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I’ve been talking the talk, now I am walking the walk.
I’m getting in the MT01 congressional race to fight for the people who make Montana special, and new polling shows me with a 4% head-to-head lead over Zinke. I realize that at times in 2025, many Americans have wondered if political gravity is real, and this poll is more evidence that the answer is “yes.” Zinke’s corruption, his party’s continued abuse of power, his support for tariffs, and his taking joy in jacking up healthcare expenses for tens of thousands of Montanans are not surprisingly, all deeply unpopular.
You probably have read that Montana became a deep red state in 2024, but that’s just not the whole story. I’m not saying we’re conspiratorial weirdos who doubt ballot totals, but rather that the “purple state gone deep red” headlines didn’t match the totality of our lived experience.
They certainly didn’t match mine. I ran for governor, held 187 in-person events, and drove more than 200,000 miles, meeting with Montanans in every corner of our state. It was an incredible experience, and without exception, I encountered people from both parties who were fiercely independent, worried about public lands, respectful of their neighbors, concerned about rising costs, and increasingly resentful of the growing wave of imported wealth wrecking our Montana way of life—just exactly the sort of people you’d expect to find here. Today, when I see those bright orange Busse campaign stickers still on cars across this state, I know we built profound connections.
And if you had listened to any one of the thousands of conversations or observed any of the crowds we engaged on those topics, you’d have probably been convinced Montana was just as independently purple as ever. That’s why we never gave up hope: polling showed us in deficit, but it also clearly reflected what we felt on the ground: voters would vote for us with just a modicum of engagement on the issues we stood for. This was especially true in MT01, the western congressional district where I am running, which is known to be very competitive and carries a Cook Political rating of Trump+5.
But there was another force moving voters too, and when it combined with the national election, it proved more potent than we expected. The most expensive per-capita election in the nation’s history was happening at the same time we were meeting those voters. In what can only be described as a travesty, outside forces converted Jon Tester’s campaign into a referendum not on whether Jon was a good senator, but instead they turned it into a jet-fueled nationalized partisan culture war that just made voters angry and prone to penalize every Democrat.
There was a lot to anger them, because per-capita spending on that Senate race alone topped the incredible sum of nearly $300 million or $320 per voter, a national election record. That kind of spending blocked out the light in every other race. To get an idea of how smothered each Montana voter was by the unrelenting waves of hyperbolic national ads, door knockers, mailers, and social media campaigns, the next-closest per-capita campaign expenditure in the nation was the Ohio Senate race at $44 per voter, and Ohioans felt smothered by that!
But it’s no longer 2024, and here in Montana, the dangerous fever is breaking. Because, as it turns out, policies from Zinke and his party that make people like Elon Musk wealthier while Montanans lose healthcare and can’t afford groceries are, as we say on the ranch, rubbing Montanans the wrong way.
Zinke’s abandonment of working people is exposing century-old Montana scars left here by the insanely wealthy mining barons who once poisoned our rivers and rigged the economic system against working people. They bought our politics and our newspapers. Like Zinke, they were corrupt, they fought environmental regulations, bribed politicians, and purchased Senate seats to ensure their profits. They bought big ranches, made it impossible for working people to get by, and constructed a system to keep themselves insanely rich. Just like Zinke is doing now.
What is bubbling up here now is a lot like what happened a century ago, when Montanans decided they had enough: they got angry, they took their destiny into their own hands, and they stood up and said, “Hell no.” They voted, organized, passed laws, and some even died to push the wealthy copper kings out of our state. And thank God they did - because generations of Montanans, including my family and me, got to live in the state they helped create.
Now Zinke is undoing everything those brave Montanans fought for. Why, might you ask, is he so hell bent on doing this? It’s because he’s making piles of money like all the wealthy corporations he’s helping buy this state. Zinke entered public office with no cowboy hat, and virtually no wealth - and except for a couple of years, he only made a government salary. But somehow, during his time in public office, his declared wealth has risen from virtually zero to more than $35 million. I don’t know all the corrupt deals he cut to get that money, but we know that in his stint as Secretary of the Interior, he faced 18 official investigations and was fired from the Trump administration because all he cared about was cashing in. Even I have to admit that it is a world-record-level accomplishment. How bad must one be to get fired for corruption in a Trump administration?
I’m not trying to cash in like Zinke or live in some fancy gated community built to keep the real Montana out; in fact, that disgusts me. I just want the people of this state to have a chance to experience the magic of Montana. I arrived in the Flathead Valley as a 20-something kid with a Montana dream. Unlike a lot of dreams that fizzle, mine turned out better than I ever imagined, not easier, but better because Montana gave us a lot of chances. Sara and I were married here. We bounced around rentals, then scraped together just enough to buy our first home. I helped build a firearms business with other hard-working Montanans. We raised two wonderful boys here. We all made friends across the state wherever we went, because that’s what Montanans do. We work hard, and we play hard, and I know this is what everyone in Montana deserves.
Montana made me a better person. And I owe it to this state to fight for what makes us all better. I hope you’ll join me to win this battle for the Last Best Place [ [link removed] ].
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