HELENA — On Saturday night, at the Montana Democratic Party’s annual Mansfield-Metcalf dinner in Helena, one topic came up over and over again: Republican U.S. Sen. Steve Daines’ last-minute move to end his reelection campaign.
“We told you we were going to do it, and we did it: We got rid of Daines,” Reilly Neill, a former state lawmaker from Livingston and Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate, told attendees.
(Watch the video to hear Democratic candidates' reactions to the shifting Senate race.)
Neill and three other Senate candidates were among the speakers at the dinner. All of them have been running for months, and are now having to adjust to a dramatically shifting landscape in the Senate race – after Daines exited just before the filing deadline and endorsed former U.S. Attorney Kurt Alme to replace him, and after former University of Montana president Seth Bodnar announced he’d run as an independent.
However, the candidates told MTN the changing environment won’t affect the way they’re approaching their campaigns.
Neill said Daines broke a commitment to the state, though she said she wasn’t surprised by his move. She’s also been the Democratic candidate most vocally critical of Bodnar, saying no independent has successfully won a congressional election in Montana and arguing Bodnar will only split the vote and allow a Republican to win.
Neill, who said immediately after the 2024 election that she planned to challenge Daines in 2026, said her campaign has been and will continue to be centered on meeting with voters in person.
“People are looking for someone to show up; they want someone to show up on the ground and hear them and listen to their concerns,” she said. “And I think my campaign has done that, on what some might call limited resources. We don't take any corporate money, we don't take any dirty money. And I think that definitely the GOP candidate in this race – and very likely the independent candidate in this race – are both taking dirty money.”
Michael Black Wolf, the tribal historic preservation officer for the Fort Belknap Indian Community, told MTN he would have preferred Bodnar join the Democratic primary instead of running as an independent. He said he’s opposed to any suggestion that Montana Democrats should throw their support behind an independent candidacy.
“Personally, nobody has contacted me, nobody has reached out to me, whether it was email or letter or anything like that, encouraging me to get out – and for me personally, I think that's really encouraging,” he said. “Just getting boots on the ground, visiting with people and people talking and saying like, ‘I'm a Democrat, I'm going to vote Democrat and I'm going to stay Democrat.’ I think that's, like I said, one of the things that we really want to try to push, irregardless of who wins the Democratic nomination.”
Black Wolf said he believes running against Alme won’t be much different than running against Daines, calling him “another MAGA Republican.”
Michael Hummert called Daines’ last-minute withdrawal “treachery” and Bodnar’s moves “Machiavellian.” Hummert, 66, is a Navy veteran and the former owner of a home remodeling business in Helena. In 2024, he challenged U.S. Sen. Jon Tester in the Democratic primary, receiving just 3% of the vote after he says he felt “frozen out” of any attention in the race. He also immediately announced plans to run again in 2026.
Hummert has a different message to other Democratic candidates in the race, saying he feels the party has focused too much on cultural issues and needs to change direction. He has called for steps like constitutional amendments to require a balanced federal budget and congressional term limits.
“The Democratic Party needs to come back to being the shield for the working class,” he told MTN. “We've lost our way. We need to not be thinking about just half the country, we need to be thinking about all the country and what's best for our nation – not the party, the nation.”
Alani Bankhead, a leadership coach, Air Force veteran and former criminal investigator from Helena, expressed a different perspective than the other candidates on Bodnar’s entrance. She said the independent campaign wouldn’t change her message or her view of the path forward.
“I'm a proponent of democracy, and I'm really glad that Montana has options – unlike previous elections, where it's been kind of two sides of the same coin,” she said. “So I'm going to run my race in letting people know that I'm a person who's gotten results in government – and not just speaking about it. We actually have arrested corrupt government officials, we've held folks accountable financially for the crimes that they commit, and we've done all these things without all the fanfare.”
Bankhead said she’d emphasize her working relationships with people in Washington, D.C., when making the case that she’s the best choice for Montana voters. She said she’d run a transparent race and that she opposed efforts to “usurp the people's ability to choose.”
Late Wednesday afternoon, a fifth Democratic candidate filed to run in the U.S. Senate race: Christopher Kehoe of Missoula. He did not appear at the Mansfield-Metcalf dinner, and MTN has not yet been able to get hold of him.
