Get an insider’s look into what’s happening in and around the halls of power with expert reporting, analysis and insight from the editors and reporters of Montana Free Press. Sign up to get the free Capitolized newsletter delivered to your inbox every Thursday.
May 28, 2026
After weeks of campaign mailers and digital ads designed to impugn Rep. Curtis Cochran’s character, the St. Regis Republican was happy to hear his neighbors say, “That’s not the Curtis I know.”
They weren’t kidding. The Curtis Cochran whose photograph was featured on the mailers sent by School Freedom Fund, a D.C. super PAC, is a motivational speaker from San Diego.
School Freedom Fund has spent $1.34 million in recent months targeting moderate incumbent Republicans or promoting conservatives facing comparatively moderate challengers in Montana legislative races.
“A couple of years ago, I was a lot heavier and kind of similar, but it’s not very close now. I’m way better looking than he is,” Rep. Cochran told Capitolized. “Moats told him.”
Moats is columnist Bruce Moats of the Mineral Independent newspaper, who did the legwork of finding the Curtis Cochran pictured on the School Freedom Fund mailers.
House District 90, which first elected Cochran in 2024, is the kind of place where strangers get noticed. It’s an 89-mile stretch of small legacy timber towns loosely threaded together by the concrete ribbon of U.S. Interstate 90, which navigates the Clark Fork-carved bottom of a timbered canyon. The former paper mill community of Frenchtown anchors the upriver end of the district near Missoula. The crest of Lookout Pass and start of the steep descent into the Idaho Panhandle anchors the northwest.
The region reliably elected Democrats in the 1990s, but turned Republican as logging on U.S. Forest Service land declined and the priorities of blue-collar timber workers and miners became incongruous with Democrats’ growing public-lands faction.
When Cochran was 30, the community’s state representative was Democrat Barry “Spook” Stang, a meat cutter at his family’s St. Regis grocery. Jim Elliott, a Democrat from Trout Creek, was the state senator. Both Stang and Elliott were shown the legislative exit by term limits, which started in 2000.
Whatever muscle memory northwest Montana voters might have had for filling ballot circles next to Democrats’ names is long gone. The targets of School Freedom Fund mailers aren’t Democrats, but rather Republicans disparaged as “Republican in name only,” RINO for short. That’s the case not only in the northwest, but across Montana’s northern tier in general. As political observer Jon Bennion points out in his book “Big Sky Politics,” when Montana was at its bluest, the state’s geographic partisan division was north-south, not the east-west of the present day.
Those northern areas used to be represented by Democrats, like Cochran’s HD 90. Like House District 18, represented by Conrad’s Llew Jones, the Legislature’s longest-serving budget architect. Like Senate District 14, represented by Russ Tempel, of Chester, and most legislative districts in the Great Falls region.
School Freedom Fund isn’t a Montana group. The only contributor to give more than $200 to the group since 2025 is Jeffrey Yass, a billionaire trader from Pennsylvania who has given the super PAC $15 million this election cycle.
To Cochran, Yass is “the TikTok guy.” After conversations with Yass and other tech investors in 2025, President Donald Trump reversed his support for banning the Chinese-created TikTok app on the condition that an American version be developed and owned by U.S. investors, including Yass’ Susquehanna International Group, or SIG. Trump previously cited the risk of TikTok users being data-mined by China and the app’s addictive videos being manipulated for political influence. In September 2025, before TikTok’s American carve-out, Trump issued an executive order calling TikTok a foreign adversary controlled application.”
The algorithm running the app is still owned by China’s ByteDance, in which SIG also has an ownership share.
“The mailers go after the sane Republicans,” Cochran said. “They characterize us as Democrats in disguise. They’re even going after Brandon Ler, the Speaker of the House, and Stacy Zinn, the vice chair of the GOP.”
Candidates targeted by School Freedom Fund appear in press releases issued by the party officers of MTGOP, which promised in June 2025 to begin vetting its candidates, including Republican incumbents, for ideological purity. The list of incumbent Republican legislators and candidates now disapproved of by party leadership is 36 names long. It includes MTGOP vice chair and state Rep. Stacy Zinn, of Billings, a former U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency officer.
