Big money from outside Montana being spent in Sheehy-Tester Senate race

More than $27 million has been spent on political advertising in Montana’s U.S. Senate race through July by political action committees acting independently of the candidates and without spending limits.

Following patterns established in Montana’s past U.S. Senate races, both the amount spent and the number of PACs spending in the race will likely more than double between now and the Nov. 5 general elections. 

For now, Republican challenger Tim Sheehy is the primary focus of PAC spending, both for and against. Groups supporting the Belgrade businessman and Navy veteran have spent $9.3 million promoting his campaign, while groups opposing him have spent $10.2 million.

Everything from digital ads, mailers and print media to TV, radio and internet advertising is represented in the totals reported to the Federal Elections Commission.

There has been less spent on messaging focused on incumbent Democratic Sen. Jon Tester, but that messaging has been mostly negative, with $7.4 million spent on ads opposing the three-term senator and farmer from Big Sandy. Ad spending supporting Tester amounted to $407,346.

A closer look at the major donors for each PAC shows relationships centered on banking and finance for several conservative donors. For progressive donors, the relationships center on unions, conservation groups, and nonprofit “dark money” groups that don’t disclose donors. 

Montana Free Press has summarized the identity and agenda of every PAC that has so far spent at least $100,000 in the Senate race:

MORE JOBS, LESS GOVERNMENT

More Jobs, Less Government is a PAC that’s spent solely in Montana’s Senate race, and has spent in roughly equal measure supporting Sheehy and opposing Jon Tester. It reports $13.5 million in resources. 

The PAC’s major donors include Henry True, of Wyoming-based True Companies, which deal in oil and gas. Henry True’s campaign disclosure lists Bridger Pipeline as his employer. Bridger is probably best known for its ownership of a pipeline that burst under the bed of the Yellowstone River upstream from Glendive in 2015. Campaign records show the Trues have individually donated to statewide Republican campaigns in Montana for years.

Marlene Ricketts of Nebraska is a $100,000 donor to More Jobs, Less Government PAC. The Ricketts family, which owns the Chicago Cubs, became a target of Donald Trump for opposing his 2016 candidacy. Ricketts was featured in a 2016 USA Today article titled “Meet the woman funding the effort to stop Trump.”  

More Jobs, Less Government’s biggest contributors are Kenneth C. Griffin and Stephen Allen Schwarzman, each with $5 million donations to the PAC.

Griffin is the billionaire founder of Citadel, a Miami-based multinational hedge fund. Griffin made news in January for spending $5 million on a Super PAC backing Nikki Haley against Donald Trump.

Schwarzman is the billionaire CEO of Blackstone Group, a private equity firm that, like Citadel, is affected by the actions of the Senate Banking Committee, on which Tester is the No. 2 Democrat. 

Another megadonor, Paul Elliott Singer, gave More Jobs, Less Government $1 million. Singer is a hedge fund executive who was profiled in ProPublica’s Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation into a group of powerful billionaires who bankrolled lavish vacations and gifts for conservative Supreme Court justices. Justice Samuel Alito accepted an Alaskan fishing lodge trip paid for by Singer that ProPublica found would have cost the judge $100,000 if purchased out of pocket.

Later, when Singer’s hedge fund brought cases before the Supreme Court, Alito didn’t recuse himself. The judge also didn’t report the fishing trip to the Judicial Conference of the United States. 

LAST BEST PLACE PAC

Last Best Place PAC launched its Sheehy opposition campaign in September 2023, months ahead of its first finance disclosure deadline. Prior to that, the source of its money had been undisclosed.

The origins of the group’s finances remain murky. Last Best Place PAC has raised $12.5 since September 2023 and spent $9.2 million opposing Sheehy through July. 

In February, the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan election watchdog, filed a Federal Election Commission complaint against Last Best Place PAC for running ads attacking Sheehy without filing a legally required independent expenditure report. 

The only person identified on Last Best Place PAC’s statement of organization is its treasurer, Dave Lewis, of Helena. It isn’t uncommon for treasurers to be the only person named in statements of organization. 

