Hill County Republicans celebrate overwhelming Trump victory

At 9:30 p.m. on election night, the Hill County Republicans, a large group packed into the hospitality suite of the Townhouse Inn, began singing “God Bless America” after FOX News had just announced that Wisconsin had gone red.

It was becoming apparent that a Republican will be moving into the White House next year. Florida and Ohio, two must-win states for Republicans, were already in the win column for Republicans.

Although a combination of national polls suggested a Hillary Clinton win by four points, Chair of the Hill County Republican Central Committee Andrew Brekke said he always believed Donald Trump would win.

“I really thought we’d be eking it out and fighting over the last couple of votes, but I thought the votes were there. I felt that all along because I felt the polling was so strange. I guess if I’m surprised, it’s that it happened the way it happened,” Brekke said.

Brekke said the national polls can’t be applied to Trump.

“I think the polls made two improper assumptions. They’re trying to assign a statistical model that doesn’t work in this race. (Trump) is a whole different phenomena that can’t be captured in a bottle. I have a political science degree so I took statistics courses …  he doesn’t fit any of the criteria you would in a statistical model. So when you have that outlier and you assume a model that’s worked for 40 years, you’ve made a mistake,” he said.

Democrat Greg Jergeson, a former state senator and chair of the Public Service Commission, was watching results with fellow Democrats Tuesday in the Eagles Club in Havre. He said he believes that a different woman candidate might have served the Democratic effort better if 2016 would have been the year to elect a Democratic woman president.

“Somebody who didn’t have the record that was attacked,” Jergeson said. “Quite frankly, the Republicans effectively attacked her record and she was just kinda never able to succeed in getting around that and I think it pulled the whole ticket down.”

“The other thing that I think is a problem for Democrats nationally and in Montana,” he added, “is that they have written off too much of the rural areas and said ‘well, there are not enough people out there to make it worth our while to go talk to,’ and then they get shellacked in one rural precinct in one rural county after another. … One person’s vote  is as important as one person’s vote in a townhouse or in other locations, but they all add up.”

Brekke said he hopes Trump will address health care, trade and energy. And as for Montana, he thinks Trump will get out of the way.

“I think Montana will flourish because I think he’s under the opinion that the states need to be left alone for awhile to fend on their own. ... We don’t need the feds telling us how to operate,” he said. “I think he sees economic stuff that needs to function on that are solely federal. Our big industries are timber, coal, all energy — all energy — and agriculture, and he tends to have a policy that’s a little laissez faire. His win is a repudiation to energy policy that’s just going off the grid.”