Jason Boeshore, a grain-elevator manager on the eastern plains of Montana, fired off a rocket this month to the private Signal chat he shares with the 23 other members of the state Democratic Party executive board. He demanded that leaders make clear in newspapers across the state that the Democratic Party would support only Democratic candidates in the fall elections. The response was swift and not to his liking. Shannon O’Brien, the chair of the party, wrote that her staff, not the board, would set the messaging strategy. Then she addressed the unspoken concerns at the heart of Boeshore’s request. “Listen if ANY of you EVER find yourselves questioning my intentions, please call me,” O’Brien wrote. “I will continue to move forward to get Democrats elected. There’s no hidden agenda.”
The problem for O’Brien is the belief among Boeshore and many other party stalwarts in Montana that exactly such a hidden agenda exists, pitting national, big-money Democrats—and maybe even some state party leaders—against the state Democratic apparatus. This internecine feud, full of rumors, speculation, and skepticism over the role of outsiders in state races, threatens to spoil one of the last best places for Democrats to pull a Senate majority from a difficult midterm map.
At issue is Seth Bodnar, a former University of Montana president who is running as an independent for the Senate seat being vacated by Republican Steve Daines. Bodnar, 47, is young, moderate, a veteran, a Rhodes Scholar, and all in all the sort of person Montanans might elect in a year when Republicans are facing the prospect of steep losses amid President Trump’s declining popularity. Democratic mega-donors such as one of LinkedIn co-founders, Reid Hoffman; the cryptocurrency investor Michael Novogratz; and the Microsoft heir Rory Gates are all supporting Bodnar’s campaign, hoping he can yank the seat away from the GOP. Because Bodnar is running as an independent, it means part of his campaign in Montana is based on criticizing Democrats whose voters he needs to support him.
Even the candidates running for the Democratic nomination have been drawn into the drama. They, too, are criticizing their own party leaders just weeks before the June 2 primary and seeking to make sure that party bigwigs don’t try to clear a path for Bodnar to face the GOP nominee in November.
“There is clearly manipulation trying to happen there,” Alani Bankhead, a former Air Force intelligence officer and Senate hopeful who lives in Helena, told me. Reilly Neill, the front-runner for the nomination, told me that the state party needs to commit to not changing its bylaws that require it to back Democratic candidates, “because the chatter is that they are going to because the money is too good to pass up.” Both have sworn to run hard against Bodnar if they win the nomination.
Bodnar’s Democratic backers say he stands the best chance of winning in November, so even without a party label, he is worth supporting on the wink-and-nod assumption that he will help Democrats seal a majority, like Angus King of Maine and Bernie Sanders of Vermont, both independents who caucus with Democrats. In other words, the handwringers in the Montana Democratic Party need to get real. “For Democrats, Seth is the only viable alternative,” Matt McKenna, a Bozeman-based Democratic strategist who has worked for the Clinton family and four Democrats who have won statewide in Montana, told me in a statement. “Seth wins with a large majority of Democrats, a majority of Independents, and the Republicans who actually do show up and are sick of the partisan shitshow.”
That works only if rank-and-file Democrats swallow their pride and throw their support Bodnar’s way—a tough ask of a gossipy party in a frontier state where some current and former Democratic operatives call their regular Zoom meetings the “Giddy Up Club.” Former Governor Brian Schweitzer, a Giddy Up founder, told me that he’d had three phone calls with Bodnar before Bodnar announced, imploring him to run inside the party. When Bodnar declined, Schweitzer went on the attack. No independent can win in Montana, the former governor insists, given the significant share of Democrats who are going to vote the party line. The danger is that Bodnar splits the Democratic vote and the Republican sails through. Republicans have circulated an April internal poll, before much campaigning, that shows Neill pulling ahead of Bodnar in a hypothetical four-way general election.
“Seth Bodnar is a pretty good guy, and I understand that he is a Rhodes Scholar,” Schweitzer told me. “But he ain’t been on a lot of dirt roads in Montana, and that’s what it takes to get elected.”
Montana is a big state with a tiny population and big personalities—fewer people vote across its 147,000 square miles than live in Louisville or El Paso. But an anti-corporate, libertarian streak has long given the state an outsize role in federal elections, sometimes attracting hundreds of millions of dollars in out-of-state funding. Daines’s sudden retirement got Democrats salivating about the possibility of a win. There was also the party crack-up, which became public in January after former Democratic Senator Jon Tester sent around his own prickly text message suggesting his support for Bodnar if he ran as an independent. Tester was a loyal Democrat during his three terms. But the seven-fingered former dirt farmer with a flat-top haircut cast his party affiliation as a liability.
