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When a candidate for Congress assaults a journalist just before election day, you'd expect him to lose his race. Not in Montana this week.

Republican Greg Gianforte allegedly body-slammed Ben Jacobs of the Guardian newspaper. The act that witnesses and an audio recording suggest was unprovoked was, if true, disgraceful.

Gianforte was charged with misdemeanor assault. But he still beat Democrat Rob Quist in Thursday's election, which was believed to be close even before the physical confrontation occurred.

Why did the Democrat lose to such a faulty Republican opponent? One answer is the state's Democratic governor, Steve Bullock, who ordered the all-mail election, which means most votes were cast before the dust-up occurred or was widely known about.

But that is only part of the answer. Although Montana did not break down the election day versus early vote totals, we do know that in at least two big counties, Gianforte did better on election day than he had in the early vote.

This and other signals within the county vote tallies suggests that many voters just didn't care about the smackdown of a Fleet Street hack. Sure enough, local reporting provides anecdotal evidence of that. Michael Tracey, a correspondent for the left-wing Young Turks YouTube channel, talked to some election day voters, and got the sort of response you might expect: "I don't believe anything anymore," one woman said of the media reporting on the alleged body-slam. Another voter, a man, may have gotten closer to the heart of the problem: "I don't care what they say ... a vote for Quist is a vote for Pelosi."

Democratic leaders spent this spring on a "unity tour" that demonstrated not only how far they are outside the mainstream of political opinion, but also how unwelcoming they are of those within it. They not only disowned but perhaps also mortally wounded their own candidate for Mayor of Omaha because he did not sufficiently toe the party line on abortion. That issue has nothing to do with the mayoralty of Omaha, yet Tom Perez, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, made a national example out of Heath Mello by declaring that pro-life candidates like him are basically dead to the national party.

This is just one example, but the incident helps illustrate how, even with public opinion running strongly against President Trump, Democrats continue to lose. They have staked out several issues, such as immigration enforcement, voter ID, and the trade-offs between environmental and economic concerns, and avoid common sense positions on these matters. They depict reasonable positions, such as that deportation is sometimes appropriate, as racist. And then they wonder why people in the heartland don't want to be represented by them.

The Montana voter's comment about Pelosi is ironic, because Pelosi is one of the few liberal Democrats who understands the need to field some centrists if the party wishes to build a House majority. But it also shows what an invidious position centrist Democrats are in when they are running for office in interior states. Even as they take abuse from zealots like Perez in the national party they are repudiated by voters.

Republicans' success in Montana may mean little in 2018. After President Barack Obama's big win in 2008, Republicans won no important elections until the fall, and didn't win any special elections to Congress until the following January. But the GOP went on to take the House in a landslide in 2010.

Republicans will now have one more House vote on healthcare and other issues. And it's all because Montana voters have reached the point where they would pick almost anyone before choosing to elect a Democrat.

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Montana is just not that into Democrats - Washington Examiner