After weeks of campaign mailers and digital ads designed to impugn Rep. Curtis Cochran’s character, the St. Regis Republican was happy to hear his neighbors say, “That’s not the Curtis I know.”  They weren’t kidding. The Curtis Cochran whose photograph was featured on the mailers sent by School Freedom Fund, a D.C. super PAC, is a motivational speaker from San Diego.  School Freedom Fund has spent $1.34 million in recent months targeting centrist conservative Republicans or promoting hardliners facing comparatively centrist challengers in Montana legislative primaries. The super PAC’s work overlaps with that of Americans For Prosperity and Accountability in State Government. Combined, the three have pumped $2.3 million into relatively low-profile Montana races, mostly to pay for digital ads, mailers, and door-to-door canvassers, since the start of the year. Their targets are the roughly three dozen races in which centrist conservative Republicans are caught up in an attempt by party hardliners to purify the GOP ranks, specifically by rooting out legislators who helped pass ideologically suspect bipartisan bills, including several backed by Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte. Not to be outdone, Conservatives4MT, a PAC backing the centrist candidates, has spent $1.8 million on campaign advertisements through May 25. Combined, the four PACs account for 96% of the spending in Montana’s 43 contested Republican legislative primaries. Cochran can only chuckle about being misidentified in the flood of PAC advertising. “A couple of years ago, I was a lot heavier and kind of similar, but it’s not very close now. I’m way better looking than he is,” Cochran told Montana Free Press. House District 90, which first elected Cochran in 2024, is the kind of place where strangers get noticed. It’s an 89-mile stretch of small legacy timber towns loosely threaded together by the concrete ribbon of U.S. Interstate 90, which navigates the Clark Fork-carved bottom of a timbered canyon. The former paper mill community of Frenchtown anchors the upriver end of the district near Missoula. The crest of Lookout Pass and start of the steep descent into the Idaho Panhandle anchors the northwest. The region reliably elected Democrats in the 1990s, but turned Republican as logging on U.S. Forest Service land declined and the priorities of blue-collar timber workers and miners became incongruous with Democrats’ growing public-lands faction. Curtis Cochran Credit: Courtesy cochranformontana.com When Cochran was 30, the community’s state representative was Democrat Barry “Spook” Stang, a meat cutter at his family’s St. Regis grocery. Jim Elliott, a Democrat from Trout Creek, was the state senator. Both Stang and Elliott were shown the legislative exit by term limits, which started in 2000. Whatever muscle memory northwest Montana voters might have once had for filling ballot circles next to Democrats’ names is long gone. The targets of this year’s School Freedom Fund mailers aren’t Democrats, but rather Republicans disparaged as “Republican in name only,” RINO for short. That’s the case not only in the northwest, but across Montana’s northern tier in general. As political observer Jon Bennion points out in his book “Big Sky Politics,” when Montana was at its bluest, the state’s geographic partisan division was north-south, not the east-west of the present day. Those northern areas used to be represented by Democrats, but are now occupied by Republicans like Cochran Rep. Llew Jones, of Conrad occupies a similar position in the state’s contemporary partisan politics. Jones is the Legislature’s longest-serving budget architect, and one of the Capitol’s most veteran and powerful lawmakers, and this year more than a  quarter million dollars has been spent in an attempt to oust him. The first ads and robocalls against Jones started 12 months ago and went unreported until February due to a reporting loophole in Montana campaign law.  Also roiled in intraparty dispute are most legislative districts in the Great Falls region, where a $510,000 opposition campaign against centrist Republican Senate candidates Ed Buttrey and George Nikolakakos is playing out. School Freedom Fund isn’t a Montana group. The only contributor to give more than $200 to the group since 2025 is Jeffrey Yass, a billionaire trader from Pennsylvania who has given the super PAC $15 million this election cycle. The other PACs throwing money at Montana also come with billionaire backers. Americans for Prosperity’s funders include the Koch family and members of the Walton clan, owners of Walmart. To Cochran, Yass is “the TikTok guy.” After conversations with Yass and other tech investors in 2025, President Donald Trump reversed his support for banning the Chinese-created TikTok app on the condition that an American version be developed and owned by U.S. investors, including Yass’ Susquehanna International Group, or SIG. Trump previously cited the risk of TikTok users being data-mined by China and the app’s addictive videos being manipulated for political influence. In September 2025, before TikTok’s American carve-out, Trump issued an executive order calling TikTok a “foreign adversary controlled application.” The algorithm running the app is still owned by China’s ByteDance, in which SIG also has an ownership share. “The mailers go after the sane Republicans,” Cochran said. “They characterize us as Democrats in disguise. They’re even going after Brandon Ler, the Speaker of the House, and Stacy Zinn, the vice chair of the GOP.” Candidates targeted by School Freedom Fund appear in press releases issued by the party officers of MTGOP, which promised in June 2025 to begin vetting its candidates, including Republican incumbents, for ideological purity. The list of incumbent Republican legislators and candidates now disapproved of by party leadership is 36 names long. It includes MTGOP vice chair and state Rep. Stacy Zinn, of Billings, a former U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency officer.  School Freedom Fund has also donated $100,000 to the Montana Senate Leadership PAC led by Republican Senate President Matt Regier. Regier’s PAC has forwarded money to other PACs targeting candidates admonished by MTGOP. Conservatives4MT, the PAC supporting the so-called moderates, has spent its $1.8 million backing the 36 Republicans that legislative leadership disapproves of. In a letter admonishing those candidates, MTGOP suggests the Republicans are being funded by none other than conservative bogeyman George Soros through a money exchange involving five separate groups. None of the groups is managed by Soros, whose name has come to symbolize demonic liberalism in conservative media culture. Conservatives4MT is primarily funded by other PACs with big backers, including Jason Carroll, founder of Hudson River Trading, whose money is also promoting Alani Bankhead in Montana’s Democratic U.S. Senate primary. Marc Merrill, a video gaming entrepreneur, is also a big donor to a PAC that supports Conservatives4MT. The group atop the funding pyramid identified by MTGOP is Sixteen Thirty Fund, which last fall became a registered Montana political committee. Sixteen Thirty’s support of more than 100 projects across the United States occasionally overlaps with projects supported by the Soros group Open Society Foundations.  Sixteen Thirty Fund also supports two dozen Montana causes and groups, including the Montanans For Election Reform Action Fund, the Secure Elections Project, the Montana Budget and Policy Center and Big Sky 55+.  Records show that just one midterm election ago, in 2022, there was no big investment by outside PACS in Montana’s legislative races, despite the existence of notable intraparty schisms. Whether or how the millions of dollars spent this year reshapes the Republican caucus will be decided by voters, many of whom know their lawmakers by sight, on Tuesday.  The post Who’s spending big to define ‘Republican’ in the 2027 Legislature? appeared first on Montana Free Press. ...read more read less