“You can send this around because I don’t care,” he wrote in the message, which was reported by the Montana press. “During my last two races the democratic Party was poison in my attempts to get re-elected.”
Days later, Bodnar stepped down as president of the University of Montana. Weeks later, he announced his campaign; Tester’s former pollster, his former political director, and the state party’s former spokesperson all signed on. Bodnar joined Act Blue, the Democratic grassroots tech platform, to raise money, hauling in $1.4 million in about a month. “I’m running as an independent because that’s who I am,” Bodnar told NBC Montana. His campaign, so far, has largely focused on the damage that Trump’s economic policies are doing to the state, with some jabs at the political status quo: “We don’t believe that here in Montana we have to settle for a broken political system.”
The Democratic whisper network went into overdrive. Some former Tester and Schweitzer aides speculated about secret plans to persuade whomever wins the Democratic nomination to then drop out of the race to consolidate support behind Bodnar. One story making the rounds involves a purported plot to have a state party convention in the summer, after the primary, to find a way to avoid an endorsement of the nominee or to leave the Democrats’ ballot line empty if the nominee were to be persuaded to step aside. “It’s becoming clear the chair of the Montana Democratic Party isn’t acting in conjunction with her board and answers to dark-money special interests,” Erik Nylund, a former regional director for Tester, told me.
Other members of the state party executive board denied any such intrigue and told me that the party has clearly communicated its commitment to the Democratic nominee. “Somebody has a fever dream that that is going to happen,” state Senate Minority Leader Pat Flowers told me. “I think there is a lot of hand-wringing and there is not any reality there.”
O’Brien, the party chair, sees the drama as self-defeating when Democrats should be united in seizing the chance to regain power. The party also has a shot at the congressional district covering western Montana this year following the retirement of Republican Representative Ryan Zinke. O’Brien pointed to the huge turnout for “No Kings” rallies in the state. A recent annual fundraising dinner for the state party was oversubscribed. “As chair, I will support the Democratic nominee,” O’Brien told me. “To my knowledge there is no intention to change the rules to allow for support of anyone else.”
Bodnar has the never-failed résumé of a future senator: first in his class at West Point; former Army Ranger–qualified Green Beret with deployments in Iraq; and onetime corporate executive at General Electric. As president of the University of Montana, he reversed a six-year enrollment decline. His wife, also a Rhodes Scholar, befriended the former first daughter Chelsea Clinton at Oxford, and the Bodnars attended her 2010 wedding. They sat next to then–First Lady Michelle Obama at a 2012 presidential debate. Last year, before a University of Montana basketball game, Bodnar showed off his Ranger skills by rappelling to the court from the rafters.
He supports abortion rights, rails against tariffs, and says that Trump needs to seek congressional authorization for the use of force in Iran. His critiques of the Democrats echo those from inside the party itself: The culture wars are a distraction; transgender athletes should not have unfair advantages in competitive sports; and “Defund the police” is a dumb slogan and worse policy. Bodnar has called for a strong border. And, as a hunter, he opposes an assault-weapons ban, but he backs new red-flag laws to take weapons away from people who threaten their communities. “Seth saw his share of dirt roads in Iraq, putting his life on the line for our country,” his spokesperson, Roy Loewenstein, a former state party spokesperson, told me when I read Schweitzer’s zinger about Bodnar’s lack of familiarity with the byways of Montana. (Loewenstein declined to make Bodnar available for an interview.)
Bodnar’s advisers point to support from former Governor Marc Racicot and the strategist Reed Galen, who both left the GOP over their opposition to Trump, as a sign of the candidate’s bipartisan credibility. But the candidate demurs when asked about the most important decision he would likely make if he wins. The Senate operates as a two-party body; the party with the most votes appoints a majority leader who sets committee assignments and oversees legislative action. “I think we need new leadership in the U.S. Senate,” Bodnar said in a recent podcast appearance, a reference to both Republican and Democratic leaders. But he will not say which party’s new leaders he would support if elected. His advisers told me that Bodnar would go to Washington, negotiate the best deal for Montana, and not join either the Democratic or Republican caucuses. “I reject the notion that we have to accept a political system where you have to submit to a leader of a Party, vote the way you’re told, and engage in endless political warfare with the other side,” Bodnar told me in a written statement.
