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
No paywall (gift)
= 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!
‘And actually, single quotes can be curly on your browser, you can see that right here’ (these should be curly-looking).
If you just type into DU yourself as I'm sure you know, you NEVER see curly quotes. You can get them in Word, you can get them in articles online, but there are NO 'curly quote' keys on your keyboard. They're created on the fly by software like Word, as you type. "Smart Quotes" they call it.
Anyways, character set describes the translations from hex representations (what is really stored on disk) to and from the 'characters', as we see them. It is a 'mapping' system, if you will. The means by which characters are converted to hex values is called "encoding". Every character set has its own "encoding" scheme associated.
The "font" otoh handles the actual presentation step, which takes the character it's been provided and makes it look like it does (and a bewildering array of other, non-obvious things about how the characters and words look, it would trip most people out to learn just HOW MUCH the font choice actually DOES in practice).
Anyways, this is not a font question, it's a character set translation issue. All four of these characters have their own distinct hex values behind the scenes. Or in some cases, they do not have one!
The “single, open, curly quote” is the Unicode character LEFT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK, U+2018. is the Unicode character LEFT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK, U+2018.
In UTF‑8, U+2018 is encoded as E2 80 98 (hex).
In ISO‑8859‑1, there is no defined character at U+2018, and curly quotes are not part of the ISO‑8859‑1 repertoire, so it does not have a valid single‑byte hex value there.
Curly quotes can clearly be saved to the database okay because I can save the above (without preview or edit) and you will see the versions I saved (with curly quotes in various spots). So the issue is not with saving to/storing in the DB. DB is probably using UTF-8 which is default for mysql.
However, at some step in the process where DU app server plucks your (saved) post content from the DB and presents it to you for a continued edit in the preview/edit form, the hex value of CURLY version that was saved in the DB is not properly interpreted anymore and you get garbage instead. That's why you can SEE the bad characters in the edit window at that point. At this point, local browser setting are irrelevant, font choices are irrelevant, because the data was F'd before it even hit your computer at all. It came out of DU's server wrong
Make sense, at least somewhat?