Montanans may recognize Lewis as the state budget director of former Republican Gov. Marc Racicot and a former Republican state senator. Lewis’ giving has not been constrained to party lines. He donated $1,400 to Independent Gary Buchanan’s failed eastern district U.S. House campaign in 2022. The PAC’s only contributor is Majority Forward, a “dark money” nonprofit that doesn’t disclose its donors.

However, tax filings for Majority Forward show that the nonprofit’s president in 2019, the most recent filing available, was J.B. Poersch, and its board was populated by former staffers for Harry Reid, the Nevada senator who led a Democratic Senate majority for eight years ending in 2015. 

Tax records show Majority Forward has also supported other players in Montana elections, including VoteVets, which also has a Sheehy opposition campaign, and Montana Native Vote, an Indigenous voter participation group.

Poersch is also president of Senate Majority PAC, an independently operated political action committee founded “to win Senate races.” There is no “Senate Majority PAC” registered with the Federal Election Commission. Officially, the PAC is registered as SMP, but its treasurer, Rebecca Lambe, signs off its SMP communications with the FEC as “Senate Majority PAC.” 

Lambe is also Majority Forward’s treasurer and a former Reid staffer. Majority Forward has donated millions exclusively to Senate Majority PAC and Last Best Place PAC this election cycle. 

Poersch is a confidante of Democratic Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer, of New York, according to The Hill. In 2010, Poersch directed the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

AMERICANS FOR PROSPERITY ACTION INC.

Americans for Prosperity Action Inc. is the political action committee of Americans for Prosperity, affiliated with billionaire Charles Koch. In one form or another, the group has been involved in Tester election runs since 2012, when, as a tax-exempt nonprofit with no obligation to disclose its donors, AFP launched the “Tester Truth Tour.” 

The tour featured a school bus that Americans for Prosperity turned into a rolling campaign call center. The bus stopped at parking lot rallies where conservatives were presented with Tester’s voting record and then invited to hop aboard to inform other voters. 

But the tour’s message was confusing because AFP, as a tax-exempt “social welfare group” under IRS rules, could only share facts about Tester’s record, not tell anyone to vote against him, or for his challenger at the time, Denny Rehberg, then Montana’s at-large Republican U.S. representative.

The tour’s merchandise table featured placards promoting Americans for Prosperity with no mention of Tester or Rehberg. Doing so would have cost the group’s donors their anonymity and required the group to pay taxes.

Americans for Prosperity Action Inc., as a PAC, can make its candidate preferences known, and has $126 million in donations to do so. Its spending against Tester is $1.2 million so far, the second-most of any outside group. Its spending supporting Sheehy is $2.6 million. 

Top donors include Koch Industries at $25 million, and three members of  Walton family, heirs to the Walmart family fortune, who contributed $15 million. Members of Wyoming’s True family, some of whom also contributed to More Jobs, Less Government, chipped in $605,000 here.

Relevant to Tester’s role as the second-most senior Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee is more than $2.5 million in donations from Truist, the seventh-largest bank in the United States. 

VOTEVETS

VoteVets’ mission is “to elect veterans to public office: hold public officials accountable for their words and actions that impact America’s 21st century service members, veterans and their families.” The group endorses veterans for public office at all levels, among them Helena Mayor Wilmot Collins and state Senate candidate Kathleen Gilluly.

VoteVets, however, is opposing veteran Tim Sheehy for U.S. Senate, having spent more than $423,000 against Sheehy’s campaign, while supporting the congressional campaigns of three other veterans across the U.S., all of whom are running as Democrats.

Tax-exempt union groups, which don’t have to disclose donors, and union-affiliated political action committees, which do disclose donors, account for 10% of VoteVets’ $12.7 million. The United Association of Union Plumbers & Pipefitters is the top donor at $500,000.

The group hasn’t spent money supporting Tester, but the group’s United States Senate Lobbying Disclosure shows that the affiliated VoteVets Action Fund lobbied for several bills sponsored by the senator, including the Great American Outdoors Act and previous versions of the Major Richard Star Act, a combat veterans benefits bill that Tester now sponsors. 

