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Daines, Edmunds seek votes in Senate race

Republicans speak at local Lincoln-Reagan Day fundraiser

Two GOP candidates for the first open U.S. Senate seat in nearly four decades were in Havre Sunday night, stumping at a local Republican fundraising dinner.

U.S. Rep. Steve Daines, R-Mont., was the keynote speaker at the Blaine and Hill county Republicans Lincoln-Reagan Day Dinner, held at the Duck Inn Olympic Room with close to 100 people at the packed event.

State Rep. Champ Edmunds, R-Missoula, was among some 11 other state and federal candidates who spoke at the dinner Sunday.

Edmunds faces Daines in the Republican primary for the seat vacated by Democratic Sen. Max Baucus, who announced in March he would not run for a seventh term.

President Barack Obama appointed Baucus U.S. ambassador to China, and this month Gov. Steve Bullock appointed the Democratic front-runner in the race, John Walsh, to the seat.

Edmunds said Sunday he announced his candidacy last February because he believed that no one representing Montana in Washington was conservative enough.

"And I guess Sen. Baucus heard, because he announced he was getting out of there pretty quick," Edmunds said.

He said when he left the U.S. Navy, he moved to Montana, and once he had raised his children as a single parent he wanted to find some other way to serve. He did not see enough conservative voices representing Missoula in Helena, so he ran for the Legislature, Edmunds said.

When he was elected - the only Republican in the Missoula County delegation, he said - he was told he couldn't vote his conservative values and win re-election, but he did.

"And if I am elected, I will take those conservative values to Washington, D.C., and I will be very much like a Ted Cruz or a Rand Paul and not very much like a John McCain," Edmunds said.

During his keynote address, Daines said government has over reached especially during the six years Barack Obama has been president, and he wants to help the Republicans take back the Senate to fight that.

"Big government used to be a concept," Daines said. "Now we're seeing it in living color with what is going on in this country with this president's policies."

Part of that overreach is restricting natural resource development in Montana, he said. Daines said he recently spoke to the chair of the Crow Tribe, Darrin Old Coyote, who said the tribe needs to develop its coal resources to fight 50 percent unemployment on the Crow Indian Reservation.

"And I'll never forget these words, he said, 'A war on coal is a war on the Crow people of Montana,'" Daines said. "And it's the Republicans right now who are standing with the Crow People. ... It's this president right now that is dead set on stopping our natural resource development in this state, and we've got to stop that by electing a new United States Senate in 2014.

He said he saw another example in Lincoln County when he toured Eureka and Libby. In a county containing a huge amount of federal forests, Daines said, federal regulation has stopped timber harvests and it is no coincidence that Lincoln County also has the highest unemployment rate in the state.

And, he said, the Republicans have the best chance in decades to take back power in Washington. Winning the House and Senate races in Montana is key to that, Daines said.

"Things are looking good but there's still a lot of work to do," he said.

Daines said the combination of Obama being in his sixth year - parties in power generally lose seats in a president's sixth year - along with people upset with overreach of the federal health care reform, the Internal Revenue Service, the National Security Agency and others, will help the Republicans.

"It provides us with probably the greatest opportunity to take back the Senate in a generation," Daines said.

 

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