The Democratic nominee for Montana’s open U.S. Senate seat, Alani Bankhead, has been telling everyone for months that there is no price anyone can pay to keep her name from appearing on the November ballot. “Why is it you are asking me a question I have been asked a thousand times?” she told me on Monday, when I tried to probe her commitment to the race. “There is nothing that is going to force me from the ticket unless God himself tells me to drop out.”
The lack of divine intervention has challenged Democratic hopes for a big-sky Senate pickup. As it stands, Bankhead will likely split the state’s ever shrinking number of non-Republicans with an independent candidate, Seth Bodnar, who has raised more money and secured more support from senior party leaders who believe he will caucus with Democrats if he prevails. That all but ensures a win for the Republican candidate, Kurt Alme, which has set off a last-minute scramble to push Bankhead from the race before the August 10 deadline for locking the ballot. The state Democratic Party has been preparing for her to leave the race. A national Democratic polling firm, Global Strategy Group, circulated new polling yesterday arguing that she should drop out. And national Democrats have been calling her, seeking meetings. Bankhead told me that former Governor Steve Bullock, a Democrat who has not yet endorsed in the race, called her last week to ask if she would meet him for coffee. She said she did not respond. “It is a very strange process to be in this position where Alani feels more like the independent than the independent,” Jeri Bucy, her communications strategist, told me.
Shannon O’Brien, the head of the state party, convened a meeting of its executive board last Thursday to discuss the possibility of leaving the Democratic line on the ballot empty if Bankhead does leave the race. State law says political parties “shall” appoint a replacement if the nominee bows out 85 or more days from an election. State Democratic party bylaws say that the party central committee “shall” call a meeting and “shall” vote on a replacement. The Montana secretary of state, a Republican, says the state party must follow those words and pick a replacement.
But Jacquelyn Lopez, the general counsel for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, attended the meeting to argue that the party would likely win in court if it opted not to replace Bankhead, according to three people familiar with the meeting who were not authorized to speak publicly. Under this plan, the party would gloss over the “shall”s in state law and party rules on the grounds that political parties have the power to interpret their own rules and significant right under the First Amendment to do what they please. Someone in the meeting asked Lopez if the Democratic National Committee would fund the inevitable lawsuits that would result from such a move, the three people said. Lopez answered in the affirmative, all three said, including one who referenced written notes of the meeting made the following day. “There was without a doubt comments made that made everyone think the DNC would pay for it,” one of the people told me. “For everyone after the meeting, there was the gist that we were going to have our bills paid for us.”
Lopez, an attorney at the Elias Law Group, told me that she represented the state party and not the DSCC at the meeting. “I did not state that the DNC would fund a lawsuit at any point, and it would be inaccurate to report that,” she told me. She did not respond to follow-up questions. A spokesperson for the DNC, Angelo Fernández Hernández, told me that the national party “has never been approached to pay any legal bills related to candidates dropping out from the election.” A DSCC spokesperson told me the committee was not involved in the meeting.
[Read: One morning of controlled chaos in Maine]
The discussion only deepened suspicions that national Democrats are conspiring against the state’s Democratic candidate in what is emerging as the clumsiest, if not the most catastrophic, political gambit of the 2026 midterms. “It’s pretty wild out here,” Nancy Keenan, a former Montana Democratic Party executive director, told me. “They call it the Wild West—but holy Toledo.”
The disappear-the-Democrat electoral strategy—a response to the party’s terrible national brand, especially in states Donald Trump comfortably won—has had more success elsewhere. In Nebraska, Democrats nominated a candidate for Senate who pledged to abandon her campaign to clear the way for an independent, Dan Osborn. In Idaho, the Democratic Senate nominee, David Roth, dropped out last week to make way for the independent Todd Achilles. Yesterday Julian Beaudion, the Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate seat in South Dakota, said he would suspend his campaign to protect “the mental and physical safety of my family,” making way for an independent candidate, Brian Bengs.
Democrats hoped Montana would follow a similar script to clear the way for Bodnar, a former university administrator and U.S. Army Green Beret, who is running on a moderate Democratic platform with a “both parties are to blame” message. As former Senator Jon Tester put it in a text message to fellow state Democrats about supporting Bodnar, “During my last two races the democratic Party was poison in my attempts to get re-elected.”
