The campaigns have their facts.
In Montana’s U.S. Senate race, one of the most consequential of the 2024 election season with some $205 million already spent in advertising and more to come by Election Day as the Democrats fight to protect three-term incumbent Jon Tester and the Republicans push Tim Sheehy as an American warrior who will help restore common sense in politics, we can’t escape the partisan jabs.
In the newspaper. On the internet. On social media. On television. In the mail.
“Shady” Sheehy can’t be good for Montana because he’s not from here, the Tester ads tell us, while “Two-Faced” Tester says one thing at home and does another in Washington, D.C., according to the Sheehy ads.
Sheehy is too rich, they say. Tester is too liberal, they say. Sheehy doesn’t have the necessary political experience, they say. Tester has become just another political fat cat, they say.
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The truth might be hiding in there somewhere — but the only way we get to it is through the facts. The hard, indisputable facts.
That’s where we come in.
With about three months more of political spin ahead of us, with both sides working overtime to influence public opinion with biased talking points, name-calling, and other assorted nastiness, Lee Montana has struck an exclusive print partnership with PolitiFact, which, for nearly 20 years, has been rating the accuracy of claims by elected officials and others on its Truth-O-Meter — from “True” to “Pants On Fire!”
The first fruits of our partnership published over the weekend on our family of websites and mobile apps: A fact-check of former President Donald Trump’s rally on Friday night in Bozeman, his first rally since Kamala Harris was anointed by Democrats to run against him after Joe Biden ditched his reelection bid.
Trump delivered a standing-room-only crowd to the Brick Breeden Fieldhouse on the Montana State University campus, then spent about an hour and 45 minutes touting Sheehy’s candidacy, criticizing Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, talking about immigration, the economy and transgender issues, among other things, and rehashing his unfounded complaints about the 2020 election.
We had team coverage from our Montana State News Bureau, with Holly Michels, Victoria Eavis, Seaborn Larson and Carly Graf spending some 12 hours covering the pre-rally scene, the assortment of counterprotests and, eventually, the rally itself that also included speeches from Sheehy, U.S. Sen. Steve Daines, U.S. Rep. Ryan Zinke, Gov. Greg Gianforte and other Montana GOP heavyweights.
Thom Bridge and Ben Allan Smith added to our reporting firepower with an array of visuals, from dozens of photos to multiple videos.
The next morning, we published the first PolitiFact piece that fact-checked five of Trump’s claims.
There are more to come between now and Nov. 5 — and we want you to have a voice in the fact-checking process. Which claims or statements from the Tester and Sheehy campaigns, or from the candidates themselves, do you want to fact-check? Let us know: Email Michels at holly.michels@helenair.com, and she’ll take your idea to editors at PolitiFact.
As part of its reporting, PolitiFact will list its sources and provide links to all supporting data, making it easy for you to check their work. Facts are facts.
The political spin is everywhere.
In his latest weekly column, Montana Republican Party Chairman Don “K” Kaltschmidt wrote the “loud cheers to ‘Make America Great Again’ from the crowd in Bozeman were unlike anything I had ever heard before” at Friday’s rally.
His column was submitted for publication on Thursday.
Two weeks ago, Sheila Hogan, chair of the Montana Democratic Party, used her weekly column to blast Gianforte, whom she labeled as “unpopular” without evidence. The governor won his June primary with a larger percentage of the vote than Democratic opponent Ryan Busse won his race and there’s no polling this year to show Gianforte at risk in his reelection campaign.
It’s up to us to do our homework, to ask questions that bust the partisan talking points, to ensure we cast our ballots based on verifiable facts.
What do you want PolitiFact to fact-check for you?
Steve Kiggins is a local news director for Lee Enterprises, and executive editor of The Missoulian and for Lee Montana. Email him at steve.kiggins@lee.net. Follow him on X, formerly Twitter, @scoopskiggy.
