Andrew Romano sees Senator Jon Tester as a test case for Democrats:
When Tester arrived on Capitol Hill, coastal types were quick to call him a New Kind of Democrat, which had a nice ring to it. Unfortunately, they couldn’t agree on what kind of Democrat he was. Some pundits pegged him as a populist. Others saw him as a Western libertarian. One even floated the phrase “macho Dem.” But as his recent decisions have demonstrated, Tester is, at root, something rarer and riskier than all that: a rural politician in an overwhelmingly urban party. “My stances are shaped by where I come from,” he told me in March. “Folks out here face challenges that most people don’t realize.” And so the question that will define the next 18 months, for Tester and his party, is not only whether there’s room in rural America for Democrats; it’s whether there’s room in the Democratic Party for rural Americans.
The Dish 