But that message never filtered down to the Democratic rank and file, a largely populist and freethinking bunch who have watched their state vote for Trump by double digits three times in a row. Party activists have rebelled, saying that there will be downballot repercussions for abandoning the party brand in the premier statewide race this year, and state voters continue to show significant support for Bankhead, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel and a first-time candidate. Recent Republican and Democratic polling shows Bodnar and Bankhead roughly splitting the non-Alme vote, giving the Republican a significant double-digit lead in a four-way race that also includes a libertarian candidate.
The situation has created a last-minute scramble and deepening paranoia on all sides. Days after Bankhead heard from Bullock, Montanans began getting calls from pollsters, first reported by the Washington Reporter, testing a hypothetical scenario in which Bullock replaced both Bodnar and Bankhead, creating a two-person race between Bullock and Alme. The possibility of Bullock running again for Senate, after losing a bid in 2020, has long circulated in the state, and the funding for the poll has not been disclosed. Bullock did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
To make matters more complicated, Bankhead won her June 2 primary with significant financial backing from apparent Bodnar allies, according to federal records. They sided with Bankhead over another primary candidate, the fierce Bodnar critic Reilly Neill. The Progressive Vet PAC spent $2.8 million to support Bankhead and oppose Neill. Jason Carroll, a tech entrepreneur and Bodnar donor, gave the group $200,000. The other $2.6 million came from a nonprofit called Contours Inc. that has supported other independent-candidate efforts. Bankhead maintained that she had no ties to the group, and had made no pledge to get out of the race if she won. She has held true to that bargain.
The pledges of other Democrats in the state have been a bit more complex. Back in April, O’Brien told me she would “support the Democratic nominee,” and rejected any rumors that the state party was preparing to clear the way for Bodnar. “To my knowledge there is no intention to change the rules to allow for support of anyone else,” she said. State Senate Minority Leader Pat Flowers told me that the idea of secret plotting for a change in rules to allow Democrats to not field a nominee was a “fever dream.”
Days after the executive-board meeting last week, O’Brien sent a four-page legal memo from the Elias Law Group to Democrats in the state. The memo acknowledges that the state party’s bylaws instruct the committee to name a replacement candidate if a nominee withdraws. But it went on to argue that if the party tries to replace a candidate and fails, it would likely survive the resulting lawsuit. “The key question,” the document reads, is how the Montana Democratic Party “interprets its own bylaws and whether a failure to appoint a replacement candidate is defensible as a reasonable interpretation of the party’s own rules.” In one scenario, the state party could construe its rules to put forward a “none of the above” option at its nominating meeting. In another scenario, the state party could require qualifications for a replacement candidate that are so stringent that “no available candidate satisfies those requirements.”
[Read: America’s most divided state loves its extremes]
Bankhead has concluded that O’Brien cannot be trusted. “There is only one person in the state Democratic Party that is standing against me, and that is Shannon O’Brien, who has been in Bodnar’s pocket the whole time,” Bankhead told me. O’Brien has previously denied any effort to support Bodnar, but could not be reached for comment for this story. A spokesperson for the state party declined to comment.
Bodnar’s campaign, for its part, says he is prepared to win a four-way contest. A super PAC supporting his campaign began running new ads against Bankhead today, asking, “What else don’t we know about Alani Bankhead?” Bankhead and Bodnar met privately in Helena on Friday, according to three people familiar with the meeting. Bankhead asked Bodnar to drop out and transfer his endorsement and money to her, two people said, which he declined to do. Bankhead told me Monday that Bodnar has not made the same request of her. “He said, I would never ask you to drop out, and I said, Great, because I wouldn’t,” she told me. But both candidates have also made clear that they think the other can’t win, and allies of Bankhead have been calling for Bodnar’s exit. “If there were somebody else who had a pathway to defeat Kurt Alme in this race, I’d step aside in a heartbeat,” Bodnar told supporters in a livestream Monday night.
The pressure is likely to only increase over the coming days, testing Bankhead’s resolve. “Nobody can accurately predict any election,” she told me. “If polls mattered, Hillary would have won. If name ID mattered, Bullock would have won. If money mattered, Tester would have won.”
When she mentioned the Almighty as the only one who might persuade her to abandon her campaign, I asked how frequently she communicated with God. “I am a person of faith,” she said.