Republicans in Washington have attacked Bodnar, and Senate Democratic leaders have stayed silent. Bodnar’s Democratic supporters act as if he is a certain vote for their side. As soon as Bodnar entered the race, a Republican group cut an ad attacking him for running the university when a transgender track athlete competed in meets with other women, in accordance with NCAA rules at the time. Alex Latcham, who runs the super PAC aligned with Republican Majority Leader John Thune, described Bodnar as a registered Democrat—an affiliation that dates to when he was living in Connecticut in 2012. (There is no party registration in Montana, and Bodnar did not claim a party in 2014 when he lived in Florida.) “It is laughable to suggest Seth Bodnar would not vote for Chuck Schumer to be majority leader,” Latcham told me. Loewenstein, Bodnar’s spokesperson, responded: “Laughing at Montanans who are fighting the broken politics of Washington is exactly what we’d expect.”
One bright spot for Bodnar and the Democratic Party is that Republicans in the state are in their own mess. Daines surprised everyone by announcing that he would not stand for reelection minutes before the filing deadline and hours after Bodnar filed as an independent. Daines’s handpicked successor, the former U.S. Attorney Kurt Alme, who has never before run for office, was the only candidate who had time to enter the race, confirming to many Montanans the stereotype of national party grandees being dismissive of local democracy.
“That stunt threw everything on both sides of the equation,” Nancy Keenan, the former executive director of the state Democratic Party, told me. “Not only are Democrats in a snit, but Republicans are also in a snit.”
In a state more libertarian than partisan—abortion, recreational marijuana, permitless concealed carry are all legal—Democrats have had success here before. They claimed at least one, and often both, of Montana’s U.S. Senate seats from 1912 to 2024, and pulled off a 16-year run in the governor’s mansion from 2005 to 2021. In 2008, Obama came within 11,000 votes of winning. Then came the disruptions of Trump. Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris got about 38 percent of the vote in 2024, dooming Tester, who ran seven points ahead of her and seven points behind his Republican opponent.
Tester’s defeat led some strategists in the state to de-emphasize party affiliation. Some Democrats backed failed ballot measures in 2024 that would have shifted to a California-style ranked-choice voting program. Others explored adopting an Alaska model, where lawmakers organize around issues rather than parties. A Democratic consulting firm, Fireweed Campaigns, founded by a former state Democratic Party official, recently began working to elect moderate Republican lawmakers in the hopes of building a post-partisan governing majority in the state legislature, earning rebukes from the state GOP.
In the summer of 2025, Fireweed convened Democratic leaders in Anaconda, Montana, for a pitch on why an independent would have a better chance of winning the state’s western U.S. House district in 2026 than a Democrat. That plan, according to two people familiar with the presentation who asked to remain anonymous, was contingent on finding a way to persuade the Democratic nominee to back out once an independent entered the race—a similar scenario to the one that some Democrats suspect is now at play in the Senate race. Tully Olson, a former Tester campaign staffer who now works for Bodnar, was employed by Fireweed at the time and was on the list of those invited to the meeting, according to a document I reviewed. Bodnar’s campaign said that Olson did not ultimately attend the meeting. (Lauren Caldwell, the founder of Fireweed, did not respond to a request for comment.)
In mid-April, Democratic activists began circulating a resolution among the state party’s executive board that would require the party to appoint a replacement within 72 hours for a Democratic candidate who drops out—one way to ensure that the party doesn’t just switch to backing an independent. Current rules are unclear on how quickly the appointment must be made, but it is also not clear that the state party could logistically arrange a nominating convention on such a short timeline. Some of the party faithful fear that national democratic strategists and donors are throwing their money behind Bodnar to attract more money into the state, rather than help the party rebuild and take advantage of Republicans’ vulnerability.
“The tradition in Montana is that the top-of-the-ticket Senate races really do have coattails, and it matters for the overall organization of the party in the state. Seth Bodnar just completely screwed that up,” Ken Toole, a former Democratic lawmaker and state party officer, told me. “It’s a lot like burning down the barn to get rid of a few mice. The damage to the party is going to take a while to get over.”
Boeshore and others have pledged to keep raising the alarm. His frustration is such that he asked me to tell Montana voters to reach out to him directly so he can tell everyone in the state that the Democratic Party does not support independent candidates. “My email is on the website,” he told me. For him, the Bodnar independent experiment was being driven by “the revenants” of the old Democratic party. But there was a new party, “a new energy,” in the grassroots, waiting to emerge. So the fight would go on. And the fate of the Senate could hang on the result.
