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Vice President JD Vance will campaign in Belgrade for Western District U.S. House candidate Aaron Flint on Monday, Oct. 26. The vice president will be at Bozeman Yellowstone International Airport for a hangar rally similar to events that featured President Donald Trump in 2018. That year, Republican Matt Rosendale was in a tight race with incumbent Democratic Sen. Jon Tester, who, despite four Trump rallies in Montana promoting Rosendale, won the largest vote percentage (50.3%) of his four Senate races.
Flint is in a tight race with Democrat Sam Forstag. Both Gallatin County, the location of the Vance visit, and Flathead County, where Trump held a rally on Oct. 14, are significant to Montana Republicans’ chances.
Flathead County has the most Republican voters in the Western District and the second most Republican voters in the state (Yellowstone County is first), having delivered 40,681 votes for incumbent Western District Rep. Ryan Zinke in 2024.
Gallatin County has the second-largest population of Republican voters in the district, is second only to Yellowstone County for registered voters in the state and delivered 31,673 votes for Zinke in the last election.
This is just the third time the 16-county Western District has been on the ballot. Republicans appeared to be increasing their hold in the district, with Zinke improving his winning margin from 3 percentage points in 2022 to 7 percentage points in 2024. Zinke chose not to seek reelection and threw his support behind Flint in March. Political oddsmakers such as the Cook Political Report and Sabato’s Crystal Ball initially rated the race as favoring Republicans, but it became a toss-up by early September, with several polls showing Flint and Forstag in a statistical tie.
Trump’s Kalispell rally, held at the Majestic Valley Arena on Oct. 14, was just the beginning of a surrogate blitz. On Oct. 20, U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson stopped at the Gallatin County Fairgrounds to stump for Flint.
At the fairgrounds event, Johnson characterized western Montana’s U.S. House race as unexpectedly tight, according to video clips of the stop.
“We need your vote. Every single vote is going to count,” the Louisiana lawmaker told several dozen attendees at the noon rally, whose audience included Gov. Greg Gianforte. “This race, crazy as it is, is a toss-up. We’ve got to win it, and it’s going to come down to every single vote.”
The race between Flint and Forstag has shifted from solid Republican to leans Republican to toss-up in eight months. In August 2024, when Johnson stumped for incumbent Zinke, he did so from an airplane hangar at Billings Logan International Airport, a two-hour drive from the closest Western District community. That visit was 90 days before the election. Tuesday’s visit was exactly two weeks before the election.
—Tom Lutey
An Offer She Apparently Refused
Democratic Senate nominee Alani Bankhead drew new scrutiny to her campaign when she suggested in a TV interview that the Democratic National Committee had offered her a role in national party politics if she would drop out of her Senate race.
Bankhead made the remarks during an interview for “Race for the U.S. Senate — Montana PBS Reports: IMPACT.” She was asked whether anyone had offered to compensate her to cease her campaign, presumably to clear a path for independent Seth Bodnar, who has drawn staunch support from Montana’s former Democratic U.S. senators and other party leaders.
“They offered [me] to be, and I’m probably going to butcher this, but the DNC’s head of female veteran candidates, or something like that, and I was like, ‘Why would I go work for an organization that is actively working against me and stabbing me in the back?’” Bankhead said during the interview. “Like, no, I’m not going to do that.”
The claim went mostly unnoticed until Oct. 21, when Mike Berg, chief of staff for Republican U.S. Sen. Tim Sheehy, Montana Republican Attorney General Austin Knudsen and Sheehy himself publicized the remarks on X.
Knudsen suggested that Democrats might have broken the law by offering a candidate compensation to drop out of the race.
“This is extremely concerning. If this is true, it appears to be a violation of Montana Code Annotated 13-35-221,” Knudsen said. “My office will be reaching out to [Bankhead, Bodnar and the Democratic National Committee] to investigate.”
The response to Bankhead’s allegation from the Montana Democratic Party was short and to the point:
“Nope. No idea,” MDP spokesperson Sofia Perez told Capitolized on Thursday.
Donavon Hawk, one of Montana’s two members of the Democratic National Committee, said he didn’t know of anything being offered to Bankhead by the DNC. When he contacted national committee staff after the news broke Wednesday, they knew nothing about Bankhead’s claim, Hawk said.
In an Oct. 9 op-ed in the Washington Post, Bankhead wrote that a current U.S. senator had offered her a job, which Bankhead assumed was contingent on her dropping out of the Senate race. She didn’t name the senator. She also said an unnamed Democratic governor asked her to “step aside.”
Those claims added to the narrative Bankhead presented in an August press conference, when she said she had received death threats from people asking her to quit the race.
In an interview with Montana Free Press at the end of September, Bankhead reiterated that she had been pressured to drop out of the race, but never suggested she had been offered employment by a U.S. senator or the DNC.
Bankhead’s campaign didn’t respond to requests by Capitolized for specifics that might make the alleged offers easier to verify.
Bankhead’s campaign has been woefully underfunded, having raised just $187,328 through Oct. 14, less than a 10th of what Republican Kurt Alme and Bodnar have each raised. Polls have consistently shown the Democrat in third place.
Bodnar’s campaign issued a lengthy statement from spokesperson Kelly Webster about Bankhead’s allegation:
“For months, Alani Bankhead has done everything in her power to falsely accuse our campaign of trying to push her out of this race. Here are the facts: Seth has never asked Alani to drop out, and no one on our campaign has any knowledge of or involvement in any offer to get her to drop out. Meanwhile, Alani has repeatedly urged Seth to drop out because she is trailing in every poll and understands she does not have the resources or support to win without pushing someone else off the ballot.
“Seth has said from day one that he expected to run in a four-way race, and he is building a winning coalition of Democrats, Republicans, and Independents who are sick of the broken and corrupt politics of Washington DC. Montanans deserve elections free from backroom deals like the one that installed Kurt Alme on the ballot and free from the desperate and false political attacks from Alani Bankhead.”
—Tom Lutey
