A pile of 39 different political mailers sat in the corner after last week’s primary election. Almost all of the gloss was from outside money looking to run Montana. A couple years earlier, out-of-state money had saturated Montana to fund a failed ballot initiative where candidates not getting a majority vote would head toward a run-off election.
No one could miss the television ads or glossy mailers of the past Jon Tester vs. Tim Sheehy fight, as Steve Daines and a handful of unnamed billionaires poured enough dark money into Montana to make even Ed Anger pig-biting mad.
But last week was a midterm primary, a historically quiet time for the electorate to choose candidates heading to the November general election. I looked at the thirty-nine mailers. It was a big pile. Amongst all the perceived enthusiasm and fanfare, only a normal number of voters headed to the primary polls to select nominees.
As early as January, there’d been rumblings and speculation that big money was headed to Montana, but nobody I asked knew anything. Or least nobody was saying. People acted like Sergeant Schultz on Hogan’s Heroes, pretending nothing was happening and insisted they knew nothing. Soon enough, a shadow group of consultants appeared through the political haze.
A month before the primary, the flood gates of money opened as out-of-state billionaires spilled millions in pocket change to elevate their chosen candidates. On the Republican side the billionaires elevated the names of Kurt Alme and Aaron Flint with their millions. For Democrats, big money promoted Alani Bankhead and Sam Forstag with their millions. All four won.
From the farm, it looked like unknown candidates could easily be introduced to the public with big money helping voters select the winner. Only about a meager third of the voting aged population in Montana turned out to cast primary ballots last week. About 60% of that third chose Republican ballots, 40% for Democrats.
A very small number of voting aged Montanans chose the Republican, Democratic, Independent, and Libertarian candidates on the general election ballot. And that’s nothing new.
Newer is the millions spent by out-of-state billionaires to advertise their candidates. Big money that’s produced mostly from technology is knocking the doors, making the phone calls, mailing the glossy flyers, and inundating the air waves.
Unrecognizable organizations like the Progressive Veterans PAC or the More Jobs, Less Government PAC are respectively run by Democratic and Republican operatives with their own agendas. Not many know who they are. No voter knows why they spent millions. If they spend millions more. Only the shadowy political groups know what they want from Montana.
Millions flow into political nonprofit budgets through a weird arrangement where the organization does good advocacy work at day while sister organizations promote a preferred candidate at night. They spend that dark money to convince. Yet nondisclosure fans suspicion.
Over the past few years, the millions of dollars flowing to consultants and political insiders is slowly dismantling the two-party system. Last cycle, the cash elevated ranked choice voting. This cycle it’s all about promoting independent candidates to the forefront of politics.
One-time Democratic staffers even helped elect handfuls of Republicans in legislative primary battles across Montana. That’ll breed a new level of resentment into the upcoming Session. The far-right Republicans won more legislative primaries than the not-so-far-right Republicans.
The next legislature will be meaner and leaner. In those outlandishly expensive Republican primary battles, none of the winners or losers were moderate-enough to support a woman’s right to choose, or are even slightly considered pro-choice.
The voters spoke. November’s western congressional race will become a fierce battle between a far-right shock jock candidate and a far-left smokejumper candidate. Expect manure truckloads of cash to flood into the western Montana as both sides of these new shadow party types try to convince voters that their billionaires political group money is the best billionaire money.
Last year, as I unsuccessfully and rather foolishly ran to lead Montana Democrats, I read through the party platform several times to make sure that the values I sought to promote were in line with the rank-and-file members across this big state. Both parties have platforms, their values speak for people in our state.
Nobody knows what values the big money pumping millions into Montana promotes. Billionaire money has no platforms, no groups of people meeting regularly. Given even political nonprofits won’t disclose donors, it’s harder and harder for locals to tell if the position or candidate that the statewide organization promotes supports their membership or big funders.
The far-right and far-left political money groups are forcefully trying to prove to America that rural red states like Montana are hell bent on their version of change. And everyone can hear that the real political parties are evermore silenced by the outside, big-tech money.
The politicians seem to enjoy letting big money talk. The rest of us can hope that the change this year’s shadow parties deliver turns out less expensive in real life than the change locals were promised from the same-looking glossy fliers mailed two years prior.