BILLINGS — Michael Hummert, a Democrat running for one of Montana's U.S. Senate seats, is positioning himself as a fiscally conservative alternative in a state where he says 40% of voters hold the balance of power.
Hummert, 67, ran against then-incumbent U.S. Sen. Jon Tester in the 2024 Democratic primary, receiving 3,328 votes. He said Tester's three-term incumbency and the dynamics of a presidential election year made that race particularly difficult for any Democrat.
Watch the interview here:
The following is a transcript of an interview with Michael Hummert, a Democrat running for one of Montana's U.S. Senate seats in 2026.
Hailey: Let's talk about your history in politics to start off.
Michael Hummert: Well, in 2024, I ran against John Tester. 3,328 people know that I did because that's how many votes I got. But in my defense, John Tester was a three term sitting senator. And yeah, it's the politics of that actual election were kind of fascinating. The breakdown, as I understand it, is around one third of the people in Montana are Democrats, about 30%, about 30% are Republicans. And 40% make all the decisions. They're the people in the center. And in that in that particular race, all those people went to the Republican side to vote. There was I think something like 230,000 or so. I could be wrong on a number. Just been several months since then. But there was a massive, almost a 2.1 or 2.2% difference in how many votes were cast on the Republican side versus the Democrat side. And I think it was about 30 or so thousand votes that John Tester lost by. So as you can see, people where they have to make a choice on picking up a Republican or a Democratic ballot on June 4th, I think it was that year. Well, they do have to make a choice. And that was a presidential year. So of course, there was a lot of support for Donald Trump. So yeah, I think that that made a big difference. Now, I was really hoping on this election that it would come down to Steve Daines, well, and of course, myself, the Democrat. But then, of course, Seth Bodner got into the race. And that's an extraordinarily interesting Machiavellian situation. I wonder, John Tester was supposedly recruiting him as an independent. I know John Tester is a Democrat. So I can't imagine that John Tester would be recruiting somebody that's not really a Democrat to run. This is just my opinion, mind you. That's meant to split the Democrat vote to ensure that there's a Republican that's going to win. Regardless of what they say, that will be the effect of what his candidacy is. He can say he's an independent and that's perfectly good. I'll take him at his word. But nevertheless, that's the effect to guarantee that a Democrat cannot win in the race or make it very challenging. I think the people of Montana may see through that, though, depending on who the candidate who's chosen on June 2nd is, I think that if I'm the candidate, I'll be happy to bring that to the people of Montana and show them exactly what's going on.
You're one of a handful of Democrats that's running. What makes you different than the rest of them?
Hummert: Well, what makes me different than the rest of them is I'm 67 years old. I'm older than they are. Not by a lot. But my passion has been geopolitics and national politics my entire life. And I have a unique view of the Democrat Party. It's the Bill Clinton wing of the party in the 90s. And you can best understand that for all your viewers. If you just simply go on YouTube and pull up Bill Clinton's 1996 State of the Union speech, it's not as long as Trump's. So it'd be easier to listen to. But nevertheless, he outlines everything he did in his first four years and everything that he wanted to get done in his next four years. And when you listen to that speech, you'll ask yourself, wow, is this guy a Democrat or a Republican? Well, by today's standards, he's too conservative to get elected even in a Democrat or Republican Party. But being a socially liberal person and a fiscally conservative person is how Bill Clinton balanced the budget three years in a row. The only president to do that in my lifetime. He didn't do this by himself. He did this working with Newt Gingrich, the speaker of the House. That's how he did it. Nothing gets done by yourself. So that's why I'm different than everybody else. I believe in fiscal responsibility. People ask me questions like, what are you going to do about the housing situation, the cost of housing in Montana? Well, that's a sovereign state issue, I think. But what the government can do, the federal government can do, is they can balance the budget of the United States. We need an amendment to make sure that regardless of who's in power, that we always have a balanced budget. Because by stabilizing our economy and reducing that inflation, the booms and the busts that we have, that is what's going to stabilize our housing. So that's why I'm different.
You call yourself a realist liberal Democrat. Can you explain what that means?
