Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg to speak against corporate campaign spending in Butte

Former U.S. Transportation Secretary and 2020 presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg is scheduled to rally in Butte on May 17 with supporters of a proposed ballot initiative that would ban corporate money in Montana politics.

Organizers of the initiative, which would prohibit corporations from contributing anything of value to candidates, political parties, or state or local ballot issues, contacted Buttigieg, the former two-term mayor of South Bend, Indiana, after learning that he had mentioned Initiative 194 during a podcast interview.

“He was doing a podcast with the Texas Tribune and he mentioned the Montana plan so we asked him,” said Jeff Mangan, lead organizer for the Transparent Election Initiative and former Montana commissioner of political practices.

Mangan, who refers to I-194 as “the Montana plan,” describes the initiative as a reset to past state limits on corporate spending in campaigns — limits that were overturned in 2010 when the U.S. Supreme Court, in Citizens United vs. the Federal Elections Commission, equated money spent on political messaging with free speech and ruled that such spending is a First Amendment right. The Montana initiative bans spending by “artificial persons”  — nonprofits, trusts, partnerships, corporations, trade associations, or unincorporated associations. The penalty for violating the ban is being refused a license to do business in Montana.

Spending in Montana campaigns rapidly escalated following the Citizens United ruling. Spending by candidate committees and third parties in Montana’s 2024 U.S. Senate race totaled a record $300 million. 

Similar initiatives have been launched in Pennsylvania and Hawaii. The May 17 event in Butte will focus on the influence of money in politics and how increased spending has correlated to less direct interaction with the public by candidates and elected officials. 

“Americans don’t have to accept a system where absurd amounts of corporate and dark money drown out their voices,” Buttigieg said in a press release announcing his Butte appearance. “A change to the law could ensure that elected leaders are more accountable to the people, which means a chance to finally break through and deliver on key issues from housing to health care.”

Initiative organizers have until June 19 to produce roughly 30,000 signatures from registered Montana voters. Mangan said about 17,000 signatures have been collected since late March, but he expects a few thousand of those won’t qualify, which is typical of signature-gathering campaigns. To get more than 30,000 qualifying signatures, Mangan said, his organization will likely need to collect 40,000.

A time and place for the Butte event are still being worked out, Mangan said. Initiative organizers have already held several promotional events featuring a bipartisan lineup of prominent political figures, including former Democratic U.S. Sen. Jon Tester, and former governor and past director of the Republican National Committee Marc Racicot. 

In 2020 Buttigieg won Iowa’s Democratic presidential caucus and placed second to Bernie Sanders in the New Hampshire primary. He is a graduate of Harvard University and the University of Oxford, which he attended as a Rhodes Scholar. He now lives in Michigan with his husband, Chasten, and their two children.