School Freedom Fund has also donated $100,000 to the Montana Senate Leadership PAC led by Republican Senate President Matt Regier. Regier’s PAC has forwarded money to other PACs targeting candidates admonished by MTGOP.
Conservatives4MT, the PAC supporting the so-called moderates, has spent more than $620,000 supporting the 36 Republicans that legislative leadership disapproves of. In a letter admonishing those candidates, MTGOP suggests the Republicans are being funded by none other than conservative bogeyman George Soros through a money exchange involving five separate groups. None of the groups is managed by Soros, whose name has come to symbolize demonic liberalism in conservative media culture.
The group atop the funding pyramid identified by MTGOP is Sixteen Thirty Fund, which last fall became a registered Montana political committee whose support of more than 100 projects across the United States does on occasion overlap with projects supported by the Soros group Open Society Foundations.
Sixteen Thirty Fund supports two dozen Montana causes and groups, including the Montanans For Election Reform Action Fund, the Secure Elections Project, the Montana Budget and Policy Center and Big Sky 55+.
The lines between Sixteen Thirty Fund and Conservatives4MT are not as direct as those connecting Yass and the School Freedom Fund.
Meanwhile, Moats reports that the San Diego-based Curtis Cochran featured on School Freedom Fund’s mailers has said he’s contacting an attorney.
—Tom Lutey
STATE SENATE MAJORITY CALLS ON WINDY BOY TO RESIGN
A bipartisan majority of Montana state senators is asking Jonathan Windy Boy, D-Box Elder, to resign his legislative seat because of sexual abuse allegations.
The letter, endorsed by at least 39 of Montana’s 50 state senators, called the allegations against Windy Boy “disqualifying for anyone holding public office.”
“We believe that the right thing for you to do for yourself personally, for the Legislature, and for your constituents is to immediately resign from your position in the Senate,” the letter states. “We do not request this of you lightly; the gravity of these allegations and the duty we have to protect the integrity of our institution and the people it serves leaves us no choice.”
Senate leadership earlier removed Windy Boy from interim committees. His current four-year legislative term doesn’t end until December 2028.
Allegations that the long-serving Democrat sent sexually explicit photos and messages to underage girls in 2002 were raised in April by Helena attorney Brian Miller, who, like Windy Boy, is a Democratic primary candidate for Montana’s Eastern District U.S. House seat.
Windy Boy briefly paused his congressional campaign over the allegation, but reactivated the campaign May 6, saying he was the target of a political ambush. Two days later, former legislator Jen Gross, a Billings Democrat, revealed that she had filed a sexual misconduct complaint over harassing text messages sent to her by Windy Boy in 2018.
According to Associated Press reports of the 2018 incident, the report by Gross, who remained unidentified until this spring, led to Windy Boy resigning his chairmanship of a legislative committee.
Members of the Senate Ethics Committee chose not to sign today’s letter to preserve their integrity should they need to meet on the Windy Boy matter before the start of the 2027 Legislature.
—Tom Lutey
MOLNAR ASKS COURT TO LET HIM BACK IN PSC BUILDING
Utility commissioner Brad Molnar is asking a federal court to end his state-imposed ban on entering his workplace — the Montana Public Service Commission building.
Molnar requested a preliminary injunction Thursday, arguing that the ban stems primarily from Molnar criticizing fellow commissioners and PSC staff, disclosing a public record, and filing a complaint against a fellow commissioner with the Montana Commissioner of Political Practices. Those are rights protected by the First Amendment, Molnar argues.
Earlier this month, the PSC voted 3-2 to ban Molnar from the building for violating office conduct policies. The commission majority found merit in a report that Molnar allegedly made sexual comments at work and later sought revenge against his accusers.
Judge Donald Molloy ordered that Molnar be allowed to participate in specific proceedings in person through May 22, but that deadline has lapsed and Molnar is again banned from the office.
Molnar told the court in a Thursday filing that the ban violates his Fourteenth Amendment right to fulfill his duties as an elected official, which harms his 250,000 constituents.
Molloy has scheduled a June 18 hearing at Molnar’s request.
Meanwhile, most of the commissioners have asked Gov. Greg Gianforte to remove Molnar from office as commissioner representing District 2. This is the second time the PSC majority has made the request.
—Tom Lutey
