Get an insider’s look into what’s happening in and around the halls of power with expert reporting, analysis and insight from the editors and reporters of Montana Free Press. Sign up to get the free Capitolized newsletter delivered to your inbox every Thursday. Sign up May 21, 2026 With less than two weeks to vote in the primary election, the second biggest spender in the Democratic race for U.S. Senate is a PAC organized to support Tim Sheehy in 2024. This cycle, it has paid $700,000 to define two Democratic female candidates. More Jobs, Less Government, the committee that spent $22 million promoting Republican U.S. Sen. Tim Sheehy’s election, has spent $695,979.42 in this year’s Democratic primary. Most of those dollars have gone toward attacking Reilly Neill, the only candidate in the Democratic field of underfunded campaigns to raise more than $100,000. It’s been more than 40 years since funding in a Democratic Senate primary in Montana was so low, giving PACs an overwhelming edge in messaging. The latest “More Jobs” ad buy is a $185,500 commercial that attacks Neill as a liberal who’s soft on immigration and wants to impeach President Donald Trump while offering a funhouse mirror reflection of Alani Bankhead as a Trump-friendly Democrat bullish on immigration enforcement.  Alani Bankhead, a Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate, talks about her background and policy stances during the 48th annual Mansfield Metcalf Dinner on March 7, 2026, in Helena. Credit: Lauren Miller, Montana Free Press, CatchLight Local/Report for America On finance reports, More Jobs says the ad supports Bankhead. The ad captioning misidentifies Bankhead as “Eloni.” In truth, Bankhead has tied her background prosecuting sex crimes to investigating the Epstein files. “I have a network that I’ve spent the last 20 years working with to protect children and the most vulnerable from sexual abuse and other corruption, and I put corrupt government officials in jail my entire career, and I intend to impeach Trump and put him in jail,” Bankhead said at an April debate in Helena. Neill, who has faced $500,000 of More Jobs commercials, mailers and texts specifically targeting her, has sought to frame her candidacy as a threat to the better funded Republican campaign of Kurt Alme. Reilly Neill, a Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate, talks about her background and policy stances during the 48th annual Mansfield Metcalf Dinner on March 7, 2026, in Helena. Credit: Lauren Miller, Montana Free Press, CatchLight Local/Report for America As previously reported, a pop-up political action committee, Progressive Vet PAC, has pumped $1 million into messaging promoting Bankhead while adding a $75,000 political ad buy against Neill. Little is known about Progressive Vet. The PAC treasurer, former legislator Moffie Funk, is a Democrat. Its sole donor is American Values Project PAC, whose sole contributor is Jason Carroll, founder of Hudson River Trading, which builds trading algorithms. Carroll rarely turns up on campaign finance reports, according to a review by Capitolized, but donates bigly when he does. Democrats are the usual recipients with one major exception: a $100,000 donation in 2022 to independent Alaska Gov. Bill Walker. Carroll gave a combined $1.7 million to Unite America PAC in 2024 and 2025. Unite America is a nonpartisan PAC that pushes for election reform, specifically ballot initiatives for open primaries. When giving to candidates, Unite America contributes fairly evenly to Democrats and Republicans. And what is known about More Jobs? The 2026 version of the PAC is a poor cousin to the version that was the largest PAC spender in the 2024 U.S. Senate race between Sheehy and then-incumbent Democratic Sen. Jon Tester. More Jobs has reported about $909,000 in receipts since 2025, with about $52,352 coming from 19 Montana donors. Billionaire Stephen Allen Schwarzman, the New York resident and CEO of Blackstone Group, is still the most high-profile donor. The private equity firm once held a 22% share of Bridger Aerospace, the Belgrade-based aerial firefighting business founded by Sheehy and his brother, Matt Sheehy, the president of Tallgrass Energy, a Blackstone company in the heavily federally regulated oil and gas pipeline industry.  Other notable donors include Wayne Boich, of WMB Marketing Ventures, a partner in Signal Peak, the operator of Montana’s only operating underground coal mine in the Bull Mountains 30 miles north of Billings. The coal mine was the direct beneficiary of the Crow Revenue Act, a Senate-originated mineral lands swap bill supported by Montana’s current senators that opened coal to its Montana mine. Signal Peak also benefited from the “One Big Beautiful Bill” that in July 2025 removed regulatory barriers to mining 800 acres of Bull Mountains coal. More Jobs has also spent $96,000 opposing independent Seth Bodnar. —Tom Lutey Just under 80,000 Montanans had returned absentee primary ballots through May 19. Based on modeling, the national firm L2 Data estimates that nearly 55% of those early voters are Republicans, 27% are Democrats and the remainder are unidentifiable. Capitolized asked the voter file and consumer data company how they produce those numbers in a state like Montana, where voters don’t declare a political party and get to select which partisan ballot they fill out. “Montana provides no party-related information in its state voter file, as the state does not require registration by party. Because of this, L2’s assignment of party affiliation for Montana voters is based entirely on analytics and modeling,” explained L2 president Paul Westcott in an email Thursday. Capitolized readers might recall earlier reporting on how L2 determined that the Republican voters from other parts of the country were relocating to Montana at a rate of almost 2-to-1 over Democrats. The core of that analysis involved tracking the address changes of voters who had registered by party in another state and later registered to vote in Montana. In tracking absentee voters, L2 said the analysis starts with the state voter data indicating when a person has returned a ballot. The voter file also includes the voter’s age and address. That information is then folded into commercial data, partisan political donations and county-level vote percentages for presidential candidates.  The data is continuously refined against actual election results. “For a state like Montana, where voters can choose any party primary ballot, but the state does not report that choice, the party ID assigned in our file is based on this modeling, not on a recorded primary ballot selection from the state,” Westcott explained. Nearly 79% of early Montana voters are older than 50. Credit: Tom Lutey/MTFP Voters 65 and older account for 59% of returned ballots, according to L2, with voters 50 to 64 accounting for 20%. More than half of the early voters are female. —Tom Lutey The post Party crashers appeared first on Montana Free Press. ...read more read less