Oh, I'd be happy to. I'm a realist liberal Democrat. The realist part of that simply says, "I deal in realities. I want to be correct, not right." There's a difference between being right and correct. Being right is emotionally satisfying. It doesn't mean that you nailed it. It means that you've got your point across. It doesn't matter if it's correct or not, but it's your point. So you're satiated with that. But being correct means that you're anchoring your decisions in the reality of life. When you strip away all the emotion and all the other components of your decision, and you're left standing on a stark ground of reality, then you can make a rational decision. And if I can say that that's one of the things that bothers me most of all with politics, is people go there to Washington, D.C., and they feed their emotional desires instead of actually looking at what's going to move this country forward into the 21st century so that we can actually survive to the next century. And right now we're on a trajectory with 39 trillion dollars of national debt, 2 trillion dollars being added to that every year. And no one's talking about it. That should be the one thing that everybody can agree on.
I have gone from one end of this state, and it's a big state, to the other end of this state, and I have never found anybody that says, "Oh no, I don't want a balanced budget." I take that back. One person running on the Eastern District, I think it was, told me that he didn't want a balanced budget. He said, "We got to have some deficit." Well, I disagreed with him. I think that we have at 39 trillion dollars, if we got a balanced budget amendment tomorrow, by the time we balanced our budget, we would probably have somewhere between 45 and 47 trillion dollars in national debt. It sounds like a tremendous amount because it is, but it's a manageable amount if we stop spending more than we take in. And the next question is, "How do you balance a budget so huge in five years?" Well, I want you to understand I didn't cause the problem. I do have the solutions, and they say it's going to be draconian. It's not. They say it's going to be painful for the population. It's not. It would be painful for the billionaires and the millionaires, because they're the ones that benefit from that two trillion dollar deficit. You and I don't. 67 percent of American people live paycheck to paycheck. They don't benefit from that massive debt. It's the very wealthy, and it's people that own large asset bases, like in the stock market, and things like that. They have discretionary funds. So, with all that caveat out there, here's how you fix the national debt. We're spending almost a trillion dollars a year on our national defense. I think when Donald Trump changed it from the Department of Defense to the Department of War, knowing who Donald Trump is, I think that was appropriate for him. He ran on being a peaceful person, but he's not proving it to me. But nevertheless, I digress. I would say that cutting it down to maybe 500 billion dollars over a five-year period of time, withdraw all of our, not all of our forces, but 90 percent of our forward-deployed forces, bring them home. It's called the Defense Department for a reason. Every single thing that has happened in my lifetime and in the last hundred years, if you look somewhere in that conflict, you'll see the thumbprint of the United States.
What are your thoughts on President Trump?
Well, I don't think you have any business going to Washington, D.C. if you can't get along with the other side. Otherwise, you're just filling a seat. Nothing gets done in Washington, D.C. unless both sides agree, unless you have a good majority in Congress. So it's crucial. And I have five amendments on my website that I want to see get passed that will secure our future and our future, our nation's future. And you can't get those done unless you work with the other side, because it takes two-thirds. Don't realize that, the people I talk to don't realize that we have this thing called the "Petro-dollar." And this was designed in the 70s where Saudi Arabia and many of the Gulf countries actually sell oil in dollars. That means if China wants to buy oil from Saudi Arabia, they first have to take yuan and exchange it into dollars and give the dollars to Saudi Arabia, and they get their oil. So this is how we export our inflation throughout the world. We are the world's reserve currency. It's extremely important to send someone to Congress that actually understands how our financial system works and how geopolitics works in conjunction with it. So if Saudi Arabia is left holding the bag now that he's stirred up this hornet's nest with Iran, and you notice they attacked Saudi Arabia, they attacked the Arab Emirates, they attacked all these different Arab states. If Donald Trump cuts and runs, there goes the petro-dollar. And gold is at such a price that people will just start centralizing with gold instead of dollars. That will crush our bond market. People won't be interested in buying our bonds. They won't trust the American people. They won't trust the American government. Very crucial that he actually follows through now. You can't find one of my Democrats, fellow Democrats running for this office, that understands just that that's just one tip of the iceberg of what he's done. And why now, everybody in this country, no matter how disgusted you are with Donald Trump, doesn't matter. This is about our survival now. He's put us on death's ground. Now we have to support him, whether we like it or not. And I don't like it. But can you imagine now?
