newspapers about his, you know, unpaid taxes and unpaid bills. But there is a huge enthusiasm gap right now. Rob Quist is drawing, literally, hundreds and sometimes thousands to his events. And Gianforte —

Sirota: And thousands of people in Montana is huge, because there are not that many people in Montana.

Stern: People marched on the capital three or four months ago. Which is something we've never seen in Montana at all. Those were all Democrats. So, you know, there is an enormous enthusiasm gap right now. And Republicans never really liked Gianforte that much. He's not really a Montana archetype. The attack on him, which Democrats have used, I don't care for it, but they do use it, is that he is quote-unquote an "out of stater." Meaning that he came from someplace else. So that attack unfortunately with Gianforte resonates with some of his own voters. It's something that resonates with Republicans probably more than Democrats when people come from New York and California and settle in Montana. And of course it takes one to know one, because I did it too.

Sirota: Well look, I lived up in Montana, too, and I remember when we worked with Brian Schweitzer years and years ago, Brian was the nine billionth generation Montana and that was a whole part of his story.

Stern: And that's exactly the talking point that Rob Quist the Democrat is using — third-generation, parents and grandparents were ranchers. That is the thing you do to get votes in Montana. And it's probably becoming less and less resonant with every year that goes on because nowadays I think 55 percent of people who are in Montana were not born in Montana. So that's changed. The state is changing somewhat, in many ways.

Sirota: Let's go to the question of whether an incident like this hurts Gianforte among voters. I know we are only hours away from the polls being closed. But there's this huge thing on Twitter, everyone's going nuts, the audio comes out and there are questions about assaulting journalists, and we can get into that, but first and foremost, do you think this matters to anybody in Montana?

Stern: It does matter. The way in which it might not matter is as follows: Montanans vote absentee, meaning by mail, in high numbers. So generally speaking by the time Election Day rolls around you will have had close to 70 percent of voters having already submitted their vote. And so, with only 30 or maybe 35 percent of the vote still to be done on Election Day, the question is if, in fact, Gianforte was doing as well as the polls suggested he might, is that outstanding vote enough, even if it's been influenced by this event, to make a difference?

I've been around Montana politics a long time. I've run statewide races. It's a very tough thing to figure out until after it's over. It's just very hard to predict. I think that this one will have some effect because every front page of every newspaper is going to have this in bold letters, and several newspapers have withdrawn their endorsements: the Billings Gazette, the Missoulian from Missoula. These papers not only withdrew their endorsements, they're going to have front page articles saying so and strongly condemning Greg Gianforte, and effectively endorsing his opponent because when you do that you're effectively saying you need to vote for the other guy.

Sirota: Do you think we should read anything deeper into this beyond Greg Gianforte is a spaz?

Stern: This gets back to what I was saying before. I described it jokingly to someone as seemingly like something verging on temporary insanity. When you have one day to go and somebody is asking you a question, which is a boiler plate question — Ben Jacobs was asking about the American Health Care Act, the new act making its way through Congress. It was the most boring question. It was about whether he has a response to the new Congressional Budget Office score.

Sirota: That's the thing. Can I just stop you there? If you lose it over somebody asking you about a CBO report, it suggests you've got deeper problems.

Stern: Not only that, but this is a reporter who writes for the Guardian. There aren't a lot of readers of the Guardian in Montana and a good deal of Montanians probably don't even know that there is a Guardian. I mean, it's not really something that I'm even that familiar with. It's a foreign entity with a U.S. presence now.

Sirota: But that was the weirdest part of the story to me. There was some reference that I heard somebody make that was like "Gianforte was upset with a previous video" or something or another story that the Guardian had done. And I was kind of like "Dude, you're campaigning in Montana. Why are you focused on that?"

Stern: As I said before, he has a temper. He has a very deep dislike of reporters who pepper him with tough questions. He has not ever learned to deal with it with grace. It is something that's tough, and not everybody can do it so easily. And it's something he has struggled with. He might perhaps have anger management problems. I don't know. It's a speculation on my part. But I must tell you that it was, and David you've known me for a long time, I was deeply unsettled when I heard the audiotape. It made me very uncomfortable. I heard it three times, and even on the third time there is something about it that is very visceral and is really uncomfortable to listen to. This is a person who is completely losing it in the moment, and I think that is something that voters really need to know about and need to hear about tomorrow if they haven't already. And I do think it should influence, and I think it will influence, people's opinion of the candidate and again, whether it's going to make the difference who knows? Remember, Eric Cantor when he was the House majority leader in Congress?

