KALISPELL, Mont. — Her candidacy was boosted with mysterious dark money. Some of her own party have suggested she is a “Republican plant” running a fake campaign. Still, Democrat Alani Bankhead continues to crisscross Montana in a gray Subaru in her long-shot bid to be the state’s next U.S. senator.
In the weeks since she refused to step aside to make way for an independent opponent who is more popular with many Democrats, Bankhead said she has been personally threatened and vilified for standing in the way of potential historic change in the Senate. She even woke up one morning to find the streets of her neighborhood papered with signs that said “Bow Out Bankhead.”
Bankhead’s detractors have accused her of being a Democrat in name only, noting she attended a right-leaning church, voted for John McCain and self-published a career book for a conservative publisher. Even her own husband couldn’t say for sure in an interview if she’s always been a Democrat. “She’s always had more liberal-leaning perspectives on things … so I guess!” Lyle Bankhead said.
Bankhead, 44, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel, is a relative newcomer to the state, having only moved here in 2022, an anathema to many Montanans, who fear their rugged paradise is being overrun by outsiders.
“I wish the Democrat who is really a Republican would get out,” said former senator Jon Tester (D-Montana), who held the office for 18 years and supports independent candidate Seth Bodnar. “She doesn’t understand the magnitude of this race.”
In their battle to wrest back control of the Senate in November’s midterms, Democrats have turned to supporting independents in deep-red states, and candidates in Senate races in Nebraska, Idaho and South Dakota have stepped aside in favor of independents.
But when Bankhead unexpectedly won her state’s primary in June, she declined to pass the baton to well-funded Bodnar, a former Green Beret and president of the University of Montana. Her decision — which she reiterated in a Washington Post op-ed on Friday — fractured the state’s Democratic Party and set up a general election scenario where she and Bodnar split the liberal vote and create a huge advantage for Republican Kurt Alme, the former state budget director.
The nonpartisan Cook Political Report has the race listed as “a solid R.” Dark money that fueled Bankhead’s rise has dried up, and most of the state’s big-name Democrats have endorsed Bodnar.
On the stump, Bankhead describes her military career as an Air Force counterintelligence officer with cloak-and-dagger intrigue, taking “suitcases full of money” to meetings with confidential sources. Her critics have charged that she exaggerated accounts of coming under fire in Iraq, and questioned the claim that she’s arrested close to a “thousand pedophiles” while working with law enforcement on child-trafficking efforts in Hawaii and elsewhere.
In the back room of Charro’s Coffee House one recent morning, Bankhead greeted volunteers warmly before they headed out to knock on doors. But the vitriol was top of mind.
“The attacks are just gross,” she told one supporter. “People are really mad about it. I hope all of this backfires spectacularly in their faces.”
One woman asked Bankhead what she would say to the Democrats who are supporting Bodnar, who has raised more than $4 million for his campaign to her $180,000.
“Over my dead body is he going to win,” Bankhead said. “All we can do is say, ‘You can vote with your values, or you can vote with your fear.’”
WHEN BANKHEAD ANNOUNCED her Senate candidacy in January in an Instagram post, she was a virtual unknown in a field of candidates expecting to oppose the powerful incumbent, Republican Sen. Steve Daines.
Bankhead said she was spurred to run by the Capitol Hill dysfunction she’d witnessed while posted at the Pentagon, as well as a more poignant recent moment when a neighbor asked her for a can of beans, then burst into tears saying she was having trouble making ends meet.
“Just seeing our neighbors not being able to put food on the table, that was really offensive to me,” Bankhead said.
On March 4 — the filing deadline — two things happened that set the race asunder: First, very late in the day, Daines announced he would not be running for a third term, throwing his support to Alme.
Second, Bodnar announced he was running — not as a Democrat, as state party leaders hoped, but as an independent.
Bodnar, 47, said in an interview that he wants to fix a broken two-party system that has “left Montanans behind” and hasn’t strictly adhered to either party line, opposing the war in Iran while supporting both gun and abortion rights.
He said he would not caucus with either party and frequently tells audiences, “Montana deserves a senator who doesn’t work for [Senate Minority Leader] Chuck Schumer, and who’s not afraid of Donald Trump.”
Former Montana governor Brian Schweitzer (D), is supporting Bankhead, saying her international experience will serve the state well. But he said Bodnar was “foolish” to run as an independent in a year when Montana voters are angry over gas prices, affordability and the Iran war.
“All he had to do was run as a Democrat and he’d be leading this race now 55 [percent] to 45,” Schweitzer said. “He was getting advice from people who don’t use calculators, I guess.”