The second prong to that is prior to him invading or bombing the hell out of Iran, they thought, you know, maybe we should have a nuclear weapon. And of course, if they get a nuclear weapon, Saudi Arabia wants a nuclear weapon, the Arab Emirates wants... You see how this just escalates. So that's why they haven't actually made the nuclear weapon. Well, I take that back. We don't know they haven't. It's foolish to think that they haven't already designed and constructed a nuclear weapon, just waiting for the 90 percent enriched uranium to go into the nuclear weapon. It only takes about two weeks to go from 60 percent to 90 percent. That's a two-week breakout time. The one thing Donald Trump has convinced them of, and many other countries in the world now, is we need a nuclear weapon so that it doesn't happen to us like it happened to Iran. No one's bombing North Korea, because North Korea has nuclear weapons. Pakistan has nuclear weapons. India has nuclear weapons. It's mutual destruction theory. So I digress. So what do I think of his policies? I think he's... I'm not much on calling people names, but this is the best description I can come up with for Donald Trump. He is a natural predator, and that comes through as being a bully, a narcissist, but ultimately he's the president. Some of his decisions have been good. It's easier to dwell on the ones that aren't good like Iran. He pulled off a miracle in Venezuela. Could have went drastically different. So this time he made it through. Next time he might not. Next time is Iran. I'm praying for our country. So you have to work with the president if you're going to be in the United States Congress. And I take that very seriously. I'm not going to throw red meat to my base.
The people on stage last night did. They had a question. What would you do with ICE if you were elected to the Senate? And everybody up there wanted to totally annihilate ICE. I don't take this the wrong way, but I don't even think they understand what ICE does. I don't think they even know what ICE stands for. It's Immigration and Customs Enforcement. We have between 15 and 20 million people in this country that aren't registered in our country to be here. They're migrants. Whether they're illegal or they're seeking asylum or whatever whatever brought them here, they're still migrants. And that is the charge of ICE, Immigration Control and Enforcement. 8.5 million of those people are gainfully employed in our country. Those aren't the people I hope that ICE are trying to chase down. This immigration problem we have, which incidentally I wrote 120 page immigration law, 42 sections long, took me two months to do it to encompass our entire immigration system under one undersecretary in the Homeland Security Department. So even a fifth grader can read this document and understand it. So migrants can understand it. And one of the first parts of this is a two-year moratorium on chasing migrants that are here for migrant purposes, whether it's economic or safety, security, whatever it may be. It doesn't restrict ICE from grabbing people that are felons or committing crimes, but it gives them a two-year period of time to actually register with the federal government and get a number so they can actually participate in the American dream. Now this document I wrote is geared toward the citizens of this country because that's the lens I look through. Everything I do, how is this going to benefit the future generations? Not just the next quarter like a corporatist. I don't want to mention any names but Bodner comes to mind and Almead but nevertheless I'm not a corporatist. I'm a mainstreamer.
Everything I think about is how can I make sure this country is going to succeed for future generations? Just like Social Security, how can I make sure Social Security is going to be here for Hailey? That's my American dream at the end of my life because I've lived a lot more with it. I hope I don't have to do another 67 years. Anyway, back to this. I also have a background in military police. I'm an academy graduate of corrections officers in Florida and also what brought me to Montana was the Highway Patrol Academy. So I'm a graduate from the Highway Patrol Academy. I understand how law enforcement works. I've been trained in law enforcement. So to think that you can just eliminate these people and think everything in this country is going to be hunky-dory that they're the problem. That's not the way reality works and I am a realist. So there might be some things that need to be changed but ultimately the change that needs to happen is the Department of Homeland Security Secretary. That's who needs to be changed and Trump did change her out. We'll see what he comes up with next but he didn't need to go into Minnesota. He didn't need to go into Minneapolis. There's 28 large cities that are Republican that he could have started with but he chose not to or no one chose not to. I'm not sure which but nevertheless that's the problem we have right now is, (Alejandro) Mayorkas opened up the border. Noem closed the border. It's the Secretary and that's part of Congress because it's the Senate that actually confirms them.
One of the other questions was what do you think about the filibuster? Everybody on the stage wanted to blow it up like they're always going to be in the majority. When the Democrats are back in the minority like they are right now the filibuster is what stops those bad laws. I have a compromise that I would propose. The filibuster for the people out there that don't understand what that is is you you have to before you can stop debate you have to have 60 votes in in the Senate to stop the debate and that's called cloture. I would like to see it drop down to maybe 55 votes. That would be a little bit easier to to do and then you can have a vote on whatever it is that you're trying to push through. Which brings me to another thing that I feel very strongly about, term limits. I don't think anybody should spend more than 12, maybe, no, just 12 years in the Congress. If you can't get the job done in 12 years, you need to leave anyway. And if you're super effective, well, then you can be a lobbyist, I guess. But nevertheless, 12 years would be it, whether it be the House or the Senate or a combination of both. There's a reason we have a term limit on the president.
We need people that understand the issues and are willing to work with the other side to get something done for the people.
