BILLINGS, Mont. (AP) — A decorated combat veteran warning about the threat of ISIS in America is being challenged for his U.S. House seat by a longtime educator who would become the first American Indian woman in Congress.

The race between Republican Ryan Zinke and Democrat Denise Juneau for Montana's only House seat reflects a broader divide playing out nationwide between Republicans focusing on foreign threats and Democrats honing in on domestic issues from education to the economy.
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Zinke, who was born in Bozeman and grew up in Whitefish, points to recent attacks in malls in Minnesota and Washington state as evidence the threat is real. He attributed his assertion that ISIS is present in all U.S. states to FBI Director James Comey, who said last year the agency was investigating people in various stages of radicalizing in all 50 states.

Montana has received no Syrian refugees, prompting Democrats to accuse Zinke and other state Republicans of employing anti-refugee rhetoric to scare residents and win their votes.

Juneau's backstory could hardly differ more from her opponent. A member of the Mandan Hidatsa tribes, she grew up on Montana's Blackfeet Indian Reservation, received a master's degree in education from Harvard University and a law degree from the University of Montana.

Denise Juneau’s Twitter profile ends with the proclamation that she is a “54th Generation Montanan,” a play on the tendency of Montana politicians to proudly claim the length of their native Montanan-ness. But Juneau is the only one of these politicians who can say she is the first Native American woman to run for Congress in Montana or any other state.

It’s the latest milestone for a woman who became the first Native American in the nation to win statewide office when she was first elected superintendent of public instruction in 2008.

Her candidacy may be historic, but for Juneau, political life runs in the family. Her mother, who currently serves as a member of Montana’s Senate, was passionate about educating voters and was vocal about civic life.

“She still carries around voter registration cards in her purse and pulls them out at inappropriate times,” Juneau said at an event at the University of Montana. “That was the household I grew up in — it was important to be civically engaged.”

In the swing state of Pennsylvania, we asked families of women – Clinton supporters all – to talk about why they support her candidacy and how they identify with her experiences as a woman in the workforce and as a mother and grandmother at home.

Polly Frey, a 67-year-old former stay-at-home mother and current furniture saleswoman in between jobs, lives with her daughter in the Philadelphia exurbs, and said she certainly sees herself in Clinton. “Being a new grandmother, definitely, it makes her more human and more attractive to me, how she would handle things,” she explained. “I worry about so much more now than I did with my kids, because you know what’s going on and you want to prepare them for what’s ahead and hope that they turn out to be even-tempered, moral, generous – all the things you would want in a human, which sometimes we don’t see in some of the candidates.”

Her daughter, Raina Murdock, is an IT professional who just turned 43 and has two children: Dexter, age four, and Meadow, one.

Murdock said, tearing up: “The one thing that I think is kind of cool, Meadow being the age she is, she’s not going to know any different” than that a woman can be president.