Dennis Hayes had been posting his outrage toward the federal government on Facebook without so much as a like when he was contacted by an unfamiliar group suggesting the 70-year-old retired handyman run for the U.S. House.
Patriots Run Project, a furtive recruiter of hardcore conservative third-party candidates, indicated it would help if Hayes were willing to run.
“They asked me if they got somebody to pay for my filing fee, would I run? And I said yeah. I’m retired, I couldn’t pay the fee,” Hayes explained last week after news broke that the recruiter wasn’t the grassroots organization it claimed to be.
The filing fee was $1,740.
Hayes is now the Libertarian candidate for Montana’s western U.S. House district. He defeated Libertarian rival Ernie Noble 390 votes to 206 in the June 5 primary election. The western House district runs from Bozeman to Eureka and drew more than 150,458 voters, mostly for incumbent U.S. Rep. Ryan Zinke and Democratic challenger Monica Tranel.
“They asked me if they got somebody to pay for my filing fee, would I run? And I said yeah. I’m retired, I couldn’t pay the fee.”
Dennis Hayes
The nonprofit Institute for Strategic Dialogue, which watchdogs internet disinformation, reported June 13 that the Patriots Run Project was running a network of groups, websites and Facebook pages that skirted the social media site’s ad transparency policies. Politico first broke the story.
The ISD report focused not on Hayes, but rather on PRP’s lack of transparency, which Facebook parent company Meta allowed for more than a year, despite Meta disclosure policies designed to protect customers from disinformation. More than 30% of U.S. adults reported regularly getting news from Facebook in 2023, according to the Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan think tank.
Because PRP disclosed nothing of its spending aside from a few broadly rounded details reported in Meta’s ad library, there’s no accounting for how successful it may have been in recruiting candidates. That lack of disclosure, coupled with federal election law exempting candidates who raise or spend less than $5,000 from reporting donors or expenditures, kept the public in the dark about PRP’s activities.
The disclosure exception is Hayes, who volunteered that the Patriots Run Project was the motivation for his candidacy. The reveal came during an interview with Montana Public Radio. The Institute for Strategic Dialogue cited that interview, published May 15, as confirmation of Hayes’ recruitment.
The Patriots Run Project website describes the group’s purpose as recruiting candidates who met a needle-threading criteria: prospects must be both pro-Trump and opposed to America’s two-party system. Within 12 weeks of Hayes’ campaign registration, Libertarians booed Trump loudly at their convention for his 2020 handling of COVID-19 and the $8.4 trillion, plus interest, that was added to the national debt during Trump’s presidency.
PRP ads that targeted Montana aimed to recruit candidates who were “tired of the uniparty” — a reference to a populist conspiracy theory that Republicans and Democrats have collaborated to create a single organization that controls the federal government regardless of which party is elected to leadership. U.S. Rep. Matt Rosendale, the Republican lawmaker representing Helena, Billings, and all points east, professes concern about the uniparty regularly.
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Zinke and Tranel previously faced off in 2022, the first time Montanans sent two representatives to the U.S. House in decades. In that race, Zinke bested Tranel by four points.
The ads, 24 of which targeted Montanans on Facebook in early March, raise issues predominant in Republican campaigns, including border security and transgender athletes’ participation in school sports — both issues embedded in Zinke’s re-election campaign.
Meta ad data shows that Montanans 65 and older were the audience Patriots Run Project reached most. The group spent $2,800 on ads branded as “Patriots Run Project MT” and picked up 52 followers.
Hayes’ platform focuses mostly on federal government agencies controlling public land, specifically regarding mining. He mines in the Miller Mountain mine district near Winston in Lewis and Clark National Forest. He argues that the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management shouldn’t be involved in permitting mining, a criticism he also levels at the Montana Department of Environmental Quality.
“I put out a bunch of stuff on Facebook about the corruption of the government, the Forest Service, the BLM. I’m against this communist government, and I guess that is why they got ahold of me,” Hayes said of his recruitment.
Soon after agreeing to PRP’s offer, Hayes said, he traveled to Helena for a meeting arranged by the Patriots Run Project with an unidentified donor, whom Hayes describes as a man in his 50s, 6 feet tall, with dark hair, and a spouse who was also present at the meetup.
Hayes and the couple met outside Hayes’ Helena bank. There, Hayes said, he gave the man a deposit slip and then waited as he went inside to put enough money in Hayes’s bank account to cover a candidate filing fee.
Montana Free Press made calls to the phone number provided by Patriots Run Project in its Montana ads and on a website where recruits could complete an online application. No one picked up the phone.
The Institute for Strategic Dialogue reported that PRP appeared to be using Voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP, to produce phone numbers with area codes unique to each state in which candidates were being recruited.
The only physical address published on PRP’s ad disclosure forms appeared to be a UPS Store mailbox in Washington, D.C. ISD found no corporate filing for the Patriots Run Project, which doesn’t operate as a nonprofit and therefore discloses nothing about its corporate structure, mission, or spending.
Hayes defends the help he’s received from PRP. His campaign platform is of his own creation, Hayes said. He said PRP still communicates frequently with him by text. He said he gets messages from a PRP representative known only as “Will.”
“I want to talk about my message, not them,” Hayes told MTFP. “They’re not running any ads for me. Social Security would not be in the shape that it’s in if the government would pay back the money it stole from it. We got veterans sleeping on the streets in the winter and the Democrats and Republicans aren’t doing a thing for them.”
“When you have to get the government’s permission to wipe your butt, something’s wrong,” Hayes said.
There have been previous campaigns waged by secretive groups to promote third-party candidates in Montana congressional races. In 2012, the liberal-leaning group Montana Hunters and Anglers promoted Libertarian candidate Dan Cox in the U.S. Senate race featuring incumbent Democrat Jon Tester and Republican challenger Dennis Rehberg.
Cox won 6.6% of the vote, drawing harsh criticism from Republicans claiming that Cox cost Rehberg the race.
In 2018, Libertarian Senate candidate Rick Breckenridge withdrew late in the process and endorsed Republican candidate Matt Rosendale over the incumbent Tester. Tester won more than 50% of the vote, his best showing in three elections.
Republicans in past elections have suggested that Libertarian candidates siphon away right-leaning votes in Zinke’s races. In 2022, Republicans accused Libertarian John Lamb of participating in Montana’s western U.S. House race to draw votes from Zinke. Lamb and Democrat Tranel participated in several forums in which Zinke was absent. Lamb drew 3.9% of the vote.
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