END CITIZENS UNITED

End Citizens United is a liberal political action committee that gets its name from a lawsuit that opened the floodgates to political spending by corporations and outside groups. Citizens United v. U.S. Federal Election Commission stemmed from the FEC, in 2008, prohibiting conservative nonprofit Citizens United from airing an opposition video to Hillary Clinton before the primary election season. The FEC said it was too close to the election for the video to air.

The Supreme Court ruled the FEC violated Citizens United’s right to free speech, that money is free speech, and that third-party campaign spending can’t be limited so long as the groups doing the spending aren’t coordinating with campaigns, candidates or political parties, which are subject to contribution limits. 

So far, End Citizens United, which has about $13 million, has spent $500,000 on content opposing Sheehy — the most the group has spent on any of the nine candidates it’s focusing on this election. The group has spent more than $53,000 supporting Tester.

The PAC’s largest donors are the estate of Janet Griesinger, located in Ohio, which contributed $158,590, and the affiliated PAC End Citizens United/Let America Vote, which has contributed $100,000.

Most of the PAC’s donations are less than $500. Total donors number 98,773, according to quarterly reports filed July 15.

SENTINEL ACTION FUND

Sentinel Action Fund is a conservative PAC with $15.6 million that’s focused on three candidates this election: Sheehy, Tester, and Bernie Moreno, a Republican candidate for Senate in Ohio running against incumbent Democrat Sherrod Brown. 

Sentinel has spent $821,000 supporting Sheehy and $82,000 opposing Tester.

Sens. Brown and Tester are the two highest-ranked Democrats on the Senate Banking Committee. Sentinel’s biggest donor, at $4 million, is Timothy Mellon, a billionaire former owner of the Pan Am Systems rail company and heir to the Mellon banking fortune. The second-largest donor at $1.5 million is Jimmy John’s fast food restaurant founder James John Liautaud. And Sentinel Action has three million-dollar donors: Interactive Brokers founder Thomas Peterffy, investor Thomas D Klingenstein (who is also chairman of the Claremont Institute, a conservative think tank), and Kenneth C. Griffin, the billionaire founder of Citadel, who is also the largest donor to More Jobs, Less Government.

MONTANA RURAL VOTERS (WORC)

Montana Rural Voters (WORC) is a Billings-based PAC that has spent $294,662 on media supporting Tester. The PAC’s donors are exclusively dark money nonprofit groups that do not disclose donors. 

The biggest of those dark money donors is Sixteen Thirty Fund, which reported $191.5 million in revenue in 2022 and has donated to multiple organizations and causes, including A Better Big Sky, Big Sky Voters PAC, Big Sky 55+, Clean Water Action, Forward Montana, Montana Budget and Policy Center and Montana State AFL-CIO.

A Better Big Sky, based in Missoula, is also the second-largest donor to Montana Rural Voters at $75,000. Tax filings for the group show donations to Montana Conservation Voters, the Western Organization of Resource Councils (WORC), and Planned Parenthood Advocates of Montana.

SAVE OUR COUNTRY

Save Our Country is a PAC whose biggest donor is the right-leaning small donations firm Targeted Victory, which accounts for all of Save Our Country’s $950,000 pot.

The PAC’s content supports three Republican candidates, including Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and two military veterans running for Senate: Sam Brown of Nevada and Montana candidate Sheehy, whom the PAC has spent $250,000 promoting.

1889 PAC

1889 PAC is the latest entrant with a hooky Montana name. The state’s Constitution was passed in 1889. Similar to Last Best Place PAC, 1889 is spending money right out of the gate without disclosing who its donors are, and likely won’t disclose donors until mid-October, when the next quarterly reports are due.

However, 1889 PAC has disclosed its $131,715 in media buys supporting Tim Sheehy, and an identical amount it’s spent opposing Tester.

The statement of organization for 1889 PAC identifies Les Williamson, of Houston, Texas, as treasurer. Williamson turns up on multiple campaign expense reports filed by Republican campaign committees.