In the spring, Bankhead’s primary campaign was buoyed by dark money. The pop-up political action committee Progressive Vet spent $3.2 million to raise her profile in ads, phone banking and text messaging, then abandoned her candidacy. Its treasurer, Moffie Funk, a former Democratic legislator, declined to comment.
Rob Saldin, a professor of political science at the University of Montana, said that dark money, where the identity of donors often remains secret, streamed to Bankhead because Bodnar’s supporters believed she could be more easily pressured to quit than more established candidates.
If that was indeed the gambit, they were wrong. Bankhead held a news conference shortly after her primary victory vowing that she would “never” drop out. She says now she would not want to disenfranchise the 48,000 Montanans who voted for her.
Bankhead said she had nothing to do with the Progressive Vet.
“People are like ‘Are you in cahoots? Did someone ask you to drop out? Why is somebody funneling all this money?’” she recounted. “We would be like, ‘We don’t know, we’ve never talked to anybody.’”
Whatever the intention, the result is, in Saldin’s words, “a total mess.”
“If you want somebody in that seat who is not a Republican, it’s an absolute fiasco,” he said.
BANKHEAD GREW UP on Army bases as the daughter of a military policeman and a homemaker. At West Point, she watched the cadets march in full gear to complete their basic training, known as “the Beast.” “I was like, sign me up,” she said.
She joined the Air Force after attending Penn State on an ROTC scholarship, and by 2010, she was stationed in Japan and making frequent deployments to Iraq, where she was an undercover counterintelligence officer who moved around the country incognito wearing a burqa. A performance review praised her as a “phenomenal operator,” whose sourcing skills led to the killings or capture of more than 10 “high-value targets.”
Yet her critics have quietly questioned whether she may have exaggerated aspects of her record.
In a March interview on the “Beer, Buds, and the Big Sky” podcast, Bankhead said, “I did not make the sacrifices of deploying and getting shot at and bombed to have my neighbors suffer the way that they are now to put food on the table and put a roof over their head. And so as far as my track record, I’ve arrested hundreds, maybe even over a thousand pedophiles and sex traffickers at this point.”
When asked in an interview to describe the times she personally came under fire, Bankhead said only: “It happened all the time.” She has a long list of service awards but not an Air Force Combat Action Medal, which is given to airmen who come under fire or who engaged with the enemy in direct fire.
Bankhead moved to the reserves in 2016, working with an international antitrafficking initiative and later as a civilian special agent investigating internet crimes against children for the attorney general’s office in Hawaii.
The state task force gleaned 23 arrests, according to the state. The antitrafficking effort she oversaw with the Department of Defense resulted in 120 arrests, according to a meritorious citation on her website.
Bankhead said that the over 1,000 total that she now campaigns with was an estimate from her years working in the field since 2009.
In 2022, she and her husband moved to Montana and settled in Helena, the state capital, with their 18-year-old daughter and a retired service dog named Lulu.
“It was the first time I got to choose where I was going to live,” she said.
Once there, she expanded her consulting business, where she trains law enforcement and does career coaching. In 2023, she self-published a book on impostor syndrome with Genesis Publishing, which specializes in faith-based and conservative titles — further raising the hackles of Democrats.
ON A COOL NIGHT in the Flathead Valley town of Whitefish, as Oktoberfest crowds rollicked in the streets, the debate at the performing arts center — between Bankhead, Bodnar and libertarian candidate Kyle Austin — was just as raucous.
Alme skipped the debate, as he has most joint events of the campaign. (“While his opponents are fighting for second place,” Alme’s campaign said in a statement, “Kurt will keep talking with Montanans where they live and work about what matters to them: lower prices, more jobs, safer communities, and protecting our way of life.”)
Over nearly two hours, the candidates answered questions about health care, data centers, government spending and housing before the spirited crowd that cheered, catcalled and waved campaign placards.
Afterward, Joan Vetter Ehrenberg, a Whitefish Democrat who supports Bodnar, said she had switched because she does not trust Bankhead.
“I don’t think she is who she says she is,” Ehrenberg said. “She was late to the party and doesn’t have experience, so I feel she’s a plant.”
Deb Bond, 66, and her husband Charlie Webster, 68 — both retired U.S. Forest Service employees — said they had hoped that hearing the candidates in person would help them decide between Bodnar and Bankhead.
“I’m still trying to figure out why one of them won’t drop out,” Webster said.
“It’s devastating, and unbelievably horrible we’re in this predicament,” Bond said. “I’m mad at both of them.”
Alex Horton and Razzan Nakhwali contributed to this report.
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