Daines Drops Re-election Bid in Montana, Upending a Senate Race
Source: New York Times
March 4, 2026, 8:47 p.m. ET
Senator Steve Daines, Republican of Montana, said on Wednesday that he would not seek re-election this year, a surprise announcement that could offer Democrats a long-shot chance to flip a seat in their uphill fight to win control of the Senate.
Mr. Daines made the announcement just minutes before the filing deadline closed for November's election, saying that he had been "wrestling with this decision for months" and that it was time for "new leaders," like the state's junior Republican senator, Tim Sheehy, to "spearhead the fight for Montana in the United States Senate."
Mr. Daines, a two-term senator who led Republicans� successful effort to flip the Senate in 2024, also endorsed a successor: Kurt Alme, the U.S. attorney for Montana. President Trump also quickly endorsed Mr. Alme on Wednesday evening.
Mr. Daines' announcement "a surprise even to his Senate colleagues" upended the political landscape in Montana, a sparsely populated and independent-minded state that has veered rightward in recent years. The last remaining statewide Democrat, Senator Jon Tester, lost his re-election bid to Mr. Sheehy in 2024.
Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/04/us/elections/steve-daines-out-montana-senate-race.html
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= new reply since forum marked as read
If you edit and repaste everything direct from the source and do not preview or edit (just post it immediately) it will appear correctly for everyone. You need the ORIGINAL source though, with the original curly quotes intact. Just paste and save and correct quote characters will stay in place.
ETA or you can manually edit all the quotation marks to non-curly form, as it seems you're working on 
And see my ETA in my post above 
It happens when you edit or preview a post with curly quotes. They will work right, however, if you paste direct from source, and do NOT edit or preview. The problem is coming from round-trips to the database.
Could be some modifications that Elad did to the software. I haven't looked to see if it's happening for OPs in other forums/groups but I do know there are certain characters that get stripped out of LBN post forms (OP and Comment section) but not in the reply forms with a preview/edit.
(ETA - the "=" and "|" are examples of characters that get stripped after edits to LBN OPs)
You post a lot of articles, so I'm telling you how to avoid the problem so you won't have to manually do all that, friend
And yes, so you're familiar with the general idea that certain things don't persist when you edit or preview (i.e. there is a database round trip). This problem is a similar/related thing, and yes it must be caused by some very recent software update installed on DU (possibly a new JDBC driver version).
(I am used to having to edit because a number of sites use extended character sets in their HTML for some of their characters and those don't always render correctly here either, so I end up having to preview/edit continually
)“Here is a sentence encased in double quotes done on a PC in Word and pasted to DU”
But if I try to preview first, OR I post it and then edit it, the curly quotes will switch to the garbage characters. It's because there's a database round-trip involved in either of those processes.
Try it
Again, I'm just telling you what to do to save yourself some work. Do with that info what you will
ETA, oh I get it now, to you, a single quote is an apostrophe, not a "quote". When you're a programmer, there's single quotes and double quotes, and "apostrophe's" just aren't a 'thing'
because on my browser, the single quote is not "curly". The double quotes are but I have seen double quotes that actually lean to the left at the beginning of a quoted section and lean to right at the end too, meaning there are different font styles of quotes!