Sheehy-supporting PAC takes aim at Montana’s Democratic Senate candidates
With a week left to vote in the primary election, the second-biggest spender in the Democratic race for U.S. Senate is a PAC that was organized to support Tim Sheehy in 2024. This cycle, it has spent $700,000 to define two female Democratic candidates.
More Jobs, Less Government, the committee that spent $22 million promoting Republican U.S. Sen. Tim Sheehy’s election, has spent $695,979.42 in this year’s Democratic primary. Most of those dollars have gone toward attacking Reilly Neill, the only candidate in the underfunded Democratic field to have raised more than $100,000. It’s been more than 40 years since funding in a Democratic Senate primary in Montana was so low, giving PACs an overwhelming edge in messaging about the candidates.
The latest “More Jobs” ad buy is a $185,500 commercial that attacks Neill as a liberal who’s soft on immigration and wants to impeach President Donald Trump, while offering a funhouse mirror reflection of Alani Bankhead as a Trump-friendly Democrat who’s bullish on immigration enforcement.
On finance reports, More Jobs says the ad supports Bankhead. The ad captioning misidentifies Bankhead as “Eloni.”
In truth, Bankhead has tied her background prosecuting sex crimes to an agenda that includes investigating the Epstein files.
“I have a network that I’ve spent the last 20 years working with to protect children and the most vulnerable from sexual abuse and other corruption, and I put corrupt government officials in jail my entire career, and I intend to impeach Trump and put him in jail,” Bankhead said at an April debate in Helena.
Neill, who has faced $500,000 of More Jobs commercials, mailers and texts specifically targeting her, has sought to frame her candidacy as a threat to the better-funded Republican campaign of Kurt Alme.
As previously reported, a pop-up political action committee, Progressive Vet PAC, has pumped $1 million into messaging promoting Bankhead while adding a $75,000 ad buy against Neill. Little is known about Progressive Vet. The PAC treasurer, former state legislator Moffie Funk, is a Democrat. Its sole donor is American Values Project PAC, whose sole contributor is Jason Carroll, founder of Hudson River Trading, which builds trading algorithms. Carroll rarely turns up on campaign finance reports, according to a review by Capitolized, but donates big when he does. Democrats are the usual recipients, with one major exception: a $100,000 donation in 2022 to independent Alaska Gov. Bill Walker.
Carroll gave a combined $1.7 million to Unite America PAC in 2024 and 2025. Unite America is a nonpartisan PAC that pushes for election reform, specifically ballot initiatives for open primaries. When giving to candidates, Unite America contributes fairly evenly to Democrats and Republicans.
And what is known about More Jobs? The 2026 version of the PAC is a poor cousin to the version that was the largest PAC spender in the 2024 U.S. Senate race between Sheehy and then-incumbent Democratic Sen. Jon Tester.
More Jobs has reported about $909,000 in receipts since 2025, with about $52,352 coming from 19 Montana donors. Billionaire Stephen Allen Schwarzman, the New York resident and CEO of private equity firm Blackstone Group, is still the most high-profile donor. Blackstone Group once held a 22% share of Bridger Aerospace, the Belgrade-based aerial firefighting business founded by Sheehy and his brother, Matt Sheehy, the president of Tallgrass Energy, a Blackstone company in the heavily federally regulated oil and gas pipeline industry.
Other notable More Jobs donors include Wayne Boich, of WMB Marketing Ventures, which is a partner in Signal Peak, the operator of Montana’s only operating underground coal mine, in the Bull Mountains 30 miles north of Billings. That coal mine was the direct beneficiary of the Crow Revenue Act, a Senate-originated mineral lands swap bill supported by Montana’s current senators that opened coal to its Montana mine. Signal Peak also benefited from the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” which in July 2025 removed regulatory barriers to mining 800 acres of Bull Mountains coal.
More Jobs has also spent $96,000 opposing independent candidate Seth Bodnar.