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Democratic gubernatorial candidate Ryan Busse held the first major press conference of his campaign this week, laying out some basic legislative priorities and directing astringent criticism at incumbent Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte.
Busse, a critic of the firearms industry in which he once worked as an executive, spent part of his roughly 40-minute remarks laying out his ambitions to retool the state’s property tax rates to help homeowners, streamline the state’s health department to help people at risk of losing their Medicaid eligibility through bureaucratic churn, and renew Montana’s expanded Medicaid program in 2025.
“I pledge to you to do everything possible to make sure that our Medicaid expansion sticks,” he told a crowd of a few dozen in the state Capitol rotunda on Tuesday. “If we don’t, you can look forward to massive closures and restrictions on health care coverage, especially across rural Montana.”
But Busse, a Kansas native who has lived in Kalispell since the 1990s, directed the majority of his speech toward Gianforte and the Republican legislative supermajority, accusing the state’s ruling political party of facilitating an upwards transfer of wealth that benefits corporate interests and well-heeled transplants over longtime working-class residents.
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“Gianforte just said a couple days ago, he said Montana’s easy to sell,” Busse said, referencing remarks Gianforte delivered earlier this month at a state Chamber of Commerce event framing recent corporate relocations as the result of lowered business taxes in Montana. “Everything to him, I guess, is a dollar sign.”
What was most striking about Busse’s speech, though, was his deployment of the word “fascism,” a term that even the most strident public critics of the state’s conservative power structure have — with limited exceptions — avoided.
“Greg Gianforte wants to replace our hard-fought and hard-won democracy in Montana with a dangerous brand of fascism and authoritarianism,” Busse said, referencing legislative efforts to restrict abortion, beef up obscenity laws and limit access to the ballot box. “He wants Montana to be a place where there are fewer freedoms, especially for women. He wants bureaucrats to have the power. He wants to invade your privacy. He wants to tell you what books you can and can’t read.”
Busse repeatedly referred to what he called Gianforte’s “weird pseudo-morality,” “weird religious morality” and “strange addiction to ideology.” (Gianforte’s philanthropic family foundation has helped fund a variety of conservative religious projects in Montana, including the Montana Family Foundation and the Glendive Dinosaur and Fossil Museum, which hosts paleontological exhibits ostensibly supporting young-earth creationism).
Greg Gianforte wants to replace our hard-fought and hard-won democracy in Montana with a dangerous brand of fascism and authoritarianism.”
Democratic candidate for governor Ryan Busse
From his first campaign ad, which featured Busse and his kids shooting clay pigeons, the Democratic hopeful and political novice has repeatedly presented himself as tough-talking, rough-and-ready candidate who espouses progressive values while still fitting the established mold of a successful Montana Democrat — that is, white, masculine, gun-owning, charming yet occasionally vulgar — set by people like former Gov. Brian Schweitzer.
Busse said he’s a candidate who can court Republican and independent voters who are disenchanted with the party’s Christian conservatism and the Legislature’s handling of housing affordability. He’ll have to if he intends to win office in a state that lent overwhelming support to Donald Trump in the past two presidential elections.
On Wednesday, Busse fielded a question from a reporter attempting to unpack that dynamic: Can he win over conservatives while calling the state’s top Republican a practitioner of fascism?
“I think that there are thousands, hundreds of thousands, of good, common-sense, well-meaning people in this state who call themselves Republicans,” Busse responded. “I meet them all the time. I don’t think they’re OK with this small sliver of Republican leadership that has become radicalized, that is speaking for them and giving the state a bad name.
“This idea that a single person, especially a governor, can be in a woman’s doctor’s office and tell her or her daughter or her mom or her aunt what they can and can’t do with their body, that’s fascist,” Busse continued. “Republican women may not say this every day at the dinner table, but their rights are just as important to them as to anyone else.”
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