One of the things that first struck pollsters about political newcomer Tim Sheehy was how many Montanans recognized the first-time candidate’s name even months before ballots went out.
Just 2% of Montanans polled at the end of August hadn’t heard of Sheehy, 37, though his campaign events for U.S. Senate weren’t broadly advertised to the public and his direct interactions with the press were few.
More than $100 million worth of political ads were defining Sheehy, both favorably and unfavorably, while the candidate limited interactions with the public that couldn’t be tightly controlled.
Sheehy has on several occasions spoken publicly, offering some insights. Polling since July has, with rare exception, shown Sheehy with a lead beyond the margin of error over incumbent Democratic Sen. Jon Tester.
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Who was Tim Sheehy before he started running for Senate?
Before Tim Sheehy was the frontrunner in Montana’s Republican primary for U.S. Senate, the ex-Navy SEAL, aerial firefighter, millionaire business owner, part-time rancher and occasional political donor was a 2004 graduate of a Minneapolis-St. Paul area private high school who grew up in a lake house outside Minnesota’s Twin Cities.
Sheehy’s basic campaign pitch portrays the challenges facing the United States in dark terms. Speaking at an August rally with former president and current candidate Donald Trump in Bozeman, Sheehy said: “For everyday working Montanans, gas prices are double. Diesel prices are double. Your home is more expensive. Inflation is at record highs. How is this economy taking care of you? It’s not. It’s been an upward transfer of wealth under the Biden-Harris-Tester regime, they’ve taken money from your pocket, and they’re paying off college student loans with it, they’re paying for illegal immigrants’ hotel rooms with it, they’re sending hundreds of billions overseas to other countries. When they should be supporting you.”
The candidate’s economic assessment reflects Trump’s own proclamations in that both paint pictures of a world that’s worse than real life.
As Montana State University economist Joel Schumacher told Montana Free Press this summer, U.S. consumer prices have surged about 21% since the beginning of the inflationary period in 2020, while nominal wages have increased 22.7% during the same period. In other words, real wage growth over the past four and half years, relative to inflation, has increased about 1.5%.
Gasoline prices have not doubled since March of 2020, when then-president Trump proposed a voluntary national shutdown of non-essential business. The U.S. Energy Information Administration puts the average price for regular gasoline in the pre-COVID Trump years at $2.49 a gallon. The current average price is $3.09 a gallon in the United States.
Trump’s own statements about inflation being the “worst ever” have been repeatedly fact-checked and found in error. As Forbes pointed out after the June presidential debate, year-over-year inflation peaked at 9.2% in 2022. There have been many periods of worse inflation in the U.S., including in the 1980s when year-over-year inflation approached 15%.
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PAC spending on Montana’s U.S. Senate race approaches $140 million
Through mid-October, political action committees have spent $137.3 million supporting or opposing incumbent Democratic U.S. Sen. Jon Tester and Republican challenger Tim Sheehy. Meet the big spenders.
Some of Sheehy’s embellishments tend to land him in hot water.
At the end of August, news broke in Char-Koosta News, the official publication of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, that Sheehy had disparaged members of the Crow Tribe when speaking to audiences in Shelby and Hamilton in November 2023. The candidate’s anecdote suggested that tribal members were drunk at 8 a.m. while roping with Sheehy and later threw beer cans at his head as he rode in the Crow Parade. The Crow reservation is dry, and signage about alcohol being prohibited is everywhere at the event. Montana’s tribes demanded an apology, which they didn’t get.
Candidates for federal office in previous elections couldn’t shrug off criticism of their “insensitive” remarks. U.S. Sen. Conrad Burns was already caught up in scandal in 2006 when he confronted a group of wildfire fighters at the Billings airport and told them they were doing a “piss poor” job. This week, the National Federation of Federal Employees launched a late attack on Sheehy for suggesting that wildland firefighters can be slow to put out fires because of their pay.
Similarly, as local and national media outlets dug into public documents describing Sheehy’s business, Bridger Aerospace, as floundering, the candidate has advanced the narrative that his business is a success, despite being millions of dollars in debt.
Sheehy launched Bridger Aerospace with substantial public and private backing. Stephen Schwarzman, the principal of his early major investor, Blackstone Inc., has invested millions in a political action committee to pay for more than $20 million in ads defining Sheehy favorably.
The ads that have driven familiarity with Sheehy portray a former Navy Seal and successful business entrepreneur. An Emerson College Poll from Oct. 27 shows Sheehy’s favorable to somewhat-favorable approval rating at 48.3%, slightly better than incumbent Sen. Jon Tester’s 48%, with only 1.6% of polled voters saying they don’t know who Sheehy is.
Democrats have been working hard in the final days of voting to take public opinion of Sheehy down a peg. Veterans groups, supportive of Tester, a major player on veterans issues in the Senate, have questioned everything from Sheehy’s medical discharge from the Navy to the now infamous bullet wound in his arm, which the candidate has described as a friendly fire injury from his military duty, but which a Glacier National Park ranger reports occurred in the park.
MTFP solicited Sheehy’s participation for this article. His office issued the following statement in his name:
“We are facing serious problems, and we need new, serious people to actually solve them instead of the career politicians who talk about ‘fighting for you’ while our problems only get worse. I’ve been running a grassroots campaign since day one, going from town to town, looking Montanans in the eye, shaking their hands, and asking for their help to complete our mission to save America and sharing the same simple vision of Montana common sense: secure border, safe streets, cheap gas, cops are good and criminals are bad, boys are boys and girls are girls. Montanans will decide control of the U.S. Senate, and the choice is clear: I’ll work with President Trump and always put America First, and Tester is an America Last career politician, the #1 recipient of lobbyist cash, F-rated by the NRA, and a radical pro-Kamala liberal. I’m humbly asking Montanans for your vote because we have an opportunity to save our country’s future for the next generation by defeating Tester and Kamala — let’s take it.”
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