In his primary, the polls showed him leading by 30 and he lost by 12 on Election Day. Why? Because none of his voters showed up. The only people that showed up to vote were for the other guy. So there was just a complete failure by all pundits and all polls to project the vote. What the Quist campaign is hoping for is that the turnout consists overwhelmingly of enthusiastic Democrats and that Republicans just aren't really interested because the president is struggling and because Gianforte is struggling and because Gianforte does not really generate that much enthusiasm among Republicans to begin with.

Sirota: And look, you've worked in national politics and you've worked in media, do you think there is a tendency, in a sense, to over read this? I've heard some people say "well you know Donald Trump has been demonizing the press, and says the press is the enemy of the people, and now Gianforte body slamming is part of it ..."

Stern: By the way, you say body slamming, the Washington Post reported it as he punched him in the face. The Fox News reporter who was at the scene said that Gianforte grabbed him by the neck, threw him down and punched him. My guess is that he punched him multiple times.

Sirota: Yes, and they quoted some WWF professional wrestler saying actually the technical term is "choke slam." I said, by the way, earlier that the one silver lining of all of this is that the term "body slam" has been resurrected from my 11-year-old WWF fandom.

Stern: Just so you know, Ben Jacobs called me the night before and said he was coming to Montana. And I know him from having worked with him from various times he would call me and get my opinion or have the governor speak on the record or whatever. I didn't want to do the interview with him because I was busy, but I said: "Listen, this race is not that exciting lately. I'm kind of hoping for it to be over soon." So that was the extent of our conversation. And the next thing I know, somebody texts me [about the alleged assault].

Look, people sometimes lose their cool. It is very difficult to be under the lights. It doesn't make you a bad person because you lose your temper. People do it. People make mistakes. But I think the bigger problem goes to what you were just saying about Trump, and about the narrative about the media in this country. This was a visceral hatred of a young man sitting there just putting a recorder up to him and saying, "I'd like your comment on a current issue." It was just a hatefulness that you hear. And I would encourage everybody who is listening to this podcast, if they haven't already done so, to listen to the recording and David perhaps he can play it on the podcast.

Sirota: I will.

Stern: It is really frightening and how angry and how hateful this guy is of a reporter who is doing his job, and it's not even a tough question. There's no such thing as a tough question if you know the question is coming.

Sirota: That's the part that was so disturbing to me.

Stern: The tough questions are the curve balls. You didn't see it coming and you think: "Oh my God. I've got to think of an answer fast."

Sirota: Again, that was the thing that was disturbing to me, like I've been around reporters when reporters are being aggressive and they're sort of jostling and really in somebody's face. The dialogue you hear on this is like, OK, he kind of pressed him a little bit. "You're saying no. I'm running out of" — there's some timing issue. And then the guy just exploded like crazy.

Stern: He absolutely — he exploded. And I think the part that you've got to be concerned about is he might not have even been aware of what he was doing. Because if you're 24 hours away from something that by all accounts is supposed to be a victory, you should be in great spirits. And this guy jumped someone and started attacking him physically. That's the place where I think you have to draw the line and say, "There might be something wrong, seriously wrong, with this man." And that's why I think it is very important for voters to really, really think about this thing tomorrow, read the news, listen to the audio and make the decision for themselves.

Sirota: So let me ask one last question then. It's kind of a disturbing question. I think Ben Jacobs had written a story that Gianforte didn't like before and some conservatives didn't like, and you've seen some on the right, on social media and the like, say, "Well if a reporter writes a bad story, a bullying story, you should expect to face some sort of retribution." I guess my question is how much do you think, among Montana voters, some people will perceive this to be like "Yeah, the guy got what he deserved"? Is there a sentiment there?

Stern: Anybody who is a big Trump supporter, you're already seeing it on Twitter and social media, these guys think it's great. The hardcore partisans think it's the greatest thing they've ever heard. He jumped a member of the liberal media, and he beat him up. And you know, you're not going to persuade those people. I do think there are always plenty of independent, persuadable voters who vote in Montana. We have one of the largest independent votes of any state in America. You know that because you and I worked on several campaigns together. There will absolutely be people who change their opinion going to the polls tomorrow. And the question is, is it enough to make a change in the race? And I wish I knew the answer. But I try never to make prophecies, especially about the future. (Laughs).