Heidi Heitkamp is badly losing in North Dakota, while Jon Tester in Montana seems safe. What gives? Montana and North Dakota are next-door neighbors. But for two incumbent Democrats running in heated Senate campaigns, they might as well be worlds apart. To the west, you have the 6-foot, 300-pound Jon Tester, an organic farmer and butcher who lost three fingers to a childhood meat-grinding accident and whose campaign recently bragged that he had shot “hundreds” of cows and hogs in his lifetime. To the east, you have Heidi Heitkamp, a former attorney for the Environmental Protection Agency who led the Roughrider State’s fight against Big Tobacco in the ’90s and previously served as attorney general. Despite both being Great Plains states, their waves of grain are of decidedly different political hues. That fact was highlighted this week in OZY’s exclusive election model in partnership with Republican data firm 0ptimus, which showed North Dakota shift 15.5 percentage points toward Heitkamp’s GOP opponent, U.S. Rep. Kevin Cramer. That change happened after two polls showed Heitkamp trailing by double digits, leaving her only a 29.5 percent chance of winning re-election according to our model. Meanwhile, Tester remains strong, still ahead by an average of 3 percentage points in recent polls and boasting a 73.5 percent chance of prevailing in November. | 
