Seth Bodnar has spent his Senate campaign positioning himself as a red-state outsider unbeholden to party machinery, but the financial picture behind his candidacy tells a more complicated story than the independent label suggests.
Bodnar has led the field in fundraising, pulling in more than $2 million since March, and has collected endorsements from prominent Montana political figures. Yet several political committees that previously backed Montana Democrats, including groups that supported former Sen. Jon Tester and former Rep. Monica Tranel, have spent exclusively in support of Bodnar this cycle rather than the Democratic nominee. Tester himself has been an early and active Bodnar booster, and a number of his former staffers now work for the Bodnar campaign. Tester has also helped recruit other prominent Democrats, including former Sen. Max Baucus, into Bodnar’s corner.
That arrangement has fueled persistent speculation that elements of the Democratic establishment view Bodnar, not nominee Alani Bankhead, as the party’s real vehicle for unseating Republicans in November — even as the party publicly backs Bankhead’s campaign.
The speculation intensified during the primary, when a previously unknown group called Progressive Vet PAC spent more than $2.5 million boosting Bankhead’s primary campaign against Reilly Neill, dwarfing the roughly $50,000 Bankhead’s own campaign had raised. The PAC’s late formation meant its donor list wasn’t required to be disclosed until after the primary had concluded. Once filings became available, records showed Progressive Vet’s funding traced back to American Values Project PAC, whose reported funding came from Jason Carroll, founder of the quantitative trading firm Hudson River Trading. Some Montana Democrats and outside observers have openly questioned whether the spending was designed less to elect Bankhead than to clear a path for Bodnar by inflating a little-known candidate’s profile just enough to win the nomination, only to undercut her general election viability later.
Bankhead has firmly denied any coordination or knowledge of the PAC’s plans, noting that candidates are legally barred from coordinating with independent expenditure groups in any case. She has publicly rejected any suggestion that she would step aside for Bodnar, calling him, in blunt terms at a recent press conference, the last candidate on the planet she would drop out to support.
Unlike Bodnar, who has built a fundraising and endorsement network increasingly populated by veteran Democratic operatives while running as an independent, Bankhead has cast her own campaign as free of dark money and PAC influence, saying she relies only on individual, grassroots contributions. Whether that framing holds up may depend on how the same network of donors and operatives now circling Bodnar’s campaign continues to